[The U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John W. Nicholson, told a Senate committee in February that the Taliban and the Haqqanis in particular are “the greatest threats to security in Afghanistan” and that their leaders “enjoy freedom of action within Pakistan safe havens.” The Haqqani network was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the Obama administration in 2012.]
By
Haq Nawaz Khan and Pamela Constable
 |
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Afghan
policemen stand guard at the site of a suicide attack in front of the Indian
Embassy
in
Kabul in 2008. (Sardar Ahmad/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)
|
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — When a fake sewage
tanker truck carrying 3,000 pounds of explosives managed to reach a
high-security district of Kabul on May 31, then detonated in an explosion that
left 150 people dead and 400 wounded, no insurgent or terrorist group asserted
responsibility. But immediately, the rumors began to spread.
The Haqqanis. It had to be the Haqqani
network, people said. No one else could have pulled off such a precise and
spectacular crime. The Afghan intelligence police soon publicly accused the
group, too, adding that it had gotten help from Pakistan’s spy agency. Seven weeks
later, the bombing remains unclaimed, and the Afghan capital is still reeling
from it.
By rights, the Haqqanis should be barely
standing. For years, this clan-based Taliban offshoot has been a high-priority
target for Afghan forces and their U.S.-led allies. The group’s charismatic
founder, Jalaluddin Haqqani, is believed to have died of illness, and most of
his sons and senior commanders have been killed or imprisoned. Pakistan, which
once allowed the Haqqanis to rule their own ministate in the border badlands,
now claims to have driven them out.
So why does the name “Haqqani network” still
evoke such dread? Why is this group of a few thousand fighters still center
stage in a grinding 16-year war, and why have their elusive whereabouts become
Exhibit A among those who say that the Trump administration must punish
Pakistan, a longtime security and military ally, for harboring terrorists?
The answers to the Haqqanis’ survival have
much to do with qualities that Jalaluddin Haqqani, a former Taliban minister
and friend of Osama bin Laden, cultivated and passed on to his surviving son
and successor, Sirajuddin. These include kinship bonds and unwavering
religious ideology, strong discipline and careful planning, and an enduring
ability to attract supporters, whether young suicide-bomber trainees or
generous Middle Eastern backers.
This mix of assets helped the Haqqanis carry
out a long list of deadly and high-profile attacks in Kabul during the past
decade, including an assault on the Indian Embassy and another on the
fortresslike Serena hotel. The group, always close to al-Qaeda, is widely said
to have introduced suicide bombings to the Afghan conflict, and the one on May
31 was especially horrific.
U.S. officials have accused Pakistan of
providing sanctuary to the Haqqanis — keeping them as a proxy force while
purporting to want peace in the region. The issue has sharpened as the Trump
administration grapples with what policies to take in the conflicted region and
as U.S. military officials have argued for a stepped-up military presence.
The U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John
W. Nicholson, told a Senate committee in February that the Taliban and the
Haqqanis in particular are “the greatest threats to security in Afghanistan”
and that their leaders “enjoy freedom of action within Pakistan safe havens.”
The Haqqani network was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the
Obama administration in 2012.
Pakistan has repeatedly denied that it
harbors or assists the Haqqanis, saying they were driven out of its border
tribal region of North Waziristan, along with other insurgent groups, in a
counterterrorism campaign by the Pakistani army in 2014-2015.
“The Haqqani network has no presence in
Pakistan. It is being operated from Afghanistan,” Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry
spokesman said last month. He said that Afghans and their foreign allies are
blaming Pakistan for their own failures. “The terrorists are on the run, and
they have settled in the ungoverned spaces in Afghanistan,” he said.
An Afghan Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah
Mujahid, said in a telephone interview that while some families of Taliban
commanders may still live in Pakistan as part of the Afghan refugee community,
there is “no truth to the allegations that any Taliban, including the Haqqani
network, are being supported by Pakistan or living freely there.”
In early June, the usually elusive Sirajuddin
Haqqani posted a long audio message in Afghan Pashto on the Taliban WhatsApp
account. In it, he condemned the May 31 bombing and said his fighters had been
ordered to avoid attacks in public places where “innocent civilians” were
likely to be harmed.
Yet he accused Afghanistan’s foreign allies
of trying to “occupy our land and take away the Islamic system from
Afghanistan. How could we close our eyes?” he said. “Our aim is to free
Afghanistan from their control and influence and enforce the Islamic system. We
have lost thousands of lives, made thousands of widows and orphans in this
jihad. So we have to take it to its logical ends.”
Haqqani, believed to be in his 40s, has kept
a low profile since succeeding his father as commander of the Taliban faction.
With a $5 million U.S. bounty for his capture and a history of drone strikes
killing his associates, he is said to be permanently on the move. Local supporters
in Pakistan said they have not seen him in two years.
[Pakistan, accused of terrorist infiltration,
starts to fence its border with Afghanistan]
But southeastern Afghanistan, especially
Khost province along the Pakistan border, remains the Haqqanis’ wartime comfort
zone. Sirajuddin Haqqani commands a guerrilla force of at least 5,000 motivated
fighters who address him as “khalifa,” or Islamic spiritual leader. One
civilian supporter said he had also met Afghan government soldiers and police
who helped the Haqqanis carry out attacks in “highly sensitive zones.”
A spokesman for the Haqqanis in Pakistan
declined to answer questions by phone. Supporters and analysts said that the
group maintains ties with Pakistan’s intelligence service from their
anti-Soviet collaboration but that it no longer enjoys free rein, largely due
to U.S. pressure.
“Pakistan is no longer a safe place for the
Afghan Taliban,” said Muhammad Israr Madani, an Islamic cleric and researcher
in Pakistan.
In the past, he said, “some got national
identity cards, but now the government has blocked them. I can’t deny the
presence of Afghan Taliban and Haqqanis still living in Pakistan, but now it is
very difficult for them to live here in peace.”
Maulana Samiul Haq, a cleric whose seminary
near Peshawar has produced many Afghan Taliban fighters, said that the Haqqani
network is still “the most active and dreaded” Taliban entity but that
Pakistan’s influence on the fighters has “weakened” under U.S. pressure. Once,
he said, top military and spy officials “welcomed them, but now they avoid
meeting them.”
Yet despite Pakistan’s efforts to distance
itself from the Haqqanis, some of their supporters are convinced this is only
a tactical retreat in Pakistan’s long-term campaign to dominate and weaken
Afghanistan. “Khalifa is the last hope, and Pakistan will not want to lose
him,” said a tribal cleric who is close to the Haqqanis.
From their murky border hideouts and camps,
the Haqqanis are also known for kidnapping foreigners as hostages. A Canadian
American family has been in their custody since 2012, when they were seized on
a hiking trip. In a video released by the group in December, the American
mother, Caitlin Coleman, 31, pleaded with then-President-elect Donald Trump to
save them from “our Kafkaesque nightmare.”
The
group has demanded that one of Sirajuddin Haqqani’s brothers, who is in prison
in Kabul under a death sentence, be spared. If he is executed, it has
threatened to kill the family.
Constable reported from Kabul.
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