by Ahmed Rashid
At the heart of this regional stand-off is the battle for the vast oil and gas riches of landlocked Central Asia – the last untapped reserves of energy in the world today. Equally important has been the intense competition between the regional states and Western oil companies as to who would build the lucrative pipelines which are needed to transport the energy to markets in Europe and Asia. This rivalry has in effect become a new Great Game – a throwback to the nineteenth century Great Game between Russia and Britain over control and domination in Central Asia and Afghanistan.
Since late 1995, Washington had strongly backed the US company Unocal to build a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan across Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. But there was another, unexpected player in this new Great Game. The day after the execution I arrived at the mansion of Mullah Mohammed Hassan, the Governor of Kandahar, to interview him. As I walked up the drive past the heavily armed Taliban guards, I froze. Coming out of the Governor's office was a handsome, silver-haired business executive dressed in an impeccable blue blazer with gold buttons, a yellow silk tie and Italian loafers. With him were two other businessmen, both as impeccably dressed and carrying bulging briefcases. They looked as though they had just concluded a deal on Wall Street, rather than holding negotiations with a band of Islamic guerrillas in the dusty lanes of Kandahar.
The executive was Carlos Bulgheroni, Chairman of Bridas Corporation, an Argentinean oil company which since 1994 had been secretly negotiating with the Taliban and the Northern Alliance to build the same gas pipeline across Afghanistan. Bridas were in bitter competition with Unocal and in a court case filed in California, they had even accused Unocal of stealing the idea from them.
For a year I had been trying to discover what interests an Argentinean company, unknown in this part of the world, had in investing in such a high-risk place as Afghanistan. But both Bridas and Unocal had kept a discreet silence. The last thing Bulgheroni wanted was to be seen by a journalist coming out of a Taliban leader's office. He excused himself and said his company plane was waiting to fly him to the Northern Alliance's capital in Mazar-e-Sharif.
As the battle for pipelines from Central Asia intensified, the Islamic world and the West were also concerned whether the Taliban represented the new future of Islamic fundamentalism – aggressive, expansionist and uncompromising in its purist demands to turn Afghan society back to an imagined model of seventh-century Arabia at the time of the Prophet Mohammed. The West also feared the repercussions from the ever-expanding drugs trade from Afghanistan and the Taliban's harbouring of international terrorists such as the Saudi extremist Osama Bin Laden, whose group Al'Qaida carried out the devastating bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998.
Moreover, experts wondered whether the Taliban's back-to-basics Islamic ideals fulfilled the dire predictions of some American intellectuals that in the post-Cold War era, a new militant Islamic world would oppose the West and create another version of the Cold War in a new clash of civilisations.1
For Afghanistan to be at the centre of such conflict is nothing new. Today's Taliban are only the latest in a long line of conquerors, warlords, preachers, saints and philosophers who have swept through the Afghan corridor destroying older civilizations and religions and introducing new ones. The kings of the ancient world believed the Afghanistan region was the very centre of the world and this view has persisted to modern times. The famous Indian poet Mohammed Iqbal described Afghanistan as ‘the heart of Asia’, while Lord Curzon, the early twentieth-century British Viceroy of India called Afghanistan ‘the cockpit of Asia’.2
For few countries in the world is it more true that geography determines history, politics and the nature of a people. Afghanistan's geo-strategic location on the crossroads between Iran, the Arabian Sea and India and between Central Asia and South Asia has given its territory and mountain passes a significance since the earliest Aryan invasions 6,000 years ago. Afghanistan's rough, rugged, deserted and arid terrain has produced some of the best fighters the world has ever seen, while its stunning scenery of gaunt mountains and lush green valleys with fruit-laden trees have proved to be an inspiration to poets.
Many years ago a wise old Afghan Mujahed once told me the mythical story of how God made Afghanistan. ‘When Allah had made the rest of the world, He saw that there was a lot of rubbish left over, bits and pieces and things that did not fit anywhere else. He collected them all together and threw them down on to the earth. That was Afghanistan,’ the old man said.
Modern Afghanistan encompasses 245,000 square miles. The country is split by a north-south divide along the massive Hindu Kush mountain range. Although there was much intermingling of races in the twentieth century, a rough division shows that to the south of the Hindu Kush live the majority of Pashtuns and some Persian-speaking ethnic groups, to the north live the Persian and Turkic ethnic groups. The Hindu Kush itself is populated by the Persian-speaking Hazaras and Tajiks. In the far northeast corner, the Pamir mountains, which Marco Polo called ‘the roof of the world’, abut Tajikistan, China and Pakistan.3 The inaccessibility of the Pamirs means that there is little communication between the myriad of diverse and exotic ethnic groups who live in its high, snow-bound valleys.
In the southern foothills of the Hindu Kush lies Kabul; the adjoining valleys are the most agriculturally productive region in the country. Western and southern Afghanistan marks the eastern end of the Iranian plateau – flat, bare and arid with few towns and a sparse population. Much of this region is just called ‘registan’ or desert by local Afghans. The exception is the oasis town of Herat, which has been a centre of civilization for more than 3,000 years.
North of the Hindu Kush the bare Central Asian steppe begins its long sweep, which stretches thousands of miles north into Siberia. With its extremes of climate and terrain the north's Turkic peoples are some of the toughest in the world and make the fiercest of fighters. In eastern Afghanistan lie smaller mountain ranges including the Suleman range which straddle the border with Pakistan and are populated on both sides by the Pashtun tribes. Passes through these mountains such as the famous Khyber Pass have for centuries given conquerors access to the fertile Indian plains.
Only 10-12 per cent of Afghanistan's terrain is cultivable and most farms, some hanging from mountain slopes, demand extraordinary amounts of labour to keep them productive. Until the 1970s nomadism -the grazing of goats and the fat-tailed Afghan sheep – was a major source of livelihood and the Kochi nomads travelled thousands of miles every year in Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan in search of good pasture. Although the war against the Soviets destroyed Kochi culture and livelihood in the 1980s, animal herding is still vital in sustaining impoverished farmers. Yesterday's Afghan nomads are today's traders and truck-drivers, who are a crucial support base and revenue generator for the Taliban by running trucks along the smuggling routes across Afghanistan.
Roads and routes have been at the centre of Afghanistan since the dawn of history. The landlocked territory was the crossroads of Asia and the meeting place and battleground for two great waves of civilization, the more urbane Persian empires to the west and the Turkic nomadic empires to the north in Central Asia. As a result Afghanistan is immensely rich in archaeological remains.
For these two ancient civilizations, which ebbed in greatness and conquest according to the momentum of history, control over Afghanistan was vital for their survival. At other times Afghanistan served as a buffer keeping these two empires apart, while at other times it served as a corridor through which their armies marched north to south or west to east when they desired to invade India. This was a land where the first ancient religions of Zoroastrianism, Manichaeanism and Buddhism flourished. Balkh, the ruins of which are still visible a few miles from Mazar-e-Sharif, is according to UNESCO one of the oldest cities in the world and it was a thriving centre of Buddhist, Persian and Turkic arts and architecture.
It was through Afghanistan that pilgrims and traders working the ancient
Silk Route carried Buddhism to China and Japan. Conquerors swept through the region like shooting stars. In 329 BC the Macedonian Greeks under Alexander the Great conquered Afghanistan and Central Asia and went on to invade India. The Greeks left behind a new, vibrant Buddhist-Greek kingdom and civilization in the Hindu Kush mountains – the only known historical fusion between European and Asian cultures.
By 654 AD Arab armies had swept through Afghanistan to arrive at the Oxus river on the border with Central Asia. They brought with them their new religion of Islam, which preached equality and justice and quickly penetrated the entire region. Under the Persian Saminid dynasty which lasted from 874 to 999 AD, Afghanistan was part of a new Persian renaissance in arts and letters. The Ghaznavid dynasty ruled from 977 to 1186 and captured north west India Punjab and parts of eastern Iran.
In 1219 Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes swept through Afghanistan destroying cities such as Balkh and Herat and piling up mounds of dead bodies. Yet the Mongols contributed too, by leaving behind the modern day Hazaras – who were the result of inter-marriage between the Mongols and local tribes.
In the next century Taimur, or Tamerlane as he is called in the West, a descendent of Genghis Khan, created a vast new empire across Russia and Persia which he ruled from his capital in Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan. Taimur captured Herat in 1381 and his son Shah Rukh moved the capital of the Timurid empire to Herat in 1405. The Timurids, a Turkic people brought the Turkic nomadic culture of Central Asia within the orbit of Persian civilization, establishing in Herat one of the most cultured and refined cities in the world. This fusion of Central Asian and Persian culture was a major legacy for the future of Afghanistan. A century later the emperor Babur, a descendent of Taimur, visited Herat and wrote, ‘the whole habitable world had not such a town as Herat’.4
For the next 300 years the eastern Afghan tribes periodically invaded India, conquering Delhi and creating vast Indo-Afghan empires. The Afghan Lodhi dynasty ruled Delhi from 1451 to 1526. In 1500 Taimur's descendent Babur was driven out of his home in the Ferghana valley in Uzbekistan. He went on to conquer first Kabul in 1504 and then Delhi. He established the Mogul dynasty which was to rule India until the arrival of the British. At the same time Persian power declined in the west and Herat was conquered by the Uzbek Shaybani Khans. By the sixteenth century western Afghanistan again reverted to Persian rule under the Safavid dynasty.
This series of invasions resulted in a complex ethnic, cultural and religious mix that was to make Afghan nation-building extremely difficult. Western Afghanistan was dominated by speakers of Persian or Dari as the Afghan Persian dialect is known. Dari was also spoken by the Hazaras in central Afghanistan, who were converted to Shiism by the Persians, thereby becoming the largest Shia group in an otherwise Sunni territory. In the west the Tajiks, the repositors of Persia's ancient culture also spoke Dari. In northern Afghanistan the Uzbeks, Turcomans, Kyrgyz and others spoke the Turkic languages of Central Asia. And in the south and east the Pashtun tribes spoke their own tongue Pashto, a mixture of Indo-Persian languages.
It was the southern Pashtuns who were to form the modern state of Afghanistan at the historical conjuncture when the Persian Safavid dynasty in the west, the Moguls in India and the Uzbek Janid dynasty were all in a period of decline in the eighteenth century. The Pashtun tribes were divided into two major sections, the Ghilzai and Abdali who later called themselves Durrani, which frequently competed against each other.
The Pashtuns trace their genealogy to Qais, a companion of the Prophet Mohammed. As such they consider themselves a Semitic race although anthropologists consider them to be Indo-Europeans, who have assimilated numerous ethnic groups over the course of history. The Durranis claim descent from Qais's eldest son Sarbanar while the Ghilzais claim descent from his second son. Qais's third son is said to be the ancestor of other diverse Pashtun tribes such as the Kakars in Kandahar and the Safis around Peshawar. In the sixth century Chinese and Indian sources speak of the Afghans/Pashtuns living east of Ghazni. These tribes began a westward migration to Kandahar, Kabul and Herat from the fifteenth century. By the next century the Ghilzais and Durranis were already fighting each other over land disputes around Kandahar. Today the Ghilzai homeland lies south of the Kabul river between the Safed Koh and Suleman range on the east to Hazarajat in the west and down to Kandahar in the south.5
In 1709, Mir Wais, the chief of the Hotaki tribe of Ghilzai Pashtuns in Kandahar rebelled against the Safavid Shah. This was partly a result of the Shah's attempts to convert the fervently Sunni Pashtuns into Shias – a historical animosity that was to re-emerge with the Taliban's hostility towards Iran and Afghan Shias three centuries later.
A few years later Mir Wais's son defeated the Safavids and conquered Iran. But the Afghans were driven out of Iran in 1729. As Ghilzai power ebbed, their traditional rivals in Kandahar, the Abdalis, formed a confederation and in 1747 after a nine-day Loya Jirga or meeting of tribal chiefs, they chose Ahmad Shah Abdali as their king. The tribal chiefs wrapped a turban around his head and placed blades of grass in it, signifying loyalty. The Loya Jirga was to become the traditional legal instrument which legitimized new rulers thus avoiding a hereditary monarchy. The rulers themselves could claim that they were elected by the tribes represented in the Jirga. Ahmad Shah changed the name of the Abdali confederation to Durrani, united all the Pashtun tribes and began a series of major conquests, quickly taking control over much of modern day Pakistan.
By 1761 Ahmad Shah Durrani had defeated the Hindu Mahrattas and captured the Delhi throne and Kashmir, thereby creating the first Afghan empire. Considered the father of the Afghan nation, Ahmad Shah Durrani was buried in an ornate mausoleum in his capital Kandahar, where Afghans still come to pray. Many Afghans have conferred a kind of sainthood on him. His son Taimur Shah moved the empire's new capital from Kandahar to Kabul in 1772, making it easier to control the newly conquered territories north of the Hindu Kush mountains and east of the river Indus. By 1780 the Durranis had concluded a treaty with the Amir of Bukhara, the principal Central Asian ruler, which designated the Oxus or Amu Darya river as the border between Central Asia and the new Pashtun state of Afghanistan. It was the first border delineation that marked the northern boundary of the new Afghanistan.
In the next century the Durranis were to lose their territories east of the Indus river while feuds between various Durrani clans dissipated their power. However, one or another Durrani clan was to rule Afghanistan for over 200 years until 1973, when King Zahir Shah was deposed by his cousin Mohammed Daud Khan and Afghanistan was declared a Republic. Meanwhile the bitter rivalry between the Ghilzai and the Durrani Pashtuns was to continue and intensify in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent emergence of the Taliban.
The weakened and bickering Durrani kings had to hold off two new empires, the British in the east and the Russians to the north. In the nineteenth century, fearful of an ever expanding Russian empire in Central Asia which might covet Afghanistan for a thrust against Britain's Indian empire, the British made three attempts to conquer and hold Afghanistan until they realised that the intractable Afghans could be bought much more easily than fought. The British offered cash subsidies, manipulated the tribal chiefs and managed to turn Afghanistan into a client state. What followed was ‘the Great Game’ between Russia and Britain, a clandestine war of wits and bribery and occasional military pressure as both powers kept each other at a respectful distance by maintaining Afghanistan as a buffer state between them.
The feuds amongst the ruling Durranis which were fuelled by British intelligence officers ensured that Afghan kings remained weak and dependent on British largesse to make up for their inability to raise revenues. As a consequence the non-Pashtun groups in the north exercised increasing autonomy from central control in Kabul. The Pashtuns were also weakened by the British conquest of north-west India, which for the first time divided the Pashtun tribes between British India and Afghanistan. This p
artition of the Pashtuns was formalised by the Durand Line, a formal border drawn up by Britain in 1893.
After the second Anglo-Afghan war, the British supported Amir Abdul Rehman's claim to the throne. The ‘Iron Amir’ (1880-1901), as he was called, received British support to centralize and strengthen the Afghan state. The Amir used British subsidies and arms supplies to create an effective administration and a standing army. He subdued rebellious Pashtun tribes and then moved north to ruthlessly end the autonomy of the Hazaras and Uzbeks. Using methods that were to be closely followed a century later by the Taliban, he carried out a nineteenth-century version of ethnic cleansing, massacring non-Pashtun opponents and transporting Pashtuns to settle farms in the north thereby creating a loyal Pashtun population amongst the other ethnic minorities.
Abdul Rehman crushed over 40 revolts by the non-Pashtuns during his reign and created Afghanistan's first brutal secret police force, a precursor to the communist Khad in the 1980s. Although these moves integrated Afghans of all ethnic groups and solidified the Afghan state as never before, much of the subsequent ethnic tensions in northern Afghanistan and the inter-ethnic massacres after 1997 can be traced back to the Iron Amir's policies. His other legacies, which were to indirectly influence the Taliban, included the isolation of Afghanistan from Western or modernizing influences including education, his emphasis on Islam by enhancing the powers of the Pashtun mullahs and introducing the concept of a divine right to rule rather than the traditional concept of election by the Loya Jirga.
The successors of the Iron Amir in the early part of the twentieth century were by and large modernizers, who established full formal independence from Britain in 1919, established the country's first constitution and set about creating a small urban educated elite. Nevertheless the fact that two Afghan kings were assassinated and that there were periodic tribal revolts demonstrated the difficulties rulers faced in turning a multiethnic tribal society into a modern state.