Taliban likely to re-emerge in Afghanistan: Pak daily

Lahore, Oct 10 (PTI) A resurgent Taliban is hoping that the U.S. and western powers will eventually lose patience in Afghanistan and turn in desperation to the earlier franchise arrangement, restoring Pakistan and its Taliban proxies' influence over Afghanistan, a leading daily here has said.

This is the calculation of the pro-Taliban elements in
Pakistan, and the paper said, "This has not proved wrong so
far."

"Bloody suicides, ambushes, roadside bombs and brazen
assaults on the N.A.T.O. and International Security Assistance
Force (I.S.A.F.) forces in southern and eastern parts of
Afghanistan have become a daily norm by Taliban, which has
already fixed the 2010 summer deadline for a complete take
over of the country," The News Daily said.

The paper said seven years down the road since the 9/11
attacks and the subsequent intervention in Afghanistan by the
allied forces, the American military might has apparently
failed to smoke out the Taliban militia, which is gradually
extending its area of control in most parts of the war-torn
country.

The situation on the ground in Afghanistan is filled with
the danger of a Taliban victory; thus, compelling President
Hamid Karzai to appeal to the fugitive Taliban Amir Mullah
Omar, "to return home under guarantees of safety to help bring
peace to Afghanistan".

Hamid Karzai went on to state that he can engage in
negotiations to give the N.A.T.O.-I.S.A.F. forces safe passage
out of Afghanistan, clearly demonstrating his frustration and
the fact that the U.S.-led war on terror has reached a tipping
point in Afghanistan, the paper said.

Meanwhile, the CNN.com has reported that the Taliban
leaders are holding Saudi-brokered talks with the Afghan
government to end the country's bloody conflict.

Former Pakistan Premier Nawaz Sharif is playing a key
role in conjunction with Saudi Arabia in bringing about a
negotiated settlement between the Taliban and the Karzai
regime to pave the way for withdrawal of the foreign troops
from Afghanistan, the paper said.

The command and control structure of the Taliban is still
intact, even though they had lost some top military commanders
like Mullah Dadullah Akhund and Mullah Akhtar Osmani.

The fugitive Taliban chief is alive and fully functional
and has been sending instructions to his field commanders from
his hideout through audio-tapes, letters and verbal messages,
the paper said.

Before the 9/11 attacks, Pakistan actively supported the
Taliban regime, mainly because many of its leading lights were
products of the Pakistani Madrassa system and had close links
with the country's intelligence establishment.

Even though Gen Musharraf had formally renounced support
for the Taliban when he threw in his lot with Washington under
American pressure, the action against the Taliban and their
supporters remained half-hearted at best, partly because of
the fact that many within the Pakistan establishment had
ideological affinity with the Taliban.

But recently N.W.F.P. Governor Owais Ghani stressed that
the U.S. should talk to Mullah Omar in order to negotiate
peace in Afghanistan.

"They have to talk to Mullah Mohammad Omar, certainly—not
maybe, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Jalaluddin Haqqani
group. The west must accept that the Mullah is a political
reality," Owais Ghani said.

"The solution, the bottom line, is that political
stability will only come to Afghanistan when all political
power groups, irrespective of the length of their beard, are
given their due share in the Afghan political dispensation,"
said the N.W.F.P. governor in an interview with a London-based
newspaper.

Owais Ghani's proposition to initiate peace talks with
the Taliban came at a time when the Karzai administration is
clearly losing administrative control even on Kabul.

Compared with 2001, the Taliban militia is obviously
better financed and better-trained as its chief patron
al-Qaeda, continues to get a major part of its funding from
private donors in the Gulf and the Middle East, although some
reports say a proportion of that funding comes from private
Pakistani and Afghan sources.

With the Taliban proving increasingly difficult to defeat
militarily, and with the western coalition reluctant to
negotiate with any radicals, the Karzai administration is fast
losing control and authority in Afghanistan. PTI MRE AKD