SALANG PASS (Afghanistan): At a stroke, most of northern Afghanistan in more or less US-friendly hands. The Taliban’s hold on Kabul looking shaky. Herat is under threat. Could the war in Afghanistan be almost over? In fact, for the US-led international coalition, the hard part of the war against the Taliban may be about to begin.
In statements over the weekend, the Northern Alliance leadership warned that Kabul was as far as its troops would go. If the US, Britain and their coalition partners want to fight the Taliban in their strongholds of Jalalabad and Kandahar, they will have to find other proxies - or do the fighting themselves.
The standard alliance formula, repeated like a mantra, is that it is not fighting Afghans - it is fighting foreigners, or ”Arabs, Pakistanis and Chechens”. The implication is that if the foreigners are driven from the country, the Taliban problem will vanish, Al Qaeda will be exterminated and Afghans will gather peacefully to solve their problems.
Yet by publicly refusing to send troops to the south of the country, the alliance is admitting the truth. The alliance-Taliban conflict is not just about Afghans versus foreign meddlers - or about true, sensible Muslims against blasphemous fanatics. It is about Afghanistan’s great ethnic divide.
The alliance represents the mainly Tajik, Uzbek, Turkmen and Hazara north of the country. The Taliban are overwhelmingly Pakhtoon, the dominant ethnic group in the south. These ethnic divisions have always been a part of Afghanistan, but they were sharpened after the withdrawal of Soviet troops in the 1980s, when power coalesced around heavily armed, ethnically based warlord bands.
Pakhtoon nationalism is only a part of the Taliban identity. And the alliance is aware of its own limits - with the possible exception of Kabul it has no wish to send its suddenly overstretched forces into territory where ordinary people fear and resent its ethnicity.
Hamid Karzai and the former governor of Jalalabad, Haji Qadir, are two anti-Taliban Pakhtoons who might form the nucleus of uprisings against the Taliban in the areas where they are strongest. Yet the US has been trying desperately since Sept 11 to find a Pakhtoon equivalent of the northern rebels - a southern alliance - and has failed.
Talk of an alliance victory in the north may yet prove premature; the road to Kabul is littered with landmines and deeply dug-in Taliban, and it is not too early to begin worrying about fighting between alliance leaders. But as winter approaches, the likelihood is of a country freezing into de facto partition.
The alliance will be comfortable in its part of Afghanistan, enjoying a relaxation of Taliban pressure and easy ties with its central Asian and Iranian neighbours. There will be little incentive to drive south. US, British, German and French special forces lined up to intervene, and more troops besides, may have to be used to dismantle Al Qaeda and the Taliban in their strongholds.
What the alliance can offer is bases on its territory - in Mazar-i-Sharif, perhaps, or the airfield at Bagram, north of Kabul. This will only intensify feelings in the Pakhtoon south of fighting foreign invaders rather than fellow Afghans.
The greatest danger for the west, beyond the day when it must risk the lives of its soldiers on the ground instead of relying on the alliance to be its infantry, is that it will end up fighting Pakhtoons on both sides of the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.