Everyone Is Blameless

Afghan President Hamid Karzai bitterly blames NATO for lack of intelligence forewarning of the latest Taliban-Haqqani attack on the inner sanctorum, of the most protected part of Kabul where diplomatic missions, government buildings are located.  For its part, NATO, while denying their responsibility, is puzzled that they had no access to the kind of low-key buzz that often alerts intelligence to an upcoming action.

On the other hand, there is the incontrovertible fact that the Afghan Forces have their own intelligence sources.  Theirs is the shared language of the insurgents; they can far easier pick up any potential threats, one might assume.  Yet neither source did, although NATO did admit to having heard some soundings that a possible attack might occur - no need for external intelligence to surmise that.

What use is it to suspect an attack, and to mount a greater awareness if there is no hint with respect to possible details: where, when, how?  Well, the where, when and how became clear enough in the wake of a complex well organized and planned attack in various parts of Kabul and in three provincial capitals.  A similarly well-organized attack that took place before the Taliban retired for the winter months also used a tall new office tower under construction from which to mount rocket attacks.

Musadeq Sadeq/Associated Press

Afghan special forces officers on Monday at one of the unfinished buildings in Kabul where militants had taken up positions.

That attack hit the U.S. Embassy and a UN post.  The more recent attack used a similar modus operandi.  But the real question is how it was that the insurgents were able to pass the scrutiny of the Afghan police who were to have searched diligently to reveal the presence of arms, grenades, rocket launchers that the insurgents carried with them.  There was the second and most critical failure.

And Western officials who have been chastized by the Afghan president as a collective rebuke against NATO intelligence, while outwardly praising the reaction and the success of the Afghan National Army in responding quickly and effectively (though it took 18 hours to conclude the siege), must surely wonder how reliant they should be in the potential of those same forces being able to cope with such attacks after Western troop withdrawals.

The boldness of the attack, the resolve of the insurgents to make their way over hundreds of miles to launch entry and attack on so many fronts, gives cause to wonder whether attacks of this kind will become repeated assaults, rather than isolated incidents.  Assaults at which the Taliban can only become more skilled and more emboldened with each new success.

After 2014, with complete NATO troop withdrawal, the Afghan National Army and Police will have to be completely self-reliant.  Access to allied intelligence assistance would be non-existent to severely limited.  At that time President Hamid Karzai, for as long as he will be around, in the face of ongoing Taliban assaults, will have no entity but his own to blame for lapses in intelligence gathering and preparations to blunt such assaults.

The country's interior minister claimed all the attackers were from the Haqqani network, flooding into the country from their Pakistan bases.  "One of the suicide bombers detained in Jalalabad by the security forces confessed that, yes, they have come from across the border, they have been trained there, and they have been equipped there", said General Besmillah Mohammadi.

That's the kind of intelligence, as it happens, not quite shared by his Western counterparts.  "Though the evidence leads us to believe that the Haqqani network was involved in this, it doesn't lead back into Pakistan at this time", according to General Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  So much for NATO/Afghan intelligence.

American intelligence views the Haqqani network, now operating in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a strategic asset in the Afghan theatre, of Pakistan Interservices Intelligence Agency.  Even while the Haqqani have joined forces with the Pakistani Taliban, which is itself fiercely battling the Pakistani Army.  So much for convoluted alliances.

In Afghanistan and Pakistan it's difficult to determine who supports whom; the West is left with the impression, gained through fruitful observation that intrigue, deception, sinister machinations to undercut and destroy one another devours by its very nature the potential for the two countries to ever live in peace with one another. 

And the game is almost entirely Pakistan's.