Events on either side of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in recent days show the U.S. effort in the region is in danger of rapid deterioration, according to officials in the United States and from those countries.
Taliban insurgents mounted a well-coordinated attack on the U.S. consulate in Peshawar, Pakistan, on Sunday. Then Afghan President Hamid Karzai was reported on Monday saying he might quit the political process and join the Taliban.
Karzai’s remarks appeared to rattle the Obama administration, which refused to criticize the Afghan leader through an election process widely seen as flawed by corruption.
According to the Associated Press, Karzai’s threat came after U.S. pressure to move against corruption.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday that Karzai’s comments are “genuinely troubling.” He added that the administration is seeking clarification of Karzai’s statements.
Karzai’s remarks about joining the Taliban come after he had had a round of negotiations with high-level insurgency groups, including one headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a man dubbed a terrorist by the United States.
Karzai also publicly chastised Pakistan in March for the arrests of senior Taliban leaders, particularly Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s deputy leader and military commander. Karzai claimed the arrest was scuttling his efforts at reconciling with the Taliban.
Pakistan’s top military official, who spoke to this reporter on a recent visit to Washington, said that Pakistan’s arrest of Mullah Baradar was a “joint CIA and Pakistani operation.”
“The last time Karzai met with Mullah Baradar was four and a half years ago,” the top military official said. “Mullah Baradar is not significant to the role of Afghanistan.”
While the United States tried to assess how serious its erstwhile ally in Afghanistan was about joining the group America is sworn to defeat, it was dealing with a sophisticated attack on its consulate in Peshawar — a critical CIA outpost dating to the Afghan-Soviet war of the 1980s.
The multipronged insurgent attack — consisting of a rocket launcher, suicide vehicle bomb and grenades — took the lives of six people and injured more than 20 outside the consulate, according to senior Pakistani officials.
No Americans were killed in the attack and all were evacuated after the attack took place in a city that one Pakistani official called the “wild west of Pakistan.”
The attack is a response by the Taliban to the increased pressure the Pakistani military and U.S.-led coalition have mounted against the insurgents, several Pakistani officials said.
“This is an example of the frustration and pressure these groups are feeling and how far they are willing to go as a result of our military operations,” said Nadeem Kiani, spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy in Washington. “They are being pressed hard, and out of desperation and frustration they mounted this attack.”
That view was echoed by a senior Pakistani military commander. “Pressure from the Pakistan military on the insurgents in North and South Waziristan is causing them to react with greater force, and it is imperative now more than ever that the U.S. and Pakistan trust one another and aid each other to stop them,” he said. “All actors must be on the same page if we are to defeat the insurgents. It’s going to be a difficult process if we’re not.”
But the attack had the characteristics of a Taliban in its resurgence in Pakistan rather than the last throes of a defeated opponent, some local sources said.
Pakistani media reports stated that the insurgents were wearing Pakistani security services uniforms, showing signs of “better coordination at conducting larger-scale attacks,” one Pakistani official told this reporter.
The events in Pakistan and Afghanistan come at a bad time for the United States and its NATO allies in the region. American commanders plan a springtime offensive in southern Afghanistan near Kandahar aimed at rooting out Taliban insurgents.
But Karzai’s increasingly active flirtation with the Taliban could undermine that effort.
More broadly, the events on both sides of the border suggest that the Obama administration’s goal of beginning a pullout in Afghanistan in little more than one year is slipping away, Pakistan officials warned. Those officials suggested that the Taliban and the Karzai government would increasingly act with that deadline in mind, seeking to shape a post-American Afghanistan.
