The attack by a group of nine Afghan insurgents on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul on Tuesday night, resulting in the death of at least 21 people has made into the world headlines… After a battle for several hours, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO] forces had to be called in supported by helicopters to overcome the attackers. The United States President Barack Obama felt called upon to react, explain and even somewhat recast his most recent perspective on the Afghanistan problem…

Comparisons have been drawn with the Mumbai attacks on November 26, 2008. True, this too was a ‘fidayeen’-type attack, with the attackers highly motivated and prepared to fight and die and masterminded no doubt from outside. Like in Mumbai, the ineptitude of the security agencies got exposed. Both attacks ultimately aimed at conveying a political message.

In the Kabul attack, this message comes in several layers – some hidden and some not-so-hidden. The latter that are easier to see are, first, Intercontinental Hotel is a high-profile target and the attack ‘enjoyed’ high visibility. The Taliban, which claimed the responsibility for the mission, hoped to catch international attention and it succeeded… It was intended as yet another reminder to the western opinion that this has become a futile war and prolonging it is only going to make it costlier in life and money.

The Taliban hoped to mock at the much-touted ‘surge’ and the attendant claims by the US military commanders that the insurgents are going to be ‘driven out’ of Afghanistan by end-2011. Obama said only a fortnight back that the “tide of war is receding” in Afghanistan; and, in his last message early this week to the US troops before demitting office as secretary of defence, Robert Gates echoed the same view claiming the US is “at last turning the tide in Afghanistan”. Gates summed up the US thinking in his ‘farewell interview’ with the Newsweek:

“I think we are increasingly in a position that reconciliation [with the Taliban] could take place on the terms of the Afghan government and the Coalition. Talk to our commanders. Their view is that this is the critical year, because we have taken away all of the Taliban’s heartland, and if they can’t take it back this year, and we further expand the security bubble, then—just like the sheikhs in Anbar province [in Iraq] who had come to the conclusion that they could not beat us—they come to the table. I’m not saying it will all be settled by the end of the year. I’m just saying you could begin a serious dialogue by the end of the year.”

The Taliban have succeeded in putting a big question mark on this high degree of optimism within the Obama administration. Equally, the Taliban attack in Kabul also contains a message to the Afghan nation as well as to the Taliban cadres not to lend credence to the US claims that it is making progress in the war… It underscores that the ‘transition’ planned from July is a sham and it goes a long way to undermine the Afghan public’s confidence in the viability of the planned transition.

To be sure, the attack was carefully timed – on the eve of a conference of top provincial officials that was to take place in Kabul on Wednesday to discuss the transition.

However, the hidden meanings are going to be of greater consequence. The Kabul attack will certainly leave the US and its NATO partners guessing as to what the so-called direct talks so far between the ‘Taliban representative’ and American officials have been about. The primary question is how ‘representative’ is the Taliban representative who met up with the American officials on German soil or in Qatar in the recent months.

The doubt always existed whether the US was talking to the right man. Once not too long ago, it ended up talking with a petty shopkeeper in Kandahar who posed as a high-ranking Taliban official and was ferried in NATO aircraft as a precious commodity. This brings up a second point.

With the Taliban no more as monolithic as it used to be in the 1990s, engaging a Taliban representative has become problematic and even pointless – that is, unless he represents all the Taliban factions or carries unmistakably the imprimatur of the Quetta Shura. The US faces a quandary here.

It has succeeded in infiltrating some insurgent groups, thanks to the access generously provided by Pakistan in the recent years on its soil. Hundreds of US agents worked on Pakistani soil on this mission. But, now Pakistan is wiser to the US game plan which is to exclude it from the direct US-Taliban contacts. This has been one reason behind the current Pakistani decision to clamp down on the US’ intelligence activities.

‘Costs of war’

Thus, the Kabul attack draws attention to the futility of direct US-Taliban talks within the available parameters. It underscores that the Haqqani group, which is militarily the strongest faction of the Taliban and is close to Pakistan can easily undermine the direct US-Taliban talks whenever it wants. The writing on the wall is clearly that the US should involve Pakistan as a key interlocutor in bringing about the talks with the Taliban and the current approach to bypass Pakistan in the search of a settlement or ascribing to it a peripheral role is simply not going to work.

The US has been taking a coercive approach toward Pakistan lately. Incursions across the Afghan border into Pakistani territory have lately become more frequent and Islamabad seems to suspect that they carry the weight of a considered policy by the US and NATO in an attempt to break the Pakistani resolve to insist on what it regards as the pursuit of its ‘legitimate interests’ in any Afghan settlement.

In sum, at the core of the US-Pakistan tensions at the present moment lies the tussle over US’ drive to have direct one-on-one talks with Taliban. The US wants Pakistan to surrender its ‘strategic assets’ (read Taliban) on the Afghan chessboard and Pakistan remains adamant that it won’t. The Kabul attack shows that it is becoming a keen battle of will. But the US can’t easily bend, either.

The US will keep demanding that Pakistan should surrender control of the Taliban groups under its influence so that they can be ‘finessed’ in terms of the overall US regional strategies. The US approach to have direct talks with Pakistan is an integral component of its overall long-term policies in Afghanistan. The US desperately needs to bring the Taliban around to the idea of its long-term military presence in the Hindu Kush. The US will show flexibility and go the extra league to accommodate the Taliban’s ‘wish list’ by ceding the southern and eastern provinces in Afghanistan to its control.

But the US is well aware that such a settlement will be completely unacceptable to Pakistan as it will inevitably rip open the Durand Line question over time if Pashtun nationalism rears its head. Besides, Pakistan doesn’t want a long-term US military presence in the region as it remains unsure about the US intentions. In short, there is no more any strategic convergence possible between the US and Pakistani interests in the geopolitics of the region. Pakistan’s interests lie in working closer with China, Russia and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in the post-2014 period. All signs are that Pakistan is reorienting its foreign policy.

Of course, Pakistan’s room for manoeuver is narrow and the risks are great. The Kabul attack is a manifestation of the strong undercurrent of tensions – the unresolvable contradictions – in the US-Pakistan relationship. The more the US pushes ahead its unilateralist agenda in the geopolitics of the region, the greater will be the possibility of such eruptions as the Kabul attack.

The fact of the matter is that time is running against the US and all that the Haqqani group has to do will be to keep derailing the US’ attempts to sit around alone in a room with a Taliban representative. At some point, the US may consider giving in as the idea of the establishment of military bases in Afghanistan is not genuinely linked to its core interest in safeguarding its ‘homeland security’ from terrorist threats but is more in terms of occupying the high ground strategically in terms of its policies toward China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan.

Prolonging the war until it gets its way is not an option for the US. As the latest study ‘Costs of War’ released this week in Washington by a team of prominent analysts and scholars shows, the US’ misadventure in Iraq and Afghanistan through the past decade has cost the country in excess of 4 trillion dollars, which is on par with the ‘cost’ of the entire World War II adjusted to today’s prices. The study points out that this is the first time that the US is fighting wars on borrowed money.