Afghan battle lines become blurred

special envoy on Afghanistan, early this week, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki arrived in Islamabad on Thursday. Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is due to visit Kabul in June. Musharraf's close confidant, Railway Minister Sheikh Rashid, was received by Ahmadinejad in Tehran early this week.

While Mullah Dadullah's killing might have dealt a significant blow to the Taliban insurgency, Iran will still be cautious about the Taliban's command structure. Iran will also factor the growing anti-American sentiments among the Afghans. But Iran cannot be missing the point that it has indeed become a meaningful interlocutor for the US with respect to Afghan situation - just as over the future of Iraq.

The Afghan bazaar perceives that Ahmed Zia Massoud (brother of Ahmed Shah Massoud and vice president in the Karzai government) is the leading figure in the United Front. Some say Massoud staged a putsch against Karzai. There is bound to be speculation about ascendancy of Russian influence. Moscow went on a publicity binge over the visit by the delegation of the Collective Security Treaty Organization to Kabul on March 9-13. But these are early days.

What cannot be overlooked is that Russia and Iran are not quite on the same page. The acrimony over the Bushehr nuclear power plant has taken a toll. Ahmadinejad's public criticism of Russian policies while on a visit to the United Arab Emirates last week underscored that the trust deficit is real.

The alignments remain fluid. Qanooni, who is close to Tehran, is keeping a low profile. "Ustad" Rabbani is doing the talking. He is a great bridge-builder. Meanwhile, Karzai alleges that the United Front is "supported by foreign embassies". Indeed, the Front includes personalities who kept links in the 1980s and '90s with Moscow, Central Asian capitals or Tehran.

The United Front has rattled Karzai (and Washington). Karzai wouldn't like the initiative to slip into the hands of the United Front. The Senate, which is dominated by his nominees, passed its own resolution on May 8 calling on the government to hold direct talks with the resurgent Taliban and other opposition forces - "direct negotiations with the concerned Afghan sides in the country".

The Senate resolution also sought that in the meantime, NATO military operations against the Taliban should cease. It said, "If the need arises for an operation, it should be carried out with the coordination of the national army and police and in consultation with the government of Afghanistan."

This partly aims at assuaging Afghan public opinion, which is incensed over Karzai's inability to protect the people from the excesses perpetrated by the trigger-happy US forces. Meanwhile, the lower house of Parliament has raised the ante by exercising its constitutional prerogative to sack Karzai's close confidant, Dadfar Spanta, pinning responsibility for the recent deportation of 52,000 Afghan refugees from Iran. Karzai promptly questioned the legality of the move.

To be sure, Karzai is coming under multiple pressures. On the one hand, there are the incipient moves by political opponents eroding his credibility and authority. On the other hand, the "international community" has become critical of him. At a high-level conference in Brussels on April 28, Richard Holbrooke, former US ambassador to the United Nations in Bill Clinton's administration, said Karzai government had "lost momentum" and transparency and was alienating its erstwhile supporters.

He added that Karzai was "walking away from democracy"; that NATO was successful in containing the Taliban but the Karzai government's bad performance was rejuvenating the Taliban's support; that there had been a "massive waste" of US and European money in Afghanistan because of very poor coordination of the aid effort; and that Karzai was losing his authority.

Holbrooke harshly reprimanded Karzai: "We don't want to see in Kabul the kind of political chaos which in Baghdad is destroying the coalition effort."

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who was present, shared Holbrooke's concerns. Given Scheffer's record of parroting US thought processes, Karzai would have felt exasperated. Indeed, within a week of the conference in Brussels, Scheffer headed for Islamabad, accompanied by the United States' supreme commander in NATO, where he and Musharraf pledged new anti-Taliban efforts.

Scheffer said in Islamabad, "It is my strong opinion that the final answer in Afghanistan will not be a military one and cannot be a military one. The final answer in Afghanistan is called reconstruction, development and nation-building."

The new buzzword is an "integrated approach" in Afghanistan. But no one has fleshed it out. There is an Afghan opinion building up over the imperative of an intra-Afghan dialogue leading to genuine power-sharing. But the US and NATO pretend they aren't seeing the groundswell of opinion.

Their emphasis is on the existential challenge posed by Afghan war to NATO's global role. They look over the Afghan ridge toward the new cold-war horizon. Meanwhile, the US is inexorably losing its monopoly over conflict resolution in Afghanistan. And regional powers include some that are against the open-ended presence of NATO forces.

It may turn out that the real "tipping point" is not over the Taliban's much-awaited spring offensive (which may not even happen), but if regional powers begin seriously to exploit the political rifts in Afghanistan for undermining the NATO strategy.

Not surprisingly, Washington shudders to think of any "regime change" in Islamabad in the present circumstances, no matter the political turmoil within Pakistan. As Scheffer put it in Islamabad on May 8 during the first ever visit to Pakistan by a NATO secretary general, NATO and Pakistan find themselves in the "same boat", and should seek an enduring, mutually beneficial partnership that goes beyond the "war against terror". And who else could hold the Pakistani end of the bargain better than Musharraf?

<i><b>M K Bhadrakumar</b served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years, with postings including ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-98) and to Turkey (1998-2001).</i>