NightWatch

For the Night of 18 October 2009

North Korea: A high ranking US official said North Korean leader Kim Cho'ng-il proposed summit talks in Pyongyang with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak.

Shortly after the US official made the comment, the South Korean office of the President dismissed it, saying the U.S. official was "misinformed" about the results of the Korea-China summit talks earlier this month and the North Korean delegation's meeting with President Lee in August.

A source from the presidential office said on condition of anonymity that Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao asked President Lee whether he would agree to an inter-Korean summit when there is progress in South-North relations.

Pulling the pieces together, North Korea appears to have asked China to convey to South Korea an offer in principle to meet to discuss reunification issues. If true, this would be the first reunification initiative since 2000. That would explain South Korea’s resistance to US involvement and disinclination to acknowledge an invitation. The South needs to think this one over without outside pressure.

As a basis for prediction, NightWatch will use as a hypothesis that the North wants reunification talks with the South and without the US. That will guide its actions in the coming month, probably until January 2010.

Pakistan: The Pakistan Army began a ground offensive on 17 October. Despite the international media coverage, it is not clear just what is in progress. The media reports are frenzied and hyperbolic, probably to compensate for the lack of detailed information. They described resistance as fierce, but that does not appear to be the case at all. Some skirmishes seem to have involved exchanges of gunfire. The Army reported an estimate of 60 militants and five soldiers killed.

It will take a few days to determine what is occurring, but nothing is occurring fast.

Afghanistan: The White House said that it will take no decision on sending more troops to Afghanistan until it determines the new government is a "true partner". White House Chief of Staff Emanuel told CNN TV it would be "reckless" to take such a decision without a thorough analysis of the new government.

President Karzai reportedly is refusing to execute an order from the election commission to hold run-off elections. That apparently is the reason the election commission’s findings have been delayed again.

Special Note: NightWatch has been studying the unclassified fighting reports in Afghanistan by district for the first two weeks of October. The NightWatch focus, as always, is on the now 400 districts because they are where the government succeeds or fails, much more than in Kabul. That means they are where the Taliban exploit corruption, bad government and the absence of government in order to expand. The fight for Afghanistan is not won in Kabul. That is just the prize that goes to the winner.

The data is incomplete and the findings are tentative. Nevertheless they support the NightWatch thesis that the insurgency as now constituted is self-limiting … to the Pashtun provinces in the south and the Pashtun enclaves in the north. There are no new districts showing the signs of a sustained presence of Taliban or other anti-government fighting cells that are not Pashtun, based on the unclassified research.

This means the Taliban and most anti-government groups remain, as they have for eight years, primarily Pashtun. They are having little to no success breaking out of the Pashtun “nation.” Districts in Konduz Province and other areas of the north, for example, that have anti-government cells appear to be those that have Pashtun communities as the result of coerced transmigration programs in much earlier periods.

These communities were outgrowths of the King’s version of a”lily pad” strategy. The King was a Pashtun and required loyal enclaves all over the country from which his forces could operate to maintain order among Tajiks and Uzbeks, for example. They tended to be hostile to their Uzbek and Tajik neighbors, who reciprocated the feelings, in the best of times.

The significance of these tentative findings is that the anti-foreign appeal of the Taliban and Pashtun nationalists is not resonating among the other tribes. The anti-government movement is limited to about half the districts of Afghanistan at most and shows no capability to move beyond them yet.

The good news is the northern tribes seem to be checking the Pashtuns. The other good news is the anti-government forces cannot win against the NATO/ISAF forces.

The bad news is most of the Pashtuns may be counted as being anti-government and anti-foreign. That means NATO/ISAF cannot militarily defeat the anti-government forces without many more forces and without imposing an occupation regime or martial law in the nine core Pashtun provinces. Control the nine Pashtun provinces and the rest will fall in line.

The larger implications are that the anti-government resistance is not monolithic. That means that one set of tactics does not fit all.

It also means that the Taliban expansion into the north, about which NightWatch warned in 2008, can be reversed, but will require using different tactics from those used in the Pashtun south. The Pashtun enclaves in the north require protection from their non-Pashtun neighbors. The Pashtun clans are far from united in their needs and wants.

Consolidation of the north and control of the center -- meaning Kabul and Jallalabad -- ought to be high priorities. Herat, the western anchor of the centerline, is doing okay, and the Hazaras, who occupy Bamiyan Province and hold the middle of the central line, hate the Sunni Pashtuns. Weaker leaders than Karzai and NATO have held the Herat to Kabul to Jallalabad line and the North, while retaining a strong presence in key southern cities.

The fighting data show the pro-government and NATO forces have more assets and more advantages than the international press report in reducing the violence and in establishing a national unity government. The fighting data by district shows the Kabul command might need several hundred separately crafted solutions to win the loyalty of the people in the 200-plus disaffected districts. In the era of the computer, that is not a particularly daunting task for smart people. That is, in fact, a bounded set.

When neither side can win on the battlefield, politics becomes the battlefield. That will become more apparent to the Taliban leaders as winter approaches. More on this later.

For now, Readers may take away that the security problem is not as dire as some suggest, is manageable, containable and even reversible, but it will take more creative and critical thinking than is evident in public releases.

Iran: For the record. Two Iranian news agencies rebutted reports this weekend that Supreme Leader Khamene'i died, while state-run TV ignored the subject. Hunh?

Security. The Iranian military said today the United States and Britain were responsible for a suicide bombing that targeted the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in the Pishin district of Sistan-Balochistan province, Haaretz reported.

Iranian state television said its sources indicated the British government was directly involved in organizing, supplying and employing the militants who conducted the attack, and that the attack was aimed at redirecting problems the West faces in Afghanistan to Iran. Both the U.S. and British governments have condemned the attacks and denied any involvement.

The Jundullah terrorist group, led by Abdolmalek Rigi, claimed responsibility for the suicide attack that killed 42 people, including at least five Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) commanders, who were meeting in Sistan-Baluchistan province. President Ahmadi-Nezhad blamed terrorists in Pakistan for "cooperating" in the attack and urged the Pakistani government to arrest the responsible individuals.

Jundullah is a Sunni Arab Baluchi group that Iran and international news agencies claim is supported by the US from Pakistan and Afghanistan. Groups using the same name inflicted significant casualties on the IRGC this year, but the weekend attack was by far the most serious.

If this is a US-backed operation, it tends to explain press reports of IRGC support for the Taliban in the eastern border provinces of Iran, as retaliation and creation of a hostile buffer zone in western Afghanistan. A severe crackdown in southeastern Iran is likely as well as an increase in covert Iranian support to the Taliban in western Afghanistan.

End of NightWatch for 18 October.