Rising Security Threat in Afghan North

Tuesday, 2 November, 2010

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Abdul Latif Sahak

IWPR-trained reporter

Earlier this year, bus driver Ustad Toryalai was able to drive round the clock along the highway from Kabul to Mazar-e Sharif in northern Afghanistan. The road, a key north-south supply route, was busy day and night with travellers, businessmen and international aid workers.

For the past six months, however, Toryalai has not dared drive at night for fear of attack. Even during the day, he finds that many passengers are no longer willing to risk the journey.

“I used to make 1,500 [US] dollars a month, but that’s now fallen to half that amount because people only like to travel during in the daytime, and they don’t carry commercial goods with them,” he said.

“The police patrol the highways during the day, but at night it’s either the Taleban or else hijackers passing themselves off as the Taleban; it isn’t clear which.”

The problems Toryalai describes reflect a wider pattern of deteriorating security across parts of northern Afghanistan previously considered relatively safe, or at least free of Taleban activity.

Local officials blame the infiltration of insurgents into northern areas over recent months, aggravated by inadequate security provision on the ground. In addition, attacks targeting Pashtun communities and grinding poverty are combining to produce local recruits for the Taleban.

“The insurgents have come under pressure in the southern provinces, so they have turned to the north,” Daud Daud, commander of Afghan National Police’s Pamir 303 Zone, which covers the north and northeast of the country, told IWPR.

Daud said the situation was critical in Kunduz, Takhar, Baghlan, Balkh, Jowzjan and Faryab provinces, and in the remaining northern provinces – Badakhshan, Sar-e Pol and Samangan – the Taleban also had a foothold. (See Taleban Try Hearts-and-Minds Tactics  for how the insurgents are building support in Kapisa, a province north of Kabul; and Taleban Justice “Fairer” Than State Courts on the alternative systems of governance they are creating in the north.)

Attacks in Daud’s within zone of responsibility in the last month alone have resulted in 30 casualties among Afghan army troops and the police, and dozens more among civilians and aid workers.

Daud noted that coordination was poor between Afghan security forces and the NATO-led international troops, but said this was being addressed.

In a recent speech, Atta Mohammad Nur, the governor of Balkh province, said that whereas last year there were security concerns in only a few villages, they now existed all across the province. Things were so bad that insurgent activity had spread to the outskirts of Mazar-e-Sharif despite the presence of 120,000 soldiers of the Afghan army, 6,000 Americans and 5,000 Germans.

He complained that his earlier warnings that security was getting worse had fallen on deaf ears. There was no coordinated plan to root out the insurgents, he said, and local police were undermanned and badly equipped, and did not receive the back-up they needed from the army.

“Police numbers are low at village and district levels, and they have poorer-quality weapons than the Taleban,” he said. “The records for northern provinces show that there’s just one policeman for every one or two villages, whereas it’s likely there are dozens of Taleban in some of these villages.”

Although he warned that conditions in the north could become even worse than in southern Afghanistan if these trends continued, and called for more Afghan security forces to be deployed, Nur said he opposed an increase in international troops in the region.

“In my view, if more foreign forces were present, their operations and bombardments would aggravate the rising security problems,” he said.

Other northern provinces are similarly affected.

Ibrahim, a merchant who trades in oil in the northwestern Faryab province and lives in Andkhoy district, on the border with Turkmenistan, said the Taleban now operated unhindered in the area and were recruiting many local young men.

“A few nights ago, the Taleban took me out of a car and questioned me,” he said. “As soon as I told them I’m a businessman, they released me.”.

Faryab’s governor Abdul Haq Shafaq acknowledges that the insurgents are active in most districts of the province, but said they were confined to launching sporadic guerilla attacks as they were unable to engage Afghan security forces in open combat.

Shafaq agreed that recruitment was on the increase, adding that “the reason for this is poverty and unemployment, which lead people to try to earn some money by joining the Taleban”.

Faryab police chief Brigadier-General Abdul Khalil Andarabi told IWPR that his men were critically short of resources, and urgently needed assistance from the Afghan interior ministry.

“We’re short of police and we are making serious efforts to integrate the ‘arbakai’ [locally-raised militia] into the province’s police framework,” he said. “The interior ministry needs to increase the number of police we have here; it’s a pressing concern.”

General Faiz Mohammad, who is in charge of implementing the Afghan government’s National Development Strategy in the north, said that in addition to Afghan Taleban, there were also members of the Pakistani Taleban and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, IMU.

The IMU originated in Central Asia in the 1990s, but relocated to Afghanistan and Pakistan as a close ally of the Taleban. Over the past year, the group, whose core is ethnic Uzbek rather than Pashtun, has been relocating combatants to northern Afghanistan, where it strengthens the Taleban’s potential to carry out attacks. The IMU may also have designs on the neighbouring Central Asian republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. (See Militant Islamic Force Signals Return to Central Asia for a recent report on the group.

General Josef Blotz, spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, has painted a similar picture, telling reporters that the Taleban and the Uzbek militants had become more active in the north where there were fewer international troops.

Like Blotz, Major-General Hans-Werner Fritz, the ISAF regional commander for northern Afghanistan, says new counter-insurgency operations are planned in the region. He says operations will be led by Afghan troops with support from their foreign allies.

Other observers say northern Afghanistan has become fertile ground for insurgent activity because of the aggressive action of armed factions in the region, often targeting the Pashtun minority.

Political expert Mohammad Wakil said the Taleban had won recruits among local people who felt unprotected from the paramilitary groups Jamiat-e Islami and Junbesh-e Melli, dominant in northeastern and northwestern provinces, respectively.

The armed wings of these factions, which date from the 1980s, were supposed to have been disbanded and disarmed in a United Nations-sponsored programme after 2001.

But Wakil said a spate of politically-motivated killings of supporters of other political groups had never been properly been investigated, he said, noting that both Jamiat and Junbesh had members in the institutions of government.

“Recent years have seen unpublicised incidents involving the killing of members of other parties…. and of tribal elders, especially Pashtuns, yet no one has been arrested for these assassinations,” he said. “These acts have rouse the anger of other parties and ethnic groups, who have begun cooperating with the insurgents by providing them with refuge and support.”

An elder of the Ishaqzai, a Pashtun tribe in Balkh province, who asked not to be identified, said that since the fall of the Taleban in 2001, more than 100 tribal elders had been killed for ethnic and political reasons.

Failure to address these crimes created feelings of resentment and a desire for revenge, he said.

“When your brother or close relative is killed, and they are completely innocent and you know who the murderer is, would you remain silent?” he asked. “Definitely not – never. That’s the position many of those who are now helping the Taleban found themselves in.”

The Ishaqzai elder concluded, “If the government assisted in arresting the murderers, these people would certainly support it. This is the government’s fault – because of some murderers, they have lost people’s confidence.”

Abdul Latif Sahak is an IWPR-trained reporter in Balkh.