By Matthias Gebauer, Susanne Koelbl and Cordula Meyer
The city of Quetta is situated like a fortress in one of Pakistan's least accessible regions, surrounded by sand-colored peaks. Gray slums open onto colorful bazaars. Pakistan's army trains its elite soldiers here, and Taliban leader Mullah Omar is said to have lived in the city since he fled Afghanistan, enjoying the protection of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's military intelligence service. Omar could hardly have it better.
Barack Obama has listened to General David Petraeus, but what works in Iraq may not work in Afghanistan.
The United States government has offered a $10 million reward for Mullah Omar, who calls himself "Commander of the Faithful." But he's remained at large, like Osama Bin Laden, who's also believed to be in the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The word among intelligence services is that Mullah Omar spends most of his time in "safe houses" run by religious groups under the protection of the ISI. They say Omar, a farmer's son from the Oruzgan province in Afghanistan, is still steering the Taliban, controlling the flow of money and organizing contacts between commanders in Afghanistan and the Pakistani secret service.
Mullah Omar's hosts are men with long, white beards, veterans of the "holy war" fought first against the Soviet Union and then against the United States. Many of these men have been jihadis for 30 years, supplying the Taliban with foot soldiers and suicide attackers, weapons and money. They are men like Maulana Noor Mohammed, whose Shaldara Koran School in the Pashtunabad slum is thought to be center of the Taliban movement.
Noor Mohammed sits cross-legged on the carpet of his office, wearing a white shirt and white turban. He's a leader of the radical Islamic party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, and he's proud to have trained the most brutal of the Taliban's commanders. Noor Mohammed continues to push his students into the war in Afghanistan, saying, "They have a duty to fight for Islam and to die if necessary."
Mullah Omar believes the same. In a statement broadcast on the Al-Jazeera TV network, he called on the Taliban to continue its resistance: "America is a big country, but with a small brain. We will continue the jihad against the USA and all invaders."
A Regional Problem
His call has had its consequences. Since May, there have been some months in which more American soldiers have died in Afghanistan than in Iraq. Dozens of Taliban commanders have died during the same time period -- in fact coalition troops kill 30 or 40 insurgents every day. The high casualty rates are making both sides take a second look at the bloody war, and start seeking out political alternatives.
Afghanistan is a priority for American President-elect Barack Obama. In his opinion, the resurgence of the Taliban and al-Qaida fighters in Afghanistan is a result of the United States waging a wrong war in Iraq. Obama wants to send an additional 7,000 soldiers to the Hindu Kush to fight back the insurgents and terrorists. At the same time he's supported the idea of dialogue with the Taliban, who may be open to reconciliation. And Obama wants to start talks with Iran, Afghanistan's neighbor to the west.
Maulana Noor Mohammed
This new strategy will involve David Petraeus, the general who was able to bring fragile stability to Iraq. He now leads U.S. Central Command in Florida, which oversees the battlegrounds in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Petraeus sent a 100-person team to the region to provide him with an analysis of the situation by the end of the year. "We have to realize that a resistance movement is not exclusively won by killing or taking prisoners," he says.
In Iraq, Petraeus was able to convince local insurgents in the Sunni-dominated Anbar Province that they and the United States had a common enemy: al-Qaida fighters. Now he has similar plans for Afghanistan, wanting to arm Pashtun tribes against the Taliban and separate them from Bin Laden's jihadis.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai doesn't mind at all that the next American president and his general may negotiate with the Taliban. Karzai's representatives met in late October with Taliban proxies in Mecca. The meeting, mediated by the Saudis, saw two groups sitting in separate rooms while a liaison shuttled back and forth. High-ranking employees of the Saudi king also offered Taliban leader Mullah Omar political asylum.
It's a rocky start, nothing more -- but also nothing less.
The Afghan president has also renewed his overtures toward Mullah Omar. "If I hear from him that he's ready to come to Afghanistan or to negotiate peace, I'll do everything in my power to guarantee his safety. If I say I want safety for Mullah Omar and the international community doesn't agree, then they have two options: either get rid of me, or leave the country."
The Taliban, now, is a loose coalition of armed militias led by local commanders, each with fewer than 50 fighters, together with various associated troops who pursue their own business as well. To hold talks, it's necessary to bring all these groups together. "The Taliban has been very successful in seeking to portray itself (in the West) as a more powerful and cohesive force than it is," says Joanna Nathan, an analyst in Afghanistan for the International Crisis Group. "This view that it is somehow going to be Mullah Omar sitting at one end of the table while President Karzai sits at the other as they sign a power-sharing agreement and we can all go home -- that is a fantasy."
'Nobody Who Wants to Talk'
Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Siraj also tend to go their own way. They work closely with al-Qaida and are also said to be sponsored by the ISI. The family is trying to "liberate" Khost province in Afghanistan. Haqqani recently spread the word that he's not interested in negotiating with Kabul.
Taliban leader Mullah Omar also recently sent his followers a message, calling on them to "stand like steel in front of the enemy" and saying that America "never anticipated so much resistance." The "Commander of the Faithful" also sends out e-mail greetings on important holidays.
Sometimes, though, Omar's followers are left lacking unambiguous directives. One fellow Taliban leader in Peshawar wanted to know how good jihadis should act. Is beheading prisoners allowed? Does Islamic belief permit killing civilians? The Taliban has a long way to go before negotiating with Karzai and the Americans.
"In Washington, the idea of holding talks comes up and it sounds good," says Lieutenant Colonel David Ell, from his makeshift wooden quarters in Camp Salerno, Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. "But here at least, there's nobody who wants to talk to us."
Ell commands around 1000 American soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division. Hardly a day goes by without casualties. "The Taliban wants only one thing here," Ell says, "to kill as many Americans as possible."
Before he was deployed to Afghanistan, Ell was in Iraq, where he conducted negotiations with Sunni and Shiite militias. He's skeptical about the possibility of doing the same in the Hindu Kush. "Afghanistan is different," Ell says. "This society with its hundreds of tribes and militias is much more complex."
General Petraeus's double strategy involves a rigorous deployment of troops, which will help NATO negotiate from a strong position. In recent weeks the United States military has increased its number of strikes from drones, and protest rained in from the Pakistani government -- but the protest was probably agreed upon beforehand.
In August Petraeus met with General David McKiernan, commander of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan, and General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, head of the Pakistani military, on an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean. Kayani also visited NATO in Brussels last week. Special forces have been training in the United States to fight in the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The US most likely has Pakistan's tacit approval for such missions. This agreement belongs to a large-scale effort to improve the situation in Afghanistan -- and it's high time.
"We're losing, and the trend has been the same since 2004," says respected American military expert Anthony Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. This is "an Afghan-Pakistani war, and to a large extent a Pashtun war," according to Cordesman, but the West hasn't adjusted yet to this idea. In Cordesman's view, the United States needs to offer Pakistan more incentives for collaboration: "help, training and bribes." In any case, he says, it's going to be a long war.
A long war could be hard on the United States, especially as the country suffers an economic crisis. That's another reason why Barack Obama is looking at Afghanistan through the lens of the changed situation in Baghdad and its surroundings. "There is a useful lesson we can take from Iraq," says the next American president, "We need to find out whether the same opportunities are present in Afghanistan."
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