Taliban insurgents fought their way into a major city in northern Afghanistan on Monday, driving back stunned security forces in a multi-pronged attack that also sent Afghan officials and U.N. personnel fleeing for safety.The fall of Kunduz would be a huge blow to the Western-backed government in Kabul and would give Taliban insurgents a critical base of operations beyond their traditional strongholds in Afghanistan’s south. Afghan government leaders and the U.S.-led coalition here view the battle for Kunduz as a key test of the Afghan security forces in their continuing fight with the Taliban. For the moment, Afghan officials acknowledged, much of the city is in Taliban hands, and Afghan authorities were left struggling over how to turn the tide, although they insisted that they would prevail once they mount a counterattack. Since they were deposed in 2001, the Taliban have been very much a rural phenomenon in terms of a fighting force. The majority of the battles fought against the Taliban by American and Nato forces over the years have been in the countryside, not the cities, and always had massive air support. But Nato and the Americans are figures of the past, and the compass militarily has swung in the Taliban’s direction. Without the clout of Western might, Afghan forces are very much left to their own devices. The fragmented tapestry of loyalties and affiliations that are Afghan culture and society are not a good foundation for a unified army and thus it is proving to be. The Taliban are now in a position to exploit this fundamental weakness, and if they are able, however briefly, to claim to have taken and held Kunduz, then other cities are also vulnerable and the spectre of Domino Theory heaves itself over the horizon.Military misadventures aside, President Ghani has some pressing foreign policy issues, not the least being relations with Pakistan. A year on, the unity government appears to be going nowhere. If anything, it appears to have been a strategic error by the US to force Mr Ghani and his rival for the presidency, Abdullah Abdullah, into an arrangement that neither really wanted.The Afghan government was never a service-oriented, people-centric entity under president Hamid Karzai, but that was precisely what Mr Ghani had vowed to change. Instead, he has been bogged down in the endless politics of maintaining an unnatural coalition.Worrying too are the prospects for the resumption of talks between the Afghan Taliban and the Afghan government.Even as Mullah Mansour’s negotiating position appears to have hardened, the Afghan government seems unsure about engaging the Taliban in talks at all. Perhaps, following the collapse of the second round of the Murree talks, elements inside the Afghan state had hoped that the Taliban would splinter so that they would be easier to deal with on the battlefield.But that has not come to pass — leaving the Afghan government seemingly at a loss about how to proceed.
pk.shafaqna.com
