Northern Afghanistan, traditionally the region most resistant to Taliban encroachment, saw a steady increase in the presence of anti-NATO insurgents in the past year, according to U.S. officials. Taliban leaders developed safe havens, set up attacks against NATO forces and mustered more recruitment in Northern Afghanistan than in any previous year, helped by Islamic clerics and fighters trained in Pakistan, according to officials and private analysts.
“Taliban … are outpowering Afghan security forces in the north in many cases, and the imams trained in Pakistan are helping them do it,” an Afghan official told
The Washington Examiner. U.S. and Afghan officials said Pakistani religious schools — where many Afghan clergy train — are a major resource for Taliban recruitment in the northern provinces and in disseminating propaganda against NATO and the Afghan government. In mid-December, insurgents struck Afghan security forces in Kunduz province in the north. The suicide attacks let to the deaths of more than a dozen soldiers and policemen.
“Perhaps the most important of all sources of support and recruitment is the clergy. … Sympathy among the clergy for the aims of the Taliban seems to be quite extensive, particularly among village mullahs,” states a 2010 report titled “The Northern Front,” by the Afghanistan Analysts Network.
The report, written by Antonio Giustozzi, a research fellow at the Crisis States Research Centre and Christoph Reuter, a German journalist living in Kabul, Afghanistan, states “there is some evidence that well before an armed presence of the Taliban surfaced in the north, sectors of the clergy were already openly preaching against the government and foreign forces.”
During the 1990s the northern fighters were known for their opposition to Mullah Omar’s growing Afghan Taliban. The opposition, however, “initially flirted with the Taliban in their early phases of expansion, and that from the time the Taliban took the north in 1998” until 2001 many of these groups collaborated with each other and now the “Taliban appear to have a clear strategy aimed at also destabilizing northern Afghanistan,” according to the report.
A former opposition leader of the Taliban who aided the United States in 2001 said that “in Afghanistan everyone knows everybody and that is how you stay alive — if you don’t, you’re dead.”
“In the Pakistan madrasas, the Taliban also recruited significant numbers of Uzbeks and particularly Tajiks from Badakhshan [province]. … On top of this, there appear to have been widespread sympathies” in the north among the clergy for the Taliban, the report goes on to say.
Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst on Pakistan and chairman of President Obama’s first Afghanistan-Pakistan Review, told
The Examiner that recent Taliban gains in the North are aimed at exhausting NATO forces. “The Taliban know they are hated in the Tajik, Uzbek and Shia communities and want desperately to expand beyond their Pashtun base to spread the battlefield to the north and west where NATO is spread thin,” he said.
