The bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul on Monday once again underlines the fact that peace and stability, let alone democratic order, in Afghanistan have been a sham since the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001. It?s also a story of arguably the most important battle in the ?war on terror? being obscured by US President George W Bush?s ?war of choice? in Iraq. The result is that since 2003, the Taliban, with the Al-Qaeda in its shadow, got away with a mild hand-slap instead of a good spanking. Now they are back, marshalling recruits daily and fanning a violent counterinsurgency. Implicit in the Indian embassy attack are two messages ? as much as the Western military presence, the Taliban resent Indian influence in Afghanistan, too; and, they want to halt all reconstruction efforts that might shore up the Hamid Karzai government?s precarious standing.

The latest assessment from the Pentagon describes a dual terror threat in Afghanistan: the Taliban in the south of the country, and ?a more complex, adaptive insurgency? in the east, made up of groups ranging from the Al-Qaeda and Afghan warlords to Pakistani militants. Alarmingly, it says security has deteriorated in large part because of the lawless, tribal border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The most immediate danger for Afghanistan, however, comes from the sanctuary that the Al-Qaeda enjoys in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. That the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan was able to pose a credible threat even to Peshawar implies that Pakistan has been both squeamish and feeble to confront it. After they got a bloody nose in Waziristan, the preferred way of the military and the ISI, which have been brokering ceasefires and troop pullouts, was to negotiate their way out of the jehadi trouble. Yet, fragile ceasefires that lasted no more than a few months helped the truculent extremists tighten their grip on FATA and wherever the Pakistani forces have withdrawn. Because some of them have been crossing into Afghanistan with fighters of the Afghan Taliban, and because some are helping shelter Al-Qaeda operatives, their increasing power threatens stability not only in Pakistan but also in Afghanistan.

As reports appearing in the American media portray a picture of the Bush administration and intelligence agencies riven by discord and turf battles over an anti-Taliban policy, President Bush is vowing to send more American troops to Afghanistan. Though the US and Nato have the largest troop presence in Afghanistan since the conflict began, the belief has strengthened in Washington that a ?surge? of troops, like that applied to Iraq last year, might be needed to turn the situation around.

Will a ?surge? work in Afghanistan? Swelling of troops has never helped undercut anti-occupation insurgencies in Vietnam, Afghanistan (under the Red Army) or Somalia.

It worked with limited success in Iraq owing to two reasons. One, Al-Qaeda?s appeal is naturally constricted because it represents a narrow strand of the Sunni sect. It found it hard to find an ideological resonance in the largely secular Iraqi society.

Second, it was the strategic blunder of expanding the scope of the anti-American insurgency to target Shias that broke the back of the so-called ?Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia?. Suicide bombings on Shia pilgrims and in holy towns of Najaf, Karbala and Samara was so repelling that it invited the opprobrium of even Ayman

Al-Zawahiri.

Afghanistan defies the ?surge? narrative because the Taliban are the flagbearers of Wahhabism. And also, jehadi sentiments in FATA and Afghanistan have magnified ever since Gen Zia-ul Haq began a vicious Islamisation programme in Pakistan after 1977 and the area became the staging ground of the mujahideen forces fighting the Soviet occupation. Unlike in Iraq where Al-Qaeda is increasingly being seen as an outside imposition, it?s very much a local construct in FATA and the warlord-littered landscape of Afghanistan.

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration made the claim that the Al-Qaeda had established a strong footing in that country. The claim turned out to be as unsupportable as the charade about the non-existent WMDs. And, by taking the eye off the ball in Afghanistan, whom did the US hurt? Not the Taliban nor the Al-Qaeda.

rajiv.jayaram@expressindia.com