The media is missing a big story about imperial catfighting in Afghanistan.
Here is how I’d tell it.
The British were on track to buy off a very high Afghan Taliban commander and to put his forces to some sensible use. In December Gordon Brown was in Afghanistan and sought the okay from the Afghan president Karzai.
The Britains send two of their top MI 6 agents, covered as UN and EU advisors, to negotiate with Mansoor Dadullah, the top Taliban commander in south Afghanistan.
A successful deal with him would have split off a significant chunk from the core Taliban forces. It likely would have been a great step to pacify the area.
In a pending meeting Mansoor Dadullah was to be given a satellite phone for further secure negotiations with the agents. The British also offered a ton of money as well as retraining and jobs for Mansoor Dadullah’s fighters. A camp would be set up near Musa Qala and training, including for police and military service, would be given.
The mission was blown when the U.S. (Khalizad?) got a whiff of it. They hated the idea. Maybe because they really don’t like to talk with the Talibans. But more likely because they don’t like the British to do their deals.
They ‘tipped off’ the Afghan Interior Minister who is under their
control. On their way to the negotiations the British agents were
raided and detained by the Interior Minister forces.
Karzai was between a rock and a hard place (both speaking English though with different accents.) But in the end he is more a U.S. tool than a British asset. So he denied any knowledge of the British plans and kicked the agents out of the country.
Sec Def Gates angrily denounced the British actions without revealing the real story.
Deals are only to be done by the U.S. The British are certainly better at making them, but their deals will be sabotaged unless they are done under U.S. supervision.
That’s the short version of the story. Now the longer trail that leads to it.
A year ago I wrote about Musa Qala:
[In summer 2006] British troops had been under siege and took fatalities in the small Afghan city of Musa Qala. Musa Qala is also the name of the river next to the city as well as the name of the province
Taliban did regularly attack the Brits and the city was coming apart. The provincial governor cut a deal with the Talibs and the city elders. The Brits approved as did the Afghan president Karzai.
The elders took over, a local police force was set up and in October [2006] the British left the area. Everybody was satisfied except the U.S., which criticized the deal.
In early 2007, despite the promissed truce, a U.S. bombing raid on a family home near Musa Qala killed the brother of the the local Taliban commander, Mullah Abdul Ghafoor. This ended the deal and the Taliban thru out the government accepted forces in Musa Qala and retook the town.
In late 2007 USuk forces again captured the town. Involved was another deal with another local commander:
The operation’s speed and relatively tidy conclusion is due in large part from a back-door political deal hammered out between the Afghan government and a local Taliban strongman, Mullah Abdul Salaam Alizai, last October.
…
The government’s deal with Mullah Abdul Salaam included his future position as Musa Qala’s governor, which he was appointed to on January 7, and allowed him to pick and choose other local authorities such as the new police chief.
That deal was done with U.S. agreement, but other bigger British deals were still pending.
The British MI 6 is for some times involved in various negotiations with Talibans.
In December, after meeting with Karzai in Kabul, Gordon Brown officially announced further British deals by graciously allowing the Afghan government to make such:
Britain is understood to have given the green light to President Hamid Karzai to undertake talks with Taliban militants as part of a long-term strategy to bring peace in Afghanistan.
The controversial announcement, which is likely to meet resistance from American hardliners, is now seen as essential amid intense fighting in the war-torn country with the prospect of British troops becoming tied up for more than a decade.
But shortly after Browns announcement something went wrong. Suddenly the Afghans killed the nomination of the British Lord Ashdown as UN/EU/NATO Viceroy in Kabul and kicked out two individuals:
President Hamid Karzai’s spokesman, Humayun Hamidzada, said the two men – named in reports as a British senior UN official, Mervyn Patterson, and an Irish senior adviser to the European Union mission, Michael Semple – were "involved in some activities that were not their jobs".
…
Both Semple and Patterson are said to have years of experience in Afghanistan, speaking the local languages and understanding the country’s complex tribal structures. They had travelled to the town of Musa Qala in the volatile southern province of Helmand on Monday, said a spokesman for the UN mission in Afghanistan, Aleem Siddique.
These two individuals were working for MI 6. Asia Times’ Syed Saleem Shahzad reports on the "Irish EU advisor":
The fluent Dari-speaking Semple had spent over 18 years in Afghanistan in various capacities, including with the United Nations and as an advisor to the British Embassy in Kabul, before being expelled last month after being accused of talking to the Taliban.
His colleagues within the Western community call him a British spy; he had become close to tribes in northern Afghanistan during the Taliban’s rule in the late 1990s. Semple has a Muslim Pakistani wife.
A 2001 report says:
Michael Semple began working in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s, after answering an ad in the paper in the UK.
Up to 1989 the Sowjets were still in Afghanistan. Who in the mid-1980s hired people in Britain to go to Afghanistan?
Shahzad also writes:
In one British initiative they targeted Mullah Mansoor Dadullah, the brother of slain Taliban strongman Mullah Dadullah, who was the new commander of the Taliban in southwestern Afghanistan.
So two MI 6 folks were in serious negotiations with high level Taliban. But the mission was sabotaged
[A]ccording to a senior Afghan intelligence source, American officials had been unhappy about meetings between the men and high-level Taliban commanders in the volatile Helmand province.
The source claimed that the US alerted Afghan authorities after learning that the diplomats were providing direct financial and other support – including mobile phone cards – to the Taliban commanders, in the hope of persuading them to swap sides.
"This warning came from the Americans," he said. "They were not happy with the support being provided to the Taliban. They gave the information to our intelligence services, who ordered the arrests."
When the mission was blown the Taliban leader Mullah Omar confirmed the negotiation story by firing Mullah Mansoor Dadullah, the target of the British operation:
"Mansoor Dadullah does not obey the rules of the Islamic emirate and violates it.
"Therefore it was decided not to appoint any post in the emirate to him," the statement said.
…
Mansoor Dadullah has been heading Taleban operations in Helmand, Kandahar and other southern provinces where attacks against the Kabul government and international forces are most intense.
If the deal that was blown had gone through Mullah Omar would likely have lost control over south Afghanistan.
Today we learn of the content of the British offer:
Britain planned to build a Taliban training camp for 2,000 fighters in southern Afghanistan, as part of a top-secret deal to make them swap sides, intelligence source
Compose Posts in Kabul have revealed. The plans were discovered on a memory stick seized by Afghan secret police in December.
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The camp was due to be built outside Musa Qala, in Helmand. It was part of a package of reconstruction and development incentives designed to win trust and support in the aftermath of the British-led battle to retake the stronghold last year.
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The memory stick revealed that $125,000 (£64,000) had been spent on preparing the camp and a further $200,000 was earmarked to run it in 2008, an Afghan official said. The figures sparked allegations that British agents were paying the Taliban.
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The camp would also have provided vocational training, including farming and irrigation techniques, to offer people a viable alternative to growing opium. But the Afghan government took issue with plans to provide military training, to turn the insurgents into a defence force.
A good deal was blown because the U.S. did not like it.
Shortly after the British deal got killed Sec Def Gates kind of confirmed it with his otherwise very unexpected critic of NATO allies:
"I’m worried we’re deploying [military advisors] that are not properly trained and I’m worried we have some military forces that don’t know how to do counterinsurgency operations," Gates said in an interview.
This is the my-way-or-no-way approach the U.S. likes to take (and which usually ends in cul-de-sac.)
The U.S. has not yet accepted it Change of the U.S. Role in the World. Why didn’t it let the deal go through? Why insist on kinetic solutions when other ways are available?
Gordon Brown is certainly mightly pissed and, while shutting up now, will remember this issue at a time and case that may be very inconvinient to the U.S.
