Forces that would rip Afghanistan
apart By Dr Michael A Weinstein
What is the other transition - the one in
Afghanistan, not Iraq - going to look like, if it occurs
at all?
Experts are in agreement that the
transition is in trouble. Throughout its history as a
field of conflict between contending empires and great
powers, Afghanistan has developed a formula for survival
that has helped it to keep its territorial integrity and
indigenous authority system, despite its dizzying ethnic
diversity and the external pressures that have been
exerted on it. That formula - a weak central government
allowing comprehensive power to local and regional
leaders - is always vulnerable to civil war, which has
been a staple of Afghan existence and threatens to break
out again.
The troubles in Afghanistan and the
uncertainty of its transition are rooted in the
possibility that the bargains and compromises necessary
for restoring the country's political paradigm will not
be made or will not be strong enough to prevent relapse
into civil war, or at best a failed decentralized state,
with the national government only fully controlling the
capital Kabul, as is currently close to the case.
Afghan social
organization Afghanistan's history of invasions
that kept compounding ethnic diversity precluded the
country from achieving integrity through a strong
centralized government. Instead, the sense of belonging
together was achieved by a complex system of nested
loyalties rooted in localities. The unit of Afghan
social organization is the qaum, a network of
affiliations that is most intense in the family, in
which are nested wider loyalties to tribe, clan,
occupation, ethnic group, region and finally to the
continued existence of the country itself, but not
necessarily to the current regime. Qaums function
to provide their members with mutual aid and to protect
them from outside groups. The degree of support and
protection is greatest at the local level and becomes
more attenuated in broader contexts, in which boundaries
between qaums shift in response of changing
balances of power.
Qaums are societies
within a society. They have allowed Afghanistan to
survive over centuries, through a common interest in
local autonomy, against external threats. Their strength
- fierce defense of local control - is also their
weakness: each qaum is suspicious of the others,
and when they cannot agree, they are prone to take up
arms. The widest qaum - the state, which in the
Western model has no structural competitor - is for
Afghans a more or less useful facility for other
qaums, not an object of loyalty or devotion.
Afghan nationalism is social, not political.
Since World War II, attempts to submit Afghan
society to centralized rule have been calamities, due to
internal resistance and external intervention. The
communist regime, which seized power in 1978 and
attempted to impose land reform and secularization, was
met with militant opposition, which brought the Soviet
Union into the conflict, leading to a civil war and war
of liberation, under the banner of Islam. The opposition
forces were aided and abetted by the United States, and
were able to overthrow the communists in 1992, three
years after the Soviets had withdrawn their troops.
Having won the war, the coalition of mujahideen fell
apart into the traditional qaum pattern, in which
authority was now firmly in the hands of warlords, who
continued the civil war among themselves.
Concerned about its neighbor's instability,
Pakistan supported a movement of Afghan refugee
religious students, which became the Taliban militia.
The Taliban promised to end the civil war and unite
Afghanistan around an Islamist state. The Taliban's
victory in 1996 ushered in a period of religious fascism
that provided relative security at the cost of state
terrorism, but did not break the qaum system. When
the United States removed the Taliban militarily, because
the regime had provided a haven for al-Qaeda before
September 11, 2001, the familiar pattern reasserted
itself, with civil war prevented only by the presence of
multinational forces.
Afghanistan's recent civil
wars have left it with a hyper-militarized form of its
social paradigm. At present, a weak transitional
government in Kabul led by Hamid Karzai is protected by
foreign troops and does not exert effective control over
the rest of the country, which is divided among local
and regional warlords with primary affiliations to clans
and particular ethnic groups. Taliban persecutions and
the resentments sparked by civil war have sharpened
ethnic divides, lessening the will to compromise.
The Taliban have regrouped as
guerrilla forces determined to impede the formation of a
stable Afghan government. The primary condition for
centralized state control - the disbanding of local and
regional militias - has not been realized: Approximately 40,000-50,000
fighters are still under the control of the warlords,
dwarfing the fledgling Afghan army.
Prospects
for transition Given the deep-rootedness of the
qaum system and the military power of local
strong men, it cannot be expected that Afghanistan will
achieve a Western-style market democracy. The most that
can be hoped for by Western powers is some form of
bargain among the contending groups to share power
through granting one another autonomy. Any greater
centralization is unlikely because the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) powers are unwilling to
expend the resources even to attempt to achieve it.
Afghanistan
is a poor agricultural country without strategic resources. The
NATO powers, led by the US, need to keep it from once
again becoming a base for Islamic revolution, but
their vital interests extend no further than that. They would
be unwilling even to lend sufficient support for
a Middle Eastern style one-party crony dictatorship to
take hold. Indeed, Afghanistan has the
lowest international troop-to-population ratio of recent interventions (1:1,115, as
compared with 1:161 in Iraq).
The NATO powers are banking on
the election of Karzai to Afghanistan's presidency on
October 9. A member of Afghanistan's Pashtun plurality,
Karzai is beholden to the occupying forces and follows
pro-Western foreign policies.
It is
still not certain that the election will be held, given
efforts to sabotage it by the Taliban and warlords
who are threatened with loss of their power. Although
70% of eligible voters have been registered, the figure
is only 10%-15% in predominantly Pashtun areas where the
Taliban resistance is active. Where registration has
been successful, voters are likely to follow the leads
of local strong men, many of whom have been suppressing
political opposition.
Whether or not elections
are held on October 9, the question will remain whether
the various forces in Afghan society can reach a pact
with each other to prevent civil war.
Recent
developments in the run-up to the election show fissures
emerging between political leaders from different ethnic
groups, raising the probability that a successful
bargain will not be made. On July 22, Uzbek strongman
General Abdul Rashid Dostum resigned from the
transitional government and announced his candidacy for
president. Five days later, Yonus Qanooni, a Tajik who
had been shifted from the important post of interior
minister to education minister in an effort to satisfy
Pashtun interests, declared his candidacy. At the same
time, the first vice president of the transitional
government and its defense minister, Mohammed Fahim - a
Tajik backer of Qanooni - was dropped from Karzai's
electoral ticket.
In Afghanistan's ethnic
demography, the Pashtuns constitute approximately 40% of
the population, the Tajiks about 20%, the Hazaras
another 20%, the Uzbeks 5% and an array of other ethnic
groups the remainder. Politically the groups are not
unified and their factions cross ethnic lines, depending
on local issues. Nevertheless, Dostum's and Qanooni's
candidacies pose the possibility that Karzai will not
receive a majority in the first round of voting and will
have to face a run off with the second-place candidate.
Karzai's position is strengthened by his retention of
Abdul Karim Khalili, a Hazara, as second deputy
president, but the Hazaras also have their own
presidential candidate in Mohammed Mohaqiq. A coalition
of convenience of Qanooni, Dostum and Mohaqiq could pose
a strong challenge to Karzai if he does not win a
majority in the first electoral round.
If the presidential election is held successfully
and Karzai wins a clear majority, his hand will be
strengthened for making the deals with warlords across ethnic
lines that will open the possibility for Afghanistan to
regain its traditional political pattern of a weak
central power presiding over strong local power centers
that are satisfied with their degrees of autonomy
and their shares of resources and offices. If he loses
the first round with a plurality and wins a run off, he will
be in a weaker position and divisive tendencies
will assert themselves. If Karzai loses a runoff, especially to
a non-Pashtun, stabilization will be difficult to
achieve and renewed civil war will loom as a
possibility, requiring long-term commitment of foreign military
forces if the NATO powers choose to try to prevent that
outcome.
Whatever the election's result, certain
conditions will persist in Afghanistan that have
international ramifications. The country is likely to
remain a major provider of heroin, a destabilizing
influence on Pakistan, a field for the eastward
expansion of Iran's influence and, if decentralization
goes too far, a staging base for Islamic revolutionaries
once again. Those conditions will be alleviated by a
successful political agreement, but they will not be
eliminated. In the absence of massive economic and
military aid from the industrial powers, which is
unlikely to come, Afghanistan will remain on the brink
of becoming a failed state or will become one yet
another time.
Conclusion Unlike
Iraq, Afghanistan is not threatened with secession or
breakup. It is not an expression of modern Western
colonialism, but an exceedingly complex society that has
been subject to imperialism throughout its history and
has kept its integrity through the delicate balances and
overlapping affiliations of the qaum system. With
no real external support for modernization from the
outside, that system is reasserting itself as the
blessing and the curse that it has always been.
Afghanistan functions most successfully when
the decentralized forces that compose its society trust one
another sufficiently to compromise over common concerns
and let the rest devolve to localities. The country's
political system breaks down into civil war when that
trust is lacking, unleashing cycles of defensive
aggression. Recent civil wars have eroded trust and left
authority over the qaums in the hands of
warlords, who have gained in influence over other
traditional authorities, especially elders and clerics.
The most likely future for Afghanistan is severe
instability that Western powers, expending limited
resources, will attempt to contain, but will not be able
to resolve.
Published with permission of
thePower and Interest News Report,
an analysis-based publication that seeks to provide
insight into various conflicts, regions and points of
interest around the globe. All comments should be
directed tocontent@pinr.com
