Daily Times

The US drone strike in the Nangarhar province of Afghanistan has reportedly killed 13 militants belonging to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other affiliated groups on March 24, 2015. The area targeted in the drone strike was near the Khyber Agency, a region that has become a battleground for the military in its fight against suspected militants. There has been a flurry of fighter jets in Tirah Valley and even a drone strike there recently. The presence of members from Pakistani religious extremist groups in Afghanistan, where Pakistani terrorists have been seeking refuge for years, can be explained by the intense military operations. Amongst the terrorists killed in the drone attack were members of the Lashkar-e-Islam, a breakaway faction of TTP that pledged allegiance to Islamic State (IS), ostensibly in the hopes of getting funds and support. The leaders of Lashkar-e-Islam have recently realigned themselves with TTP after the exhaustive operation Zarb-e-Azb. It is likely that their fear of becoming isolated targets of the military, in light of the fact that the Afghan Taliban and the Afghanistan government are making their way to the negotiating table with Pakistan acting as a go-between, was the driving force behind their decision to join TTP again.

Nevertheless, it is uncertain whether the Afghan government will be successful in its attempts to achieve a political deal with the Afghan Taliban. Senior Taliban leaders met officials in Islamabad to discuss the possibility of talks earlier this month. It was revealed that two top leaders have different views regarding negotiations; while political leader Akhtar Mohammad Mansour is amenable to negotiations, battlefield commander Abdul Qayum Zakir opposes them. The representatives reportedly left with the message from Pakistan that this disagreement must be resolved to initiate talks. President Ashraf Ghani asked President Barrack Obama on Tuesday, during his visit to the US, to postpone the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. The White House has agreed to maintain a presence of 10,000 US troops in Afghanistan through 2015 and a continued presence and gradual withdrawal thereafter. This wisdom most likely comes from the way IS was able to fight off the US-trained troops in Iraq, capture their weapons and vehicles and gain control of swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria after the abrupt departure of US troops from Iraq. This development may make negotiations with the Afghan Taliban even more difficult because the leaders of the group had put forth the departure of US troops as a condition for initiating talks with the Kabul government. Despite the obstacles, Pakistan must continue to work to facilitate negotiations to ensure Afghanistan’s stability and peace in the region as a whole. A deal between the Afghan Taliban and Afghanistan’s government will isolate TTP and other proscribed organisations operating in Pakistan, making them vulnerable to attacks from the military and benefiting both states.
Regardless of the possible consequences, Obama’s acquiescence to President Ghani’s request shows that the US is sensitive to Afghanistan’s security concerns in the status quo. It is encouraging to see that the governments, intelligence agencies and security forces of the United States, Afghanistan and Pakistan are tracking the movements of terrorists from Pakistan and targeting them effectively to prevent them from becoming embedded in Afghanistan. The destabilisation of Afghanistan by militant organisations will re-establish and strengthen their capacity to filter back in and carry out attacks in Pakistan and weaken the efforts to negotiate with the Afghan Taliban. The strength of these groups in this region is also directly linked with the threat of further terrorist attacks in the west and the rest of the world. Therefore it behoves all three countries to put their differences aside and continue to work together and share intelligence as they seem to be doing now. After years of assigning blame to each other and differing with regards to security policy, the leaders of the three nations finally seem to be cooperating in their efforts to achieve stability in the region and combat the international scourge of terrorism, which has been growing alarmingly in recent years. *