Taliban, al-Qaida building in Peshawar

WASHINGTON — It was supposed to be Iraq that was threatened. For at least the last five years, it was assumed by the best American analysts that the strange and ominous tribal warfare at the heart of that historically troubled country would inevitably “do it in.”

American “occupation forces,” meanwhile, were ever-so-helpfully providing the Iraqis with a new “colonialism” to rebel against. How very neat!

But now, it seems that the “attention spans” of the al-Qaida and Taliban militants — not to speak of the militants themselves — have moved from Baghdad on the Tigris to the British colonial city of Peshawar on the Khyber Pass. Without our quite knowing it, is it possible that “the war” has moved southward and that Pakistan is now a part of the struggle?

This new and dangerous part of the conflict began openly in mid-June with a dramatic break from a prison in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. With all the drama of a 1940s Hollywood spy thriller, an estimated 1,000 to 1,200 prisoners, many of them already Taliban fighters and all of them anti-American, escaped across the Afghan border with Pakistan, along the way taking control of seven villages in southern Afghanistan.

In what appeared to be a well-organized and strategically thought-out series of moves, the Taliban fighters and some al-Qaida guerrillas who had already left the fight in Iraq moved toward the historic city of Peshawar. Ironically, in the 1980s and until 1989, when the Afghan resistance defeated the Russian occupiers, Peshawar had been the center for the resistance, supported by the American CIA.

As The Wall Street Journal reported in its June 28-29 weekend edition: “In a remarkable shift, Afghanistan, where U.S. officials were once confident of victory, is now rivaling Iraq as the biggest cause of concern for American policymakers.”

In fact, a new Pentagon report says that the Taliban — whose rabidly conservative fighters want to turn all three countries, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Pakistan, into conservative, Sharia-ruled Islamic countries — after its initial failures, has today “coalesced into a resilient insurgency.” At the same time, U.S. combat fatalities in Afghanistan are increasing, and the country is more dangerous for Americans than is Iraq.

As The New York Times reported further from the scene: “The militants move unchallenged out of the lawless tribal region, just 10 miles away, in convoys of heavily armed, long haired and bearded men. ... There is a feeling that the city gates could crumble at any moment.”

At the same time, these militants, who recently executed two men and then threw one’s head around for sport, are obviously trying to control the NATO supply route for weapons for its troops in the south of Afghanistan — these routes pass from Karachi to the outskirts of Peshawar and through the Khyber Pass to the battlefields of southern Afghanistan. Another reason for profound concern is that Peshawar is a mere 90 minutes by car from Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan.

Local tribal leaders also complain about the lack of strategy of Pakistani officials after the fall of the more assertive government of pro-Western President Pervez Musharraf and the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. One tribal leader from the Khyber agency and a former member of the National Assembly was quoted in the Times article as saying: “There is no strategy to counter them. Very soon, the Taliban will go to Peshawar and say, ‘Hands up.’”

‘Hands down’

I would personally like to go to the world, and to some of our and others’ leaders, and say instead, “Hands down!” Because when you look at all the chaos in Eurasia, Central Asia, the deep Middle East, whatever you want to call these interwoven and poisonous worlds, the only answer for any rational man or woman is, “Don’t get involved.”

In fact, these developments are simply so inevitable that a person with even a little bit of brains would think, “If Darius I the Great of Persia, if the generals of Alexander the Great, and if the Buddhist thinkers of the great Asoka’s kingdom could not get out of the Khyber Pass with themselves and their empires intact, how in all get-out are WE going to get out of it?”

Universal Press Syndicate