PAKISTAN - The Coming Challenges - Part 11 - The Security Perspective.

The Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar's vow to retake control of Afghanistan, in a message released on Nov. 12 to a Pakistani news agency on the eve of the Muslim holy festival of Eid-ul-Fitr, came as an embarrassment to President Pervez Musharraf and a frustrating development to the US which has depended much on him in its war against terrorism. It proved that Musharraf's military offensives against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda fugitives in South Waziristan were futile, although his forces did kill up to 40 of them by Nov. 12.

With the winter cold having begun in Waziristan and other mountainous areas on the Pakistani-Afghan frontiers, Pakistani government forces can no longer pursue their offensive due to their lack of experience in combat in extremely cold conditions. They will have to wait until the next spring, from late March, to resume their hunt for Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

Mullah Omar, widely believed to be living in that part of Pakistan from where he directs an insurgency against American and Afghan forces in southern and eastern Afghanistan, said the US was trying to impose a puppet regime in his country, but that it would fail. His two-page message was released by fax to a local news agency called the Afghanistan Islamic Press, based in Peshawar, Pakistan, and was reported by Reuters. He said he will revive the Taliban Islamist emirate - with himself still regarded as "Amir Al-Mu'minim" (Prince of the Believers in Wahhabi Islam) - and will thwart parliamentary elections due in Afghanistan by next May.

The UN's peacekeeping chief in Afghanistan, Jean-Marie Guehenno, on Nov. 9 warned the UN Security Council that the parliamentary elections will be far more difficult than the Oct. 9 presidential polls. In a stark appeal for more action against a soaring narcotics trade and rise of irregular militias in Afghanistan, Guehenno told the Security Council: "Parliamentary elections will be much more complicated and fraught with security concerns. The international community may be tempted to diminish its attention on Afghanistan in the aftermath of the presidential election. It should resist this temptation".

Guehenno said many issues in Afghanistan still had to be resolved, including delimitation of electoral districts, updating voter lists and vetting thousands of potential candidates. But security remained paramount. He warned: "These elections will inevitably be more affected by local tensions and more susceptible to fraud and intimidation than the presidential elections were. The influence of local commanders, the widespread and tangled web of narcotics and arms, and the absence of an efficient local civil administration continue to constitute serious obstacles". International support for demobilisation must be sustained, he said, as well as action against the illegal drug trade. Guehenno added that "irregular militias" were emerging as an alarming problem. "These are armed groups not on the payroll of the ministry of defence, and not included in the demobilisation programme. They are perhaps even more destabilising than the regular militias".

Afghanistan figures prominently in the security perspectives of Musharraf and the US concerning this part of the "Greater Middle East" (GME), including the Indian sub-continent and Central Asia, where Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and affiliated movements remain active (see News Service in this week's Diplomat Package).