Afghanistan - A Test Of Endurance.

The Taliban regime in Afghanistan was ousted within a month in October-November 2001. Since then, the US has discovered what the British and Russians have done earlier - that Afghanistan is a country that cannot be "stabilised" in the conventional sense. It has also discovered that the easy victory over the Taliban reflected both its own military capability as well as the skill of the Taliban leadership in finding asylum in Pakistan.

Over the past few months, observers have pointed out that the US is gradually sinking into a trap in Afghanistan laid by a combination of Al Qaida terrorists, a former Taliban leadership associated with the forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and those in the military establishment of Pakistan who see the regime of Hamid Karzai in Kabul as a threat to their geo-strategic interests. The trap - not very different from the one which snared the former Soviet Union - involves hit-and-run guerrilla tactics against a far superior power which has not been able to control their safe haven.

During the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, Pakistan functioned as a safe haven for Afghan mujahedin under US protection. Now nuclear-armed Pakistan continues to be a safe haven, but is protected by a different rationale: the US appears to be worried that action which would undermine its President, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, could result in a radical Islamist takeover in Islamabad with the atomic weapons falling directly into the hands of any one of a number of groups on the US State Department's terrorism blacklist.

Anti-US fighters in Afghanistan have over the past several months become increasingly bold in their attacks. Such attacks will intensify in the months ahead as Islamist hardliners attempt to "teach a lesson" to the Bush administration ahead of the elections. The frontier region of Spin Boldak on the Afghan side of the Durand Line - which separates Pakistan from Afghanistan but which remains unrecognised by Kabul as a boundary - has become a haven for anti-US fighters who can easily slip across the border into Pakistan.

On the Pakistani side, local officials have indicated that their orders are to neither harass nor help these fighters; in practice, this amounts to assistance, because Taliban and Hekmatyar sympathisers in the area provide material support. Taliban leader Mullah Omar himself is said to be constantly on the move within the Pakistani provinces of Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). It is also strongly suspected that Osama Bin Ladin is hiding on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghan frontier. Meanwhile, less than two years after the ouster of the Taliban regime, the pro-West regime of Hamid Karzai (protected by American bodyguards) exercises little power beyond Kabul.