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September
28, 2001
Inside Afghanistan
The Northern Alliance Waits
for the Real War to Start
By Patrick Cockburn
in
Panjshir Valley, Afghanistan
The Independent
Exploding shells twinkle over
a hilltop in northern Afghanistan as opposition soldiers try
to show that one day they will have the strength to overthrow
the Taliban in Kabul. A line of soldiers advances on the enemy's
position and flushes out a single prisoner.
It was a perfectly efficient
operation as a training exercise by the forces of the Northern
Alliance, the opposition movement, which hopes one day to recapture
the Afghan capital, Kabul, which it lost to the Taliban five
years ago.
But such set-piece assaults
are unlikely to play a central role in any assault by the Northern
Alliance as it tries to break out of its mountain fastnesses
over the next few months. The transformation of the battlefield
is more likely to come about because allies of the Taliban change
sides.
There is another possibility
for the Northern Alliance. If the US launches a sustained air
attack it might become impossible for the Taliban to concentrate
its forces to meet an assault on the ground.
If the Taliban did muster
its forces, it would suffer heavy casualties, which it can ill
afford, and total loss of equipment, as happened to the Iraqi
army in the Gulf War of 1991. But it is difficult to believe
that the United States will give tactical air support to advancing
Northern Alliance forces when the American public wants to see
its own troops in action.
Abdullah Abdullah, foreign
minister of the Northern Alliance, says its forces have launched
"small-scale offensives in different parts of the country".
The idea is to make probing attacks to see if the Taliban is
weakening. The Taliban, for their part, do not want to give
anybody the impression that they are on the run.
It would help the Northern
Alliance immensely in terms of its international credibility
if it could win a serious victory such as recapturing Mazar-
I-Sharif, the largest city of northern Afghanistan. There are
no eyewitness accounts of the fighting, but the Taliban claim
to have recaptured the one city that the Northern Alliance said
it had taken. The alliance, also known as the United Front,
says it fought off a counter-attack.
But the Northern Alliance
has had one very important achievement over the last month.
It has survived the assassination of its leader, Ahmed Shah
Masood, on 9 September by two suicide bombers who posed as journalists
seeking an interview. It was widely believed when he died that
nobody else could hold the Northern Alliance together, but there
is no public sign of the movement splitting.
The problem for the movement
is that it depends on minorities in the north of Afghanistan.
Its main stronghold is the precipitous Panjshir Valley and districts
wholly populated by Tajiks, who make up a quarter of Afghanistan's
population. It has two other redoubts further west, both of
which have been successfully defended because they are deep
in the mountains.
There is an important difference
in the build-up to a possible war between the US and its allies
and the Taliban in Afghanistan and the war against Saddam Hussein's
Iraq. Even at this stage, many Afghans believe the end of the
Taliban is inevitable because the disparity in forces is too
great. In Iraq, it was never clear that the war was going to
end with the removal of Saddam Hussein and indeed it did
not. Afghanistan's neighbours Pakistan, India, Russia
and the Central Asian states are already vying for influence
in a post-Taliban Afghanistan.
The war in Afghanistan has
always been peculiar. The armies involved are small. The Taliban
has only 60,000 men and the Northern Alliance about 15,000.
Both also have large militia forces. Fighting has been fierce,
but the Taliban and the Alliance have tried to avoid heavy casualties
to their core units.
A difficulty for the opposition
to the Taliban is that its support is based on ethnicity
it is backed by Tajiks, Uzbeks and Shia Muslims and it
does not have support among the Pushtu who make up 38 per cent
of the Afghan population. This poses a serious long-term problem
for the opposition factions, particularly if they want to avoid
Pakistan retaining its influence through some instrument other
than the Taliban.
The Northern Alliance is likely
to be strengthened by the impending struggle. But Afghanistan
is such a divided country that it is hardly a country at all.
Its tremendous mountain ranges make it difficult for any central
government to gain total control of the provinces.
The constituent members of
the National Alliance have little in common except hatred of
the Taliban. They will certainly split at some point, but the
prospect of support from so many quarters will probably make
them stick together for the moment in face of a common enemy
whom they hope will soon be in its death throes.
CP
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