June 17, 2008
Old-Line Taliban Commander Is Face of Rising Afghan Threat
By CARLOTTA GALL
KABUL, Afghanistan -- The attack was little reported at the time. A suicide bombing on March 3 killed two NATO soldiers and two Afghan civilians and wounded 19 others in an American military base.
It was only weeks later, when Taliban militants put out a propaganda DVD, that the implications of the attack became clear. The DVD shows an enormous explosion, with shock waves rippling out far beyond the base. As a thick cloud of dust rises, the face of Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, a Taliban commander who presents one of the biggest threats to NATO and United States forces, appears. He taunts his opponents and derides rumors of his demise.
"Now as you see I am still alive," he says.
The deadly attack demonstrates the persistence of the Afghan insurgency and the way former mujahedeen leaders, like Maulavi Haqqani, combine tactics and forces with Al Qaeda and other foreign terrorist groups.
As a renewed sense of crisis grips the war here, fueled by reports on Monday that Taliban had overrun districts in southern Afghanistan after a huge jailbreak last week, these new networks have given the insurgents a broader pool of recruits and added power and sophistication to their attacks, American military officials say.
The bomber in the March attack, for instance, turned out to be a German citizen of Turkish origin who was trained in Pakistan, according to European officials in Kabul.
The combined terrorist-insurgent networks have flourished from sanctuaries in Pakistan. In a sign of the increasing frustration of the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, with the challenges to his government, he threatened on Sunday to send Afghan troops into Pakistan to hit militant leaders who have vowed to continue a jihad in Afghanistan.
The combination of sanctuary in Pakistan, deep links on both sides of the border and steady support from Arab and other jihadist networks has made Maulavi Haqqani a formidable threat to the stability of Afghanistan.
The Haqqani network is suspected of being behind three large vehicle suicide bombings in eastern Afghanistan this year, the latest on June 4.
In addition, Afghan security officials say one of his senior lieutenants masterminded a multipronged attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul that killed seven people in January, as well as the assassination attempt on Mr. Karzai in April.
A quarter-century ago, Maulavi Haqqani was a favorite of American and Pakistani intelligence agencies and of wealthy Arab benefactors because of his effectiveness in organizing mujahedeen fighters from Afghanistan, Arab nations and other Muslim regions to attack the Soviet forces that had occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Today he has turned his expertise against American and NATO forces. From his base in northwestern Pakistan, the aging Maulavi Haqqani has maintained a decades-old association with Osama bin Laden and other Arabs. Together with his son, Sirajuddin Haqqani, 34, he and these allies now share a common mission to again drive foreign forces from Afghanistan.
In Pakistan's tribal areas of North and South Waziristan, Maulavi Haqqani and his son run a network of madrasas and training bases and provide protection for foreign fighters and terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda.
They also provide logistics and intelligence for attacks in Afghanistan, according to a United States military public affairs officer, Sgt. Timothy Dinneen, who is based at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and wrote a paper on the Haqqanis last year.
Another United States military spokesman, Maj. Chris Belcher, accused the Haqqanis of bringing foreign fighters from Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Chechnya, Turkey and Middle Eastern countries into Afghanistan.
Maulavi Haqqani's old ties keep his insurgent ranks flush with men and money, the American officials said, as do arms and smuggling rackets they control within their fief.
Meanwhile, Pakistani forces have been reluctant to move against the Haqqanis. According to European officials and one senior Pakistani official, Maulavi Haqqani has maintained his old links with Pakistani intelligence and still enjoys their protection.
Asked in 2006 why the Pakistani military did not move against Maulavi Haqqani, a senior Pakistani intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that it was because he was a Pakistani asset.
Maulavi Haqqani has by now become so powerful in his redoubt that a Western military official who has worked in both Pakistan and Afghanistan said the problem of going after him was that the Pakistani military was not capable of taking him on and feared failure if it tried.
Pakistani forces accompanied by Americans raided a mosque owned by Maulavi Haqqani while searching for him in North Waziristan in 2002, but since then he has been largely left alone.
One Western military official said there was an unspoken agreement between Pakistani and American officials that United States Predator drones would generally be used in the tribal areas against foreign Qaeda members, rather than Pakistani or Afghan targets, like the Haqqanis.
As Maulavi Haqqani has aged, his son has increasingly taken over military operations from his father and, according to the United States military, has expanded his father's connections with foreign financing and fighters.
One example may be the bomber in the March 3 attack. The spokesman for the Taliban, Zabiullah Mujahed, in a telephone interview, identified the bomber as Muhammad Beg and said he had volunteered, traveling from Turkey to join Maulavi Haqqani.
"As men from Muslim countries usually do, he came willingly to join Afghan Muslims and carry out attacks against the non-Muslim invaders," Mr. Mujahed said.
German investigators have taken the German-Turkish link seriously, according to the German news media. Suicide bombings have been widely used in the conflicts in Pakistan and Afghanistan in recent years, but Mr. Beg is the first known German suicide bomber.
The group claiming responsibility for his attack, the Islamic Jihad Union, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda, seems to have acquired some Turkish German recruits whom they trained in Waziristan for terrorist attacks, according to Guido Steinberg, an expert in Islamic studies at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
The Haqqanis have given shelter to such groups. Last October, Sergeant Dinneen, the public affairs officer, warned in a lengthy press release that the younger Haqqani had expanded his father's original operating areas from the border provinces to other areas in northern, central and southern Afghanistan, including Kandahar.
"His close connections with Al Qaeda have enabled him to accumulate more financial support from Middle Eastern countries and have created a larger recruiting pool of fighters from other countries," the sergeant wrote.
Queried in May, a United States military spokeswoman said the Haqqani network had formed a syndicate with other, unspecified groups. Their goal was to "destabilize Afghanistan," the spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Green, public affairs officer for American forces in Afghanistan, wrote in an e-mail statement from Bagram air base.
The DVD on the March attack appears to be a rare attempt by Maulavi Haqqani, who looks to be well into his 60s, to answer his opponents and dispel months of reports that he was dead or sick and that he had ceded control of his network to his son. He pointedly rebuts those rumors and claims to have been at the scene of the March 3 suicide attack, which was at the site of the government's office in the Sabari district of the eastern Afghan province of Khost.
"I was present two or three days ago when we started operations on Sabari district," he says. "And now I am present by the grace of God."
His voice quavers, and at one point his arm shakes as if from Parkinson's disease. But he places blame for rumors of his death on propaganda put out by the United States military and its NATO allies.
He specifically mentions attacks on a hotel -- possibly the January attack on the Serena in Kabul -- and on the Sabari district base, making it clear that he has espoused Al Qaeda's most ruthless of tactics, suicide bombing.
Suicide bombing was unheard of in Afghanistan before 2001 and remains controversial, even among Taliban commanders. Many Afghans consider it to be contrary to Islam and to the tribal Pashtuns' code of honor. Maulavi Haqqani's embrace of it demonstrates the increasingly powerful sway Al Qaeda holds over him and other Taliban.
"We will fight them with patience," Maulavi Haqqani says on the DVD. "This is not a battle of haste; this is a battle of patience. If a strong animal fights with a small and weak animal, the big animal uses all its power, not against the enemy, but against itself."