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Dangerous line in the sand
By Ramtanu Maitra
The recent
visit to the United States by the President of
Afghanistan's transitional government, Hamid Karzai,
made clear how fragile the stability in Afghanistan is
today. Karzai's recent assurances to American lawmakers
that Afghanistan's polity is on the right track, and
that all he needs is more money to speed up the
reconstruction work, fell on deaf ears.
Too much
news has come out in recent months indicating that
despite the best intentions of Karzai, things are as
murky and unstable today in Afghanistan as they were in
January 2002, when the Taliban fled Kabul in the face of
the invading American and Northern Alliance troops.
Just days before Karzai's arrival in Washington,
his Minister of Mines and Industries, Juma Muhammad
Muhammadi, a former World Bank official and an American
citizen, died in a plane crash over troubled Pakistan -
the third senior member of Karzai's cabinet to meet
sudden and unnatural death. The first two were outright
assassinations. Muhammadi died soon after his plane took
off from the Pakistani port city of Karachi on a clear
and a sunny day. In the absence of a detailed
investigative report, the assumption is that he, like
the other two ministers, was also assassinated.
No security
Still, Karzai and his
friends in Washington put on a brave front and tried to
convince American lawmakers that their prime concern in
Afghanistan should be the slow pace of reconstruction
due to inadequate international financial help. Karzai
and others believe it is urgent to put more money into
reconstruction, but it is arguable whether it is at all
possible to carry out any meaningful reconstruction in a
security environment that is not just dicey, but
outright dangerous.
A number of factors have
made Afghanistan a dangerous place, but perhaps the most
fundamental is that Afghanistan is a nation without any
institutional structure. The only institution in Afghan
history that united the people and was respected by the
various ethnic and tribal groupings was the nobility of
southern Afghanistan, who ruled the country and kept it
together.
But the Afghan communists in the 1970s
and then, in the 1980s, the US-backed mujahideen and the
Northern Alliance targeted the nobility, assailing it
and undermining its influence and driving much of it
into exile. Finally, in the 1990s, the Taliban
systematically and completely uprooted the last remnants
of the nobility as an institutional presence.
In
place of the nobility, Afghanistan was left with a bunch
of poppy-growing armed warlords who worked hand-in-glove
with the international narcotics mafia and some
intelligence officers from Pakistan and the United
States. Societal harmony generally has broken down, and
the average Afghan now depends mostly on handouts from
international community or smuggling to survive. Many
regular farmers grow poppy.
The geopoliticians
and resource-hungry materialists, who have used
Afghanistan as the cockpit of Asia during the past three
decades, facilitated this criminalization of Afghan
society. Southern Afghanistan remains firmly under the
influence of the Americans, British and French, while
the north bows to Russia. Now, both India and China have
shown growing interest in the oil, gas and mineral
wealth in the rich steppes of Central Asia.
The Durand Line
On the ground,
however, the criminalization of Afghanistan is directly
linked to the Durand Line, the boundary line separating
Afghanistan in its east from Pakistan. This line created
and perpetuates a region of permanent instability
encompassing eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan.
During their rule over India, British colonials
were forced to the negotiating table with Afghanistan by
a pair of costly defeats to their expeditionary forces
in the 19th century. Britain wanted Afghanistan in its
fold for an advantage in the famous "Great Game" with
Russia, so in 1893 the British agreed on a border with
the Afghan King Abdur Rahman Khan. The British
negotiator was Sir Mortimer Durand, and the new eastern,
southern and northern boundaries of Afghanistan went
into history books as the Durand Line. From its
inception, this wholly artificial line has served as a
convenience or inconvenience, depending on the period
and the interested party. From time to time, it ceases
to exist altogether - for instance, during Afghanistan's
occupation by the Soviet troops in the late 1970s when
millions of Afghan refugees poured into Pakistan without
let or hindrance.
The heart of the problem is
that the Durand Line runs through the middle of the
lands of the most important eastern Afghan Pashtun
tribes, and since the line was drawn, these eastern
Pashtun have resolutely refused to recognize it. The
Pashtun are divided into more than 60 clans, all
speaking the common Pashto language. They number some
12.5 million in Afghanistan, where the major clans are
the Durrani and Ghilzai, and 14 million in Pakistan. In
Pakistan, Pashto speakers are only 8 percent of the
population of 145 million, which is otherwise dominated
by Punjabis and four lesser ethnic groups. In
Afghanistan, however, with a population of barely 26
million, the Pashtun constitute nearly half and
naturally dominate Afghan affairs.
No Afghan
regime after 1893, even the Taliban, has accepted the
validity of the Durand Line. But Pakistan - formed out
of old British India in 1947, and as the successor state
to the Sikh empire - has always sought to make it
permanent while trying to keep the problem at arm's
length. The fact that 14 million Pashtun inhabit western
Pakistan is why Pakistan has tolerated the "Free" Tribal
area west of Peshawar. This fact also explains why
Islamabad always enjoyed better relations with the
southeastern Kandahari Pashtuns, who are fewer and had
not suffered at all from the 1893 map-making.
Pakistan continued its "arm's length" policy by
putting the Federally Administered Tribal Agency (FATA),
as the Pashtun-inhabited border area with Afghanistan is
identified in Pakistan, under the direct control of the
central government. Frontier regulations stipulated that
the clans could retain their own legal order, with
elders' councils and local jirgas (courts), as
well as the practice of going to war to resolve tribal
feuds over land and livestock. There remain to this day
places in FATA where general tribal law is in force. The
head of the clan rules in the clan's name. Above all,
the regulations allowed smuggling to go on - of weapons
and washing machines, drugs and television sets.
Some Afghan voices over the years have demanded
an independent Pashtunistan; others have sought
incorporation by Afghanistan on the grounds that, with
the withdrawal of the British, the Durand Line was no
longer valid. But Pakistan, which was reduced to its
present size - about twice that of California - when
Bangladesh seceded in 1971, refuses to countenance a
further shrinking of its territory.
The price
of holding the line
Pakistan wants an Afghan
government dominated by ethnic Pashtuns that will
provide it strategic depth both in its conflict with
India and in maintaining access to Central Asian
resources. This is why Pakistan trained and armed the
Taliban, and continues to do so even after joining the
US in the war on terrorism, thus parlaying the border
ambiguities into geopolitical gains. But an unstable
Pakistan-Afghanistan border is not a trouble-free
proposition for Pakistan. While it may work in favor of
Pakistan's geopolitical interest, it hurts the country's
wallet.
For one thing, resurgent agitation for
an independent Pashtunistan is a problem. The
Pakistan-Afghanistan Agreement on Shipping, which in
reality legalizes smuggling, is one means of controlling
latent tribal irredentism, and maintaining the border as
a kind of legal fiction - but it costs Pakistan US$4
billion each year in lost customs. The agreement
guarantees free movement across the extremely porous
border of mountain passes and deep ravines. Traveling
from Parachinar in Pakistan to Khost in Afghanistan, one
would become aware of the border only after it had been
crossed: an on-coming truck would signal the change,
because in Afghanistan, unlike in Pakistan, they drive
on the right side of the road.
Even prior to the
present war on terrorism, it was apparent that the old
Durand Line was more hindrance than help, even to
Pakistan. During the 1990s, sectarian elements belonging
to the madrassas, run by the orthodox Jamaat
factions within Pakistan's political mainstream, used to
cross over to Afghanistan, get trained at the so-called
jihadi training camps and return to indulge in sectarian
violence and terror against the Shi'ites as well as in
the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K),
escaping from law enforcement agencies to sanctuaries in
Afghanistan.
Moreover, the smuggling
institutionalized by the shipping agreement arguably
costs Pakistan more than lost customs fees. Apart from
the trafficking in narcotics, goods from Russia and
Central Asia are brought into Afghanistan from all over
the world to be smuggled into Pakistan. This is over and
above the smuggling that has been going on for ages
through the transit trade arrangement between Pakistan
and land-locked Afghanistan from the very outset. This
massive smuggling is one of the major reasons why
Pakistan's economy is in such a shambles today.
According to the annual United Nations'
International Narcotics Control Strategy, released
February 28, "Pakistan remains a substantial trafficking
country for heroin, morphine, and hashish from
Afghanistan. Pakistani traffickers also play an
important role in financing and organizing opium
production in Afghanistan. Successful interdiction
operations occur, but drug convoys are small, well
guarded, and mobile, with good communications capability
and the ability to take advantage of difficult terrain
and widely dispersed law enforcement personnel to
smuggle drugs through Pakistan. The steady flow of drugs
transiting Pakistan has left a social toll, fueling
domestic addiction and contributing to persistent
low-level corruption. Pakistan has established a
chemical controls program that monitors the importation
of controlled chemicals ..."
Afghanistan's
sovereignty at stake
The loose, undefined border
is also under constant dispute. In recent weeks, tribal
delegations have been streaming into Kabul from border
regions to complain to Karzai about alleged Pakistani
incursions, government officials say. According to one
group of elders from the eastern province of NangaRhar,
Pakistani troops visited their village six months ago
and offered to provide schools and wells if they agreed
to become part of Pakistan. Similar complaints can be
heard from many Afghans residing in the border areas.
There are accusations that Pakistani troops have
captured four to five kilometers of Afghan territory
across the Durand Line.
Pakistan, of course,
denies the allegations and insists there is no question
over the demarcation of the border. "Pakistan has not
moved any checkpoints and it has not taken any Afghan
territory," said government spokesman Major-General
Rashid Qureshi said last December.
But the
porosity of the border is widely acknowledged - not
least by the American and the International Security
Assistance Forces (ISAF) operating within Afghanistan,
which ran into the ambiguities of the Durand Line while
tracking down al-Qaeda and Taliban militia. In recent
days, the US military in Afghanistan stated it had the
right to cross into Pakistan while in pursuit of
suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists. American
forces "reserve the right to go after them and pursue
them", said military spokesman Major Stephen Clutter,
adding that Pakistan was aware of what he called the
"long-standing policy".
It is evident that the
Durand Line poses a problem for Afghanistan in
maintaining its sovereignty. It weakens the Pashtuns,
the majority ethnic group in Afghanistan, preventing
them from functioning as a coherent political entity.
The only solution to the problem is to push the Durand
Line eastward to the River Indus to bring all the
Pashtuns under Afghanistan, making sure to keep the
Afghanistan border with Pakistan's Balochistan province,
however, where it is now. This is not formation of a
"Greater Pashtunistan"; it is to bring all the Pashtuns
under one flag. Such a proposal would no doubt meet with
strong resistance from among Pakistan's geopoliticians,
at least initially. But the potential merits in terms of
regional stability are hard to deny. Moreover, it would
help to reduce drug trafficking and illegal smuggling
into Pakistan, which could be expected to benefit the
country significantly financially.
Within
Afghanistan, the country requires a Federalist approach.
While Kabul would remain the capital, the country would
have three definite autonomous regions - one dominated
by the Pashtuns, the other two by the Hazara Shi'ites
and the Tajik-Uzbek ethnic groups. The administration of
Afghanistan would remain the responsibility of all three
ethnic groups, and this could be organized through the
traditional Afghan loya jirga.
(©2003
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