US worried about 'Taliban shelters in Quetta'

US worried about 'Taliban shelters in Quetta'

(NSI News Source Info) February 23, 2009: There is growing concern among US officials, even as CIA drones pound targets in FATA, about alleged Taliban havens in Balochistan, The New York Times reported on Monday. Americans are increasingly focusing on Quetta, from where Taliban leaders are alleged to stir violence in Afghanistan.

Taliban operations in Quetta are different from operations in the Tribal Areas. As the United States prepares to pour as many as 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan, military and intelligence officials say the effort could be futile unless there is a concerted effort to kill or capture Taliban leaders in Quetta to cut the group's supply lines into Afghanistan.Afghan and US commanders have long said Taliban leaders, including Mullah Muhammad Omar, guide commanders in southern Afghanistan from the city.

"When their leadership is where you cannot get to them, it becomes difficult," said Gen Dan K McNeill, who until June was the senior American commander in Afghanistan and recently retired. "You are restrained from doing what you want to do."

Quetta is close to the provinces in southern Afghanistan where the war's fiercest fighting has occurred. American intelligence officials said that the dozen or so militants who were thought to make up the Taliban leadership in the area were believed to be hiding either in Afghan refugee camps near Quetta or in some of the city's Afghan neighbourhoods.

One former intelligence official with years of experience in Afghanistan and Pakistan likened the situation to America's difficulties during the Vietnam War, when Vietnamese guerrillas used a haven in Cambodia. For the past year, the top American goal in Pakistan has been to press Islamabad for help elsewhere -- in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan.

But NATO generals and diplomats have long complained that the command and control of Taliban fighters, distinct from Al Qaeda insurgents, may lie in southern Pakistan, and that Pakistani security services ignore the threat. "We've made progress going into the Tribal Areas and Northwest Frontier Province against Al Qaeda, but ... not ... against the Quetta shura," said a senior Obama administration official.

Some current and former American intelligence officials are sympathetic to difficulties that the government in Islamabad faces in rounding up Taliban leaders. Balochistan has long been an area hostile to government control, and even Pakistani spies have difficulty building a network of sources there, they said. So offer the Balochis a deal: they get independence from Islamabad if they in turn wipe out the al-Qaeda and Taliban in their territory.

The influence of the Taliban leadership over operations on the ground in Afghanistan is a matter of some debate among analysts. "The Quetta shura is extremely important," said Lt Gen David W Barno, a retired former commander of American forces in Afghanistan who is advising General Petraeus on a strategic review of this region, including Pakistan and Afghanistan. "They are the intellectual and ideological underpinnings of the Taliban insurgency."

But Gen David D McKiernan, currently the top military commander in Afghanistan, said in a speech in Washington in November that any assessment that said the Quetta shura's dictates were closely followed by field commanders "gives the Taliban far too much credit for coherency at the operational and strategic level. They don't have that."