Underscoring the crisis confronting the US occupation was the revelation this week that a supposed senior Taliban official with whom US and NATO officials were organizing negotiations was an imposter.
The individual, identified as "Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour", was supposedly the number-two man in the Quetta Shura led by Mullah Mohammed Omar. He was flown from Quetta, Pakistan aboard NATO aircraft and was paid substantial sums of money to participate in talks with NATO and the Karzai government. According to press reports, the "Taliban negotiator", now identified as a shopkeeper from Quetta, met with Afghan and NATO officials three times before his masquerade was discovered.
There are suspicions within the US-NATO camp that the imposter was planted by the Pakistani military intelligence service, the ISI, as part of a bid to sabotage any attempt by Washington to bypass Pakistan in seeking a settlement with the Taliban.
Such suspicions may explain how the imposter was able to get away with his deception in the first place. The person he pretended to be was a minister of civil aviation in the previous Taliban government and known to a number of people in the Afghan government and its 70-member peace council, which was set up to pursue reconciliation with the Taliban. But they apparently were not consulted.
"It is ridiculous that people are willing to meet anyone who introduces themselves as a high authority within the Taliban. This is why we have this council to vet people," a member of the Afghan peace council told the Financial Times.
In an attempt to mask the humiliating blunder, Karzai issued a statement denying the talks have ever taken place, calling reports to the contrary "propaganda" from the "foreign press."
For his part, the US senior commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, claimed that the fact that the individual with whom his subordinates were negotiating and paying off was an imposter was "not a surprise." He insisted that there had been skepticism "all along, and it may well be that that skepticism was well-founded," declared the general.
In reality, however, US officials had touted the talks as a key part of their strategy for diffusing the insurgency and reducing the size of the US-led occupation. The Taliban leadership has repeatedly insisted that it would negotiate only under conditions of a withdrawal of foreign troops from the country.
Meanwhile, the announcement of the results of the September 18 parliamentary election by the Afghan electoral commission Wednesday served to deepen the country's crisis.
The results underscored the fraudulent character of the entire electoral process, from the presidential vote last year to September's parliamentary ballot. They included the exclusion of 24 candidates from parliament on the grounds of fraud and a finding that 1.3 million ballots out of the 5.6 million cast had been tossed out as invalid.
Hundreds of people protested in the streets of Kabul on Wednesday denouncing the results as fraudulent.
One substantive result of the election is a sharp loss in representation for Afghanistan's Pashtun population, which had previously accounted for the majority in the country's parliament. It was suspected that violence in the Pashtun areas and hostility to the central government may have driven down the vote.
The BBC cited preliminary reports indicating that in Ghazni, for example, all 11 parliamentary seats went to members of the Hazara minority, the third largest ethnic group in the southern province, where Pashtuns are the majority. The election commission said on Wednesday that the results in the province had still not been determined.
The Pentagon's progress report comes in the wake of last weekend's NATO summit in Lisbon, which followed Washington's lead in burying the commitment made by Obama when he launched the Afghanistan "surge" last December to begin withdrawing US troops in July 2011. Instead, it adopted a policy ostensibly aimed at transferring the "lead" in combat operations to Afghan puppet forces by the end of 2014.
Asked by a reporter about the US "exit strategy" for Afghanistan, a senior official briefing the media on the Pentagon report bristled. "We don't have an exit strategy," he said. "We have a transition strategy. The US commitment to Afghanistan is continuing, enduring, and long-lasting."
In other words, the ruling establishment and its military have no intention of leaving Afghanistan. They are determined to continue their bloody efforts to annihilate the Afghan resistance in order to secure Washington's control of the country and further US designs on establishing hegemony in the oil-rich and strategically vital region of Central Asia.
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