Titre

AHMADSHAH MASSOUD

MILITARY LEADER OF THE FORMER AFGHANISTAN GOVERNMENT

Ahmadshah Massoud, military leader of the former Afghanistan Government, spoke with Anthony Davis of his anti-Taliban and anti-Pakistan plans after being ousted from Kabul eight weeks ago (Photo: EPA/PA News)
Driven from Kabul but now entrenched north of the city, former government military commander Ahmadshah Massoud is seeking to widen the war in Afghanistan.
He wants to militarily overstretch the Taliban and exhaust the ability of Pakistan - which he accuses of backing them - to provide logistic support to the radical Islamic militia.
"Our best option is not to try and take Kabul directly but rather to spread the fighting to other areas of Afghanistan," he said in an interview at his headquarters in Jabal-us-Siraj, 77 km north of Kabul.
"We have the capability to do this in several areas, including [the eastern provinces of] Konar, Laghman and Nangarhar," said the 44 year-old former defence minister who, since early October, has joined northern Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostam and the Shi'a Hizb-i-Wahdat faction of Karim Khalili in a tripartite anti-Taliban coalition.
"If Khalili co-operates, we can also spread the war into [the southern provinces of] Ghazni, Uruzgan, Zabul and Helmand," he added. Those provinces border Shi'ite areas of central Afghanistan where Khalili's Hizb-i-Wahdat has a following.
Massoud said the Taliban movement - which now holds the whole ethnic Pushtun province of the south and east as well as Herat in the west - is far from popular with all the Pushtuns there. The potential for uprisings by local groups supported by the northern coalition was considerable, he said.
"Many people in Pushtun areas were thinking of [former King] Zahir Shah in the beginning. They thought the US was behind the Taliban and that the US would support the return of Zahir Shah. They saw the Taliban as a temporary phenomenon. But when the Taliban declared its enmity for Zahir Shah, there was a lot of disappointment among educated people."
Massoud also argues that the Taliban movement is only held together by an expansionist war. However, now that the militia had failed to move into the farsi-speaking areas of northern Afghanistan, differences in their ranks could be expected to surface. He claimed that the Taliban's two leading figures, Mullah Omar - generally regarded as the ranking personality in the movement's shadowy supreme council - and Mullah Rabbani, differ on some social and political issues, including that of support from Pakistan. To date, however, no independent evidence of rifts in the Taliban leadership has surfaced.
On Pakistan, Massoud voiced particular anger over the role he alleges Islamabad has played in supporting the Taliban and the campaign that swept it into Kabul on 27 September. "We need to gradually extend the war. Then ISI [Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence], the whole Pakistan government and all those behind Pakistan will see that there may be no end to this war. One day it will start in Jalalabad, the next day in Konar, another day in Laghman.
"From the economic standpoint, this will not be easy for them. As the war spreads, Pakistan will not be able to continue supporting it. If they look to the future, they'll see this war can be a military, economic and political morass for them. There will be no transit trade routes, no [natural gas] pipelines [from Central Asia across Afghanistan]; only a fire that is spreading. What happened to the Russians here, will happen to them too."
Massoud has so far thought little about a proposal for the demilitarisation of Kabul put forward by the United Nations Special Mission to Afghanistan. In such a scenario, the Taliban would be encouraged to make a face-saving withdrawal from the city while northern forces refrain from entering.
A limited Afghan security force - possibly overseen by UN personnel - might monitor compliance and ensure law and order in Kabul.
Massoud does not favour a Pakistani proposal that would see the force composed of 100 men from each of Afghanistan's 29 provinces. With the Taliban controlling two-thirds of the country, such a force would, by definition, be Taliban dominated.
He preferred a security force divided equally between Taliban and northern coalition forces, although an alternative might be a security force made up solely of Kabulis.
However, Massoud said that since his loss of Kabul, UN special envoy Dr Norbert Holl had flown repeatedly to negotiate with Dostam in Mazar-i-Sharif and with Taliban chiefs in Kandahar, but that the German diplomat had yet to meet him. "He said at a press conference in Kabul that he didn't know where to find us," said Massoud.
While officially the former Kabul government recognises the role of the UN in mediating between Afghan factions, aides close to Massoud are sceptical of a mission that seems not to enjoy real superpower support and appears unable to locate a key protagonist in the conflict.