KABUL, 6 March 2005 — Afghanistan’s Taleban insurgents are “down but not out” after failing to mount any significant attacks in recent months, the acting head of the US-led coalition said. British Maj. Gen. Peter Gilchrist, who is leading the 18,000-strong force in the absence of its American commander Lt. Gen. David Barno, told AFP in an interview that the ousted regime’s hierarchy had fragmented.
“There have been attacks, we have had several, but they are not coordinated, they are not structured in the way they used to be,” Gilchrist said. Two US soldiers have died in combat since the New Year compared to nine in the same period a year earlier. Although the worst winter in over a decade accounted for part of the lull, Gilchrist said the Taleban’s command structure was unraveling.
“A year ago we were seeing large groups coming in and trying to attack us, and now you see smaller groups and you don’t see any coordination between groups,” he said. “You don’t see that there is a command structure able to coordinate and achieve anything of any major significance.” Taleban militants have been waging a bloody rebellion in the south and southeast since the fundamentalist Islamic militia was ejected from power by a US-led invasion in late 2001.
But their failure to live up to their pledge to derail Afghanistan’s first presidential election last October had “done them a lot of psychological damage,” Gilchrist said. “I think they are less trustworthy of each other, and there are signs that there are a large number of them that would like to find a way to come home and to reintegrate back into society,” he added.
President Hamid Karzai’s government has recently been in talks with senior officials from the former regime, which incurred Washington’s wrath when it failed to surrender Al-Qaeda mastermind Osama Bin Laden after 9/11. Karzai has said his government will offer an arms-for-amnesty deal to all but around 150 of the most hardened Taleban war criminals and those with links to Al-Qaeda.
“We hope that the government will be in a position to announce something in the relatively near future, where we can start a process where we can try to reintegrate these people into society,” Gilchrist said. He added that when large numbers of Taleban rank-and-file members — said by US military officials to number around 1,000 — start laying down their arms, it would “cause a major disruption to the command chain”.
“We can expect quite a lot of foot soldiers who are trying to find their way back and currently have nothing better to do ... than to fight, would like to come home and will do if they thought it was safe,” he said. There have also been “clear signs” that former Taleban leaders who fled to neighboring Pakistan in late 2001 wanted to come back and resume a normal life in Afghanistan, Gilchrist said.
Former Taleban Foreign Minister Wakeel Ahmed Mutawakel is now in Kabul and is playing a key role in efforts to persuade former colleagues to take up the government’s olive branch. However, Gilchrist scotched speculation that former Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is now on Washington’s most-wanted list of terror suspects, would be among those to come in from the cold. “I can’t actually see that he has any wriggle-room... because he has put himself so far the other side of the law,” he said. The general added that a small Taleban hard core would “continue to run an insurgency” despite the carrot and stick effect of the amnesty offer and the coalition’s military operations. “They will continue to attack softer targets and will probably try to achieve some sort of demonstration, some sort of spectacular,” he said.
