America looking for divisions in Taliban

[Naveed Yaseen]

* US intelligence examining various tribes supporting Afghan militancy to determine whether some can be broken off

Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: US intelligence agencies have launched an intensive effort to examine the various tribes supporting the Afghan militancy to determine whether some can be broken off.

Top military and intelligence officials say they know far too little about the disparate groups they are fighting and believe many fighters have been incorrectly labelled as the Taliban. “You have a whole spectrum of bad guys that sort of get lumped into this catch-all term of Taliban … because they’re launching bullets at us,” a senior defence official told Boston Globe. “There are many of the groups that can probably be peeled off.”

The initiative involves hundreds of intelligence operatives and analysts in the US and overseas, and is expected to culminate later this year in a detailed, classified analysis of the various Taliban factions and other groups. The effort is considered crucial to the long-term success of President Barack Obama’s goal of crushing the remnants of Al Qaeda and bringing stability to the region.

“This is the key to moving forward,” said Peter Bergen, a specialist on radical terrorism at the New America Foundation.

Part spy-craft, part history research, the project is an attempt to re-create the successes in Iraq in 2007 and 2008, when the US and its allies were able to co-opt some elements of the Sunni-led insurgency and Shia militias and bring them into the fold of the Iraqi government.

“Over time in Iraq we developed a very nuanced understanding of the enemy,” the top US commander in the Middle East, told the Globe. “That proved invaluable as we worked with our Iraqi partners to determine which sub-groups, tribes, and other social elements might be reconcilable and which were truly irreconcilable.”

There was no comparable attempt in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A recent Obama administration review of US policy found that American understanding of the adversaries was seriously lacking.

The first step, officials said, will be identifying the remnants of the Afghan Taliban who ruled Afghanistan until it was overthrown by US-led forces in late 2001 for harbouring the planners of the 9/11 attacks.

Then there are Al Qaeda’s leaders and other Arabs aligned with them who used Afghanistan as a haven to plan attacks on the US. But there are other foreign elements, including Uzbeks, Chechens, and Uighurs, whose ultimate intentions are less understood, officials said.

There also are the so-called Pakistani Taliban like Baitullah Mehsud. And there are also criminal elements such as the drug smugglers “who don’t like anybody setting up shop in their area”.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp...2009_pg7_1