Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, Second Edition
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The Taliban were incensed with Iran's support for the alliance. In June 1997, the Taliban closed down the Iranian Embassy in Kabul, accusing Iran of destroying peace and stability in Afghanistan’.18 A Taliban statement in September 1997 after their failure to capture Mazar was explicit. ‘Iranian planes in gross violation of all internationally accepted norms intrude our country's air space to airlift supplies to airports controlled by the opposition. The grave consequencs of such interference will rest with Iran which is the enemy of Islam. Afghanistan is capable of harbouring opponents of the Iranian government inside Afghan territory and thus of creating problems for Iran,’ the statement said.19
However, it was the killing of the Iranian diplomats in Mazar in 1998 that nearly forced Iran into war with the Taliban. There was enormous popular support for an Iranian invasion of western Afghanistan, which was further manipulated by hardliners in Tehran wanting to destabilize President Khatami. Even the reticent Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi was forced to adopt extremely tough language. ‘The Taliban are Pushtuns and cannot sideline all the other ethnic groups from the political scene without sparking continuing resistance. In such circumstances there will be no peace in the country. I warn the Taliban and those who support them that we will not tolerate instability and conspiracy along our borders. We had an agreement with Pakistan that the Afghan problem would not be resolved through war. Now this has happened and we cannot accept it,’ Kharrazi said on 14 August 1998.20
Iran felt betrayed by Pakistan on several counts. In 1996, just when President Burhanuddin Rabbani, under Iranian advice, was trying to broaden the base of his government and bring in Pashtuns and other groups, the Taliban captured Kabul. Iran was convinced that Pakistan had sabotaged Rabbani's effort. In June 1997, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visited Tehran. Together with President Khatami the two leaders called for a cease-fire in Afghanistan and declared that there could be no military solution. But Iran considered that Pakistan had no intention of sticking to the agreement. ‘Pakistan has left no room for our trust and has destabilized its position with the Iranian people. We cannot accept seeing Pakistan cause problems for our national security,’ wrote the Jomhuri luami.21
Then, in the summer of 1998, Pakistan persuaded Iran to participate in a joint diplomatic peace mission. Mid-level Iranian and Pakistani diplomats travelled together for the first time to Mazar and Kandahar on 4 July 1998 to talk to the opposing factions. Just a few weeks later, the Taliban attacked Mazar and slaughtered the Iranian diplomats, scuttling the initiative. The Iranians were convinced that Pakistan had duped them by pretending to launch a peace initiative, just as the ISI was preparing the Taliban for the attack on Mazar. Moreover, Iran claimed that Pakistan had promised the safety of its diplomats in Mazar. When they were killed, Iran was furious and blamed the Taliban and Pakistan. Iranian officials said that Mullah Dost Mohammed, who allegedly led the Taliban seizure of the Iranian Consulate, had first gathered the diplomats in the basement of the building and spoken by wireless to Kandahar before shooting them dead.22
The Taliban replied, correctly as it appeared, that the Iranians were not diplomats but intelligence agents involved in ferrying weapons to the anti-Taliban alliance. Nevertheless, in the diplomatic skirmishing that followed, trust between Iran and Pakistan evaporated.23 The Iranians were also furious that the Taliban actions had endangered its growing rapprochement with the USA. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had said in June 1998, the critical role that Iran plays in the region, ‘makes the question of USA–Iran relations a topic of great interest and importance to this Secretary of State.’24
The Iranians had been encouraged that the USA was taking them seriously for the first time. USA–Iran co-operation on Afghanistan, ‘certainly can be an exemplary case and shows that the US has a better understanding of the reality in this region and the role that Iran can play for the promotion of peace and security,’ Kamal Kharrazi told me. ‘We have been trying for a long time to tell them [the USA] that Iran is a key player in the region.’25 Iran and the USA had also drawn closer because of Washington's changed perceptions about the Taliban. Both countries now shared the same views and were critical of the Taliban's drug and gender policies, their harbouring of terrorists and the threat that the Taliban's brand of Islamic fundamentalism posed to the region. Ironically for the USA, the new threat was no longer Shia fundamentalism, but the Sunni fundamentalism of the Taliban.
The Taliban were now even proving an embarrassment to Saudi Arabia, which helped bring Tehran closer to Riyadh. The Taliban's harbouring of Bin Laden had exposed their extremism and posed a threat to Saudi stability. Significantly, the rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia did not falter, even when Iran was threatening to invade Afghanistan in 1998. In May 1999, President Khatami visited Saudi Arabia, the first Iranian leader to do so in nearly three decades.
The Taliban pose a security threat to the Saudis, especially through their support for Saudi dissidents. In the past the Saudis had deferred to the Taliban's fundamentalism, without giving due thought to what kind of state, political compromises and power-sharing should evolve in Afghanistan, but they could no longer afford to take such a casual attitude. With so much of Saudi foreign policy run on the basis of personal relationships and patronage rather than state institutions, it has become difficult to see how a policy towards Afghanistan, geared more to Saudi national self-interest and stability in the region, rather than Wahabbism, can evolve.
If President Khatami were to push forward his reform agenda at home, the Iranian regime would increasingly desire and need a peace settlement in Afghanistan – to end the drain on its resources from funding the anti-Taliban alliance, stop the drugs, weapons and sectarian spillover from Afghanistan and move towards a further rapprochement with the USA. Ironically, the Taliban's extremism had also helped bring Iran and Saudi Arabia closer together and weakened Pakistan's relationship with both countries. The big loser from Iran's return to the diplomatic mainstream was Pakistan. However, to end its isolation from the West, Iran needed to demonstrate that it was a responsible and stabilizing member of the international community. Its first and biggest test could be in helping to bring peace to Afghanistan.
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CONCLUSION:
THE FUTURE
OF AFGHANISTAN
Afghanistan has become one of ‘the world's orphaned conflicts – the ones that the West, selective and promiscuous in its attention happens to ignore in favour of Yugoslavia’, said former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1995.1 The world has turned away from Afghanistan, allowing civil war, ethnic fragmentation and polarization to become state failure. The country has ceased to exist as a viable state and when a state fails civil society is destroyed. Generations of children grow up rootless, without identity or reason to live except to fight. Adults are traumatized and brutalized, knowing only war and the power of the warlords. ‘We are dealing here with a failed state which looks like an infected wound. You don't even know where to start cleaning it,’ said UN mediator Lakhdar Brahimi.2
The entire Afghan population has been displaced, not once but many times over. The physical destruction of Kabul has turned it into the Dresden of the late twentieth century. The crossroads of Asia on the ancient Silk Route is now nothing but miles of rubble. There is no semblance of an infrastructure that can sustain society – even at the lowest common denominator of poverty. In 1998 the ICRC reported that the number of Afghan families headed by a widow had reached 98,000, the number of families headed by a disabled person was 63,000 and 45,000 people were treated for war wounds that year alone. There was not even an estimate of those killed. The only productive factories in the country are those where artificial limbs, crutches and wheelchairs are produced by the aid agencies.3
Afghanistan's divisions are multiple – ethnic, sectarian, rural and urban, educated and uneducated, those with guns and those who have been disarmed. The economy is a black hole that is sucking in its neighbours with illicit tr
ade and the smuggling of drugs and weapons, undermining them in the process. ‘It will take at least ten to 15 years before there will be a functioning central authority capable of doing the minimum of the administration needed for the development of the country. And that is, in my view, a rather optimistic statement,’ said Swedish aid-worker Anders Fange.4
Complex relationships of power and authority built up over centuries have broken down completely. No single group or leader has the legitimacy to reunite the country. Rather than a national identity or kinship-tribal-based identities, territorial regional identities have become paramount. Afghans no longer call themselves just Afghans or even Pashtuns and Tajiks, but Kandaharis, Panjshiris, Heratis, Kabulis or Jowzjanis. Fragmentation is both vertical and horizontal and cuts across ethnicity to encompass a single valley or town. The Pashtun tribal structure has been destroyed by the loss of common tribal property and grazing grounds, and by war and flight. The non-Pashtun identify their survival with individual warrior leaders and the valley of their birth.
The tribal hierarchy which once mediated conflicts has been killed or is in exile. The old, educated, ruling elite fled after the Soviet invasion and no new ruling elite has emerged in its place which can negotiate a peace settlement. There is no political class to compromise and make deals. There are lots of leaders representing segments of the population, but no outright leader. In such a scenario, with no end to the war in sight, the question of whether Afghanistan will fragment and send waves of ethnic fragmentation and instability spinning through the region, becomes paramount.
Much of the blame for the continuation of the war lies in the hands of outsiders who continue to back their proxies in an ever-increasing spiral of intervention and violence. The FSU began the process with its brutal invasion of Afghanistan, but suffered hugely. ‘We brought Afghanistan with us – in our souls, in our hearts, in our memory, in our customs, in everything and at every level,’ said Alexander Lebed, who served as a major in the Soviet army in Afghanistan and is now a presidential candidate. ‘This feeble political adventure, this attempt to export a still unproved revolution, marked the beginning of the end,’ he added.5
The Afghan Mujaheddin contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union, the Soviet empire and even communism itself. While the Afghans take all credit for this, the West has gone the other way, barely acknowledging the Afghan contribution to the end of the Cold War. The withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan heralded the end of the Gorba-chov experiment in perestroika and glasnost – the idea that the Soviet system could be changed from within. There is a lesson to be learnt here for today's meddlers those who intervene in Afghanistan can face disintegration themselves not because of the power of the Afghans, but because of the forces that are unleashed in their own fragile societies.
By walking away from Afghanistan as early as it did, the USA faced within a few years dead diplomats, destroyed embassies, bombs in New York and cheap heroin on its streets, as Afghanistan became a sanctuary for international terrorism and the drugs mafia. Afghans today remain deeply bitter about their abandonment by the USA, for whom they fought the Cold War. In the 1980s the USA was prepared ‘to fight till the last Afghan’ to get even with the Soviet Union, but when the Soviets left, Washington was not prepared to help bring peace or feed a hungry people. Regional powers took advantage of the political vacuum the US retreat created, saw an opportunity to wield influence and jumped into the fray.
Today the USA, by picking up single issues and creating entire policies around them, whether it be oil pipelines, the treatment of women or terrorism, is only demonstrating that it has learnt little. The abortive Unocal project should have taught many lessons to US policy-makers, but there appear to be no signs of it as US diplomats scurry across Central Asia trying to persuade oil companies and governments to commit to building a main export pipeline from Baku to Ceyhan. But even that is likely to be indefinitely delayed. The start-up for construction scheduled for the year 2000 has been progressively delayed to 2003 and most recently to 2005.6
The lessons from the Unocal project are several. No major pipeline from Central Asia can be built unless there is far greater US and international commitment to conflict resolution in the region in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya, Georgia and with the Kurds. The region is a powder keg of unresolved conflicts. Nor can secure pipelines be built without some degree of strategic consensus in the region. Iran and Russia cannot be isolated from the region's development for ever. They will resist and sabotage projects as long as they are not a part of them. Nor can pipelines be built when ethnic conflicts are tearing states apart. Ethnicity is the clarion call of the modern era. Trying to resolve ethnic problems and keep states together needs persistent and consistent diplomacy rather than virtual bribes to keep various warlords quiet.
Oil companies cannot build pipelines which are vulnerable to civil wars, fast-moving political changes and events, instability and an environment beset by Islamic fundamentalism, drugs and guns. The old Great Game was about perceived threats in which force was never directly used. Russia and Great Britain marked out borders and signed treaties, creating Afghanistan as a buffer between them. The new Great Game must be one where the aim is to stabilize and settle the region, not increase tensions and antagonism. The USA is the only world power which has the ability to influence all the neighbouring states to stop interfering in Afghanistan. It has to do so with far more commitment than it has demonstrated so far.
Pakistan, weakened by the demise of its strategic partnership with the USA after the end of the Cold War and in the throes of a deep economic crisis, was nevertheless determined to extend its zone of influence by trying to nominate the next government in Kabul. Faced with a belligerent Indian neighbour seven times its size, Pakistan's obsession with security has naturally shaped its domestic politics and foreign policy concerns since it was created in 1947. But the military-bureaucratic-intelligence elite that has guided Pakistan's destiny since the 1950s has never allowed civil society to function. Only this elite has had the right to determine the nature of the threat to Pakistan's national security and its solutions-not elected governments, parliament, civic organizations or even common sense.
Since 1988, four elected governments have been dismissed, ten governments have come and gone and domestic stability is still as distant a dream as ever.7 With such deep crises of identity, political legitimacy, economic mismanagement and social polarization, the elite has nevertheless indulged in the worst example of imperial overstretch by any third world country in the latter half of this century. Pakistan is now fighting proxy wars on two fronts, in Kashmir and Afghanistan and even though the repercussions from these wars – Islamic fundamentalism, drugs, weapons and social breakdown – are now aggressively spilling into the country, there is no reappraisal or policy review. Pakistan is now ripe for a Taliban-style Islamic revolution, which would almost certainly jeopardize stability in the Middle East, South and Central Asia.
What Pakistan's policy-makers have failed to realize is that any stable government in Kabul will have to depend on Pakistan for reconstruction, foodstuffs, fuel and access to the outside world. Pakistan's own economy would benefit as it would provide workers, technicians and materials for Afghanistan's reconstruction. The Afghan refugees would return, easing the financial burden of sustaining them and Pakistan could begin to reassert some control over its dilapidated state institutions and borders.
While Pakistan has had a forward policy in Afghanistan, Iran's interference has essentially been defensive, maintaining a limited influence and resisting a total Taliban takeover. But Iran has contributed heavily to the fragmentation of Afghanistan by playing the Shia card, the Persian language card and keeping the very ethnic groups it supports divided amongst themselves. The disparateness of the Hazaras and the Uzbeks, the two ethnic groups Iran has provided the most aid to, is sufficient to show how Iran's policy of divide and rule has devastated the anti-Taliban alliance. Iran's policies hav
e reflected the intense power struggle within the Iranian elite which has only intensified in the last two years.
Moreover, the complete breakdown of trust and understanding between Iran and Pakistan has set back the peace process and proved ruinous for the Afghans. There is no common ground between the two states on a solution to the Afghan civil war and even more ominously both states are funding proxy wars between Shias and Sunnis in each other's countries as well as in Afghanistan, increasing the likelihood of a major sectarian explosion in the region. With the advent of the Taliban, sectarianism and ethnic/sectarian cleansing has reared its ugly head for the first time in Afghanistan's history.
The Central Asian states are the new players on the block, but they have quickly taken to protecting what they see as threats to their national interests. Pashtun domination of Afghanistan does not suit them and they abhor the kind of Islamic sentiments the Taliban espouse. Until their ethnic cousins in Afghanistan are part of some power-sharing formula in Kabul, the Central Asian states will not cease to aid them to resist the Taliban. This places in jeopardy Pakistan's plans for accessing pipeline and communication routes across Afghanistan from Central Asia. If the Taliban were to conquer the entire country, the Central Asian states would have to accept the Taliban reality, but they would be unlikely to trust their energy exports to go through Taliban controlled Afghanistan and Pakistan.