The Taliban are indeed our enemy--but, what, me worry?

Quite a few people are now saying that al Qaeda are the real AfPak threat, and the Taliban are just nasties with a local focus (see below). Those people should read this, by a NY Times reporter held captive for seven months. And that "local threat" includes nuclear-armed Pakistan (again, see below). What, me worry?

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Over those months, I came to a simple realization. After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become. Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of “Al Qaeda lite,” a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan.

Living side by side with the Haqqanis’ followers [more here and here], I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.

I had written about the ties between Pakistan’s intelligence services and the Taliban while covering the region for The New York Times. I knew Pakistan turned a blind eye to many of their activities. But I was astonished by what I encountered firsthand: a Taliban mini-state that flourished openly and with impunity.

View the Interactive Feature

The Taliban government that had supposedly been eliminated by the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was alive and thriving.

All along the main roads in North and South Waziristan, Pakistani government outposts had been abandoned, replaced by Taliban checkpoints where young militants detained anyone lacking a Kalashnikov rifle and the right Taliban password. We heard explosions echo across North Waziristan as my guards and other Taliban fighters learned how to make roadside bombs that killed American and NATO troops...

Meanwhile, Dexter Filkins has been with McChrystal in Afghanistan. From the end of a major article in the NY Times Magazine:

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The exact shape of a scaled-down commitment is not clear, but it goes something like this: American Special Forces units, aided by Predator drones, can keep Al Qaeda off-balance, while American soldiers stay on to train the Afghan Army and the police.

It’s an attractive argument, of course: it offers the hope that the United States can achieve the same thing — American security — at a much-reduced cost. (The fate of the Afghan people themselves is basically left out of this equation.)

Last month, I visited Richard Haass, one of the idea’s chief proponents, at his office in New York, where he is president of the Council on Foreign Relations. (Before that, through June 2003, Haass was director of policy planning at the State Department under President George W. Bush.)

Haass is particularly persuasive, in part because he does not pretend to have easy answers. After eight years of mismanagement and neglect, Haass says, every choice the United States faces in Afghanistan is dreadful. The weight of the evidence, he says, suggests that curtailing our ambitions is the option least dreadful.

“It’s not self-evident that doing more will accomplish more,” Haass told me. “And I’m skeptical about how central Afghanistan is anymore to the global effort against terror. I’m not persuaded that you can transform the situation there.”

The bulk of Al Qaeda’s leadership, Haass pointed out, is now in Pakistan. That’s where the United States should really be focused — in Pakistan, with a population six times larger than Afghanistan’s and with at least 60 nuclear warheads. “No one wants Afghanistan to become a sponge that absorbs a disproportionate share of our country’s resources,” he said.

General McChrystal and most of the rest of the Pentagon say that Haass’s argument is essentially an illusion. If the United States drew down substantially in Afghanistan, they say, much of the country would quickly be overrun by the Taliban, rendering the other things — training and counterterrorism — impossible. Al Qaeda would return, possibly to the place it had before the 9/11 attacks, and Pakistan would be likely to follow...

Ahmed Rashid, for his part, has this to say about the Taliban and Pakistan:

Pakistan's militants are intent on nothing less than toppling the government, assassinating the ruling establishment, imposing an Islamic state and getting hold of Pakistan's nuclear weapons...

At that front:

Pakistan says 60 militants dead as Taliban resist onslaught
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...A map of northwestern Pakistan locating military offensive against the Taliban. Taliban fighters mounted fierce...

Slideshow: Pakistan

What, me worry?

Update: Yet more from the NY Times, via Brian Platt at The Canada-Afghanistan Blog:

Overnight Experts

I'm no expert. But I did not stay at a Holiday Inn Express in Kabul in 1972, nor from 1975-77. In '72, as a, er, traveller, I stayed at an ordinary cheap hotel downtown. Later, as a, er, diplomat, I stayed at the Hotel Kabul (Czechoslovak Communist-built I think , food sure was Central European and almost all the guests were Commies or Asians on expenses), also downtown. Not at the Intercon in the area of the British Embassy compound, a long way away, where almost all Westerners on expenses stayed. Bit of a rebel then.

The country was, though dirt-poor, not the horrible mess that it has become. Largely, in my view, as a result of the Soviet invasion in 1979 that was aimed at proving that no country once become Communist could be let slide away. The Brezhnev Doctrine, anyone remember that?

Here's a relevant US government report on what the Afghan press (it existed) was covering in February, 1960.