US troop withdrawal leaves Pakistan vulnerable to attack by insurgents

Jacob Green
The US still has around 3,500 troops in Afghanistan’s mountainous Kunar province, which borders Pakistan. Photograph: David Goldman/AP



"Information about these individuals and groups has been passed to the Afghan government and Nato but no action has been taken," said Major General Athar Abbas, the Pakistani military spokesman. "Fazlullah is going from strength to strength, day by day."

Afghans claim that the Pakistani military has responded to the incursions by indiscriminately firing artillery across the border, hitting villages in attacks that have killed at least 43 civilians since last May.

"They want to destroy Afghanistan," Ehsanullah, a 25-year-old teacher from Kunar province told the Guardian. "They want people to rise up and demonstrate against the government and the Americans."

Most fighting in Afghanistan is concentrated in the south and west, in territory controlled by Taliban and Haqqani network fighters. But the Taliban's Pakistani cousins have taken advantage of the US departure from Kunar and Nuristan, in the east, to open a new front in the conflict.

President Barack Obama pulled most US forces from the two provinces in 2009 as part of the "surge" into the southern provinces. American generals considered them virtual lost causes. Taliban fighters had overrun a small US base in Nuristan in 2008, killing nine US soldiers, while years of fighting in Kunar's Korengal valley had caused heavy casualties with little progress to show.

Now about 3,500 US troops remain in Kunar but none in Nuristan. The diminished western presence has facilitated Pakistani Taliban fighters, led by Fazlullah, who fled the Swat valley following a major offensive in 2009. They have joined forces with local fighters and Maulvi Faqir Muhammad, another Pakistani fugitive, to mount attacks into Pakistan.

In June, Taliban fighters rounded up 16 Pakistani border guards in Dir district and killed them on video. In late August, hundreds of fighters slipped into neighbouring Chitral for a night raid that killed at least 35 soldiers as they slept in their tents, prompting the first Pakistani army deployment to the area since the Taliban insurgency began.

Pakistani forces have responded to the incursions by shelling suspected Taliban positions. But some shells have crossed into Afghanistan, often landing in inhabited areas.

Sadar Owila, an elder from Kunar, narrowly avoided death in mid-September when, he claimed, a Pakistani shell exploded beside his vehicle moments after he entered a mosque.

"The windows shattered and my driver was injured by shrapnel," he said. "The people in the mosque said that if they die there, at least they will go to paradise." He added that over 100 families had left the border area for safety elsewhere. Aminullah Amarkhil, a police chief in charge of a 100-mile stretch of frontier, said that 43 people had been killed and 54 wounded since May.

Abbas, the Pakistani spokesman, admitted some shells were falling in Afghanistan, but said it was not "intentional fire".

The cross-border shelling has led to a storm of protest in Kabul, where parliamentarians have angrily accused President Karzai of "going soft" on Pakistan to facilitate contacts with the Taliban.

A profusion of conspiracy theories and misinformation on both sides of the border further complicates matters. Many Afghans see the Pakistani shelling as part of a nefarious policy directed by the main military spy service, Inter-Services Intelligence.

Several villagers from border regions told the Guardian that Pakistan was trying to clear civilians from the areas, or seize control of the Kunar river. Many insisted their territory was largely insurgent free and said Pakistani accounts of Taliban attacks were overblown.

But across the border, senior politicians and police officials claimed Nato soldiers were orchestrating the Taliban raids as part of an unspecified plot to destabilise Pakistan.

"The Nato forces and the Indian army are helping these people. They are supporting them, giving money to them, running training camps. It is quite clear," said Muhammad Anwar Khan, a provincial parliamentarian with the ruling Pakistan People's party from Upper Dir.

The Pakistani indignation has an ironic twist. The military has long been accused of supporting Taliban fighters in Waziristan and other tribal districts at the western end of the border; now they find themselves under attack in the opposite direction on the eastern side.

While intensified US operations in southern Afghanistan over the last two years have produced impressive results – the number of attacks initiated by insurgents on Nato and Afghan forces are well down on previous years – the east has deteriorated.

And Kunar and Nuristan pose particular problems. Although the provinces, with their multiple smuggling routes and cross-border traffic by insurgents, lumber smugglers and other groups, are important to both the government and the militants, they are also exceptionally difficult to control.

The latest exchanges could be a harbinger of what lies ahead after most western troops leave in 2014.

Western strategy hinges on handing control to a beefed-up Afghan army supported by a much smaller western contingent of perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 soldiers.

But if the Pakistani and Afghan governments have failed to secure their common border areas by then, the Taliban could step up attacks in both directions across the porous border, with dire consequences for stability in both countries.

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