Strategic Panorama 2009 - 2010 - IEEE

The AF PAK scenario
For this purpose it would be useful to know what President Karzai’s
objectives are and what stabilisation scenario he believes can be achieved
with the means he has at his disposal. The scant progress of the national
reconciliation initiatives and plans to break up the illegal armed groups,
who could total some 125,000 combatants throughout the country, seems
to indicate that the Kabul government is not clear about this. Even with
the mediation of Saudi Arabia, the initiatives directed at the Hizb-e-islami
group headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar have neither achieved appreciable
results nor been continued and developed. So far Karzai appears to have
been playing to the gallery more than genuinely attempting to get anywhere
with these initiatives.
Although the insurgency as a whole lacks coherence and even the ability
to coordinate on the ground, it appears to share the belief that these
calls for dialogue are signs of weakness and not strength on the part of
Karzai and his partners of the international community and should therefore
be despised or used for propagandistic purposes to project an image of
weakness of the international coalition. In this regard the insurgents share
a common aim, namely to topple the Afghan government and expel the
infidel foreigners from their country and are indifferent to Karzai’s overtures
or to the messages of the UN and ISAF.
It would be very difficult to speak of a structured Afghan public opinion
owing to the extreme ethnical and tribal division of Afghan society
and the difficulty of conducting studies of this kind in rural areas, especially
those controlled by the insurgency. Nevertheless, it is possible to
understand the prevailing sentiment or the Afghans’ ideas about what is
happening to them and what they expect of the future, as despite this
social structure there is a genuine Afghan national awareness which is
expressed as such. The latest poll, the 5th since 2004, conducted by
the Asia Foundation underlines that 70% of interviewees maintain that
the Afghan police and army still need the support of foreign troops and,
similarly, that they are indeed tired of the war, and a similar percentage,
71%, are in favour of reconciliation and dialogue with the armed rebel
groups.
Although the doubts about the firmness of the West’s commitment
and historical rejection of foreign occupation could be exacerbated by
the dashed expectations of the western intervention of 2002, we must
continue to rely on the continued support for ISAF’s presence expressed
in these data—a backing that is reinforced above all by fear of the return
of the Taliban.
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