Reagan legacy lingers in Afghanistan,
Pakistan By M B Naqvi
KARACHI - Conservative opinion holds the Great
Communicator Ronald Reagan, who died this month at 93,
to be a great US president. His greatness largely
comprises his ability to convince his country's people,
or a majority of them, that he stood for freedom and
democracy and that communism was the worst of evils.
He certainly was a scourge for communism. He is
credited with having brought the East-West Cold War to
an end by winning the war in Afghanistan that eventually
led to the downfall of communism within the Soviets.
But a lot of people in South Asia bitterly
criticize the legacies that Reagan's policies left in
Afghanistan and Pakistan. The state of Afghanistan has
actually been destroyed, and the blame for it lies, to
an indeterminate extent, on Reagan's thoughtless but
enthusiastic support of the Afghan jihad throughout the
1980s. He fomented and abated the rise of religious
extremism in Pakistan that is now threatening this
country's stability.
What has happened to Iraq
as a result of George W Bush's war is a replay of what
Reagan did in Afghanistan. There is now scarcely any
hope of keeping Iraq an integrated entity based on
Bush's schemes and plans.
But the damage that
Reagan caused to Pakistan and Afghanistan exceeds this
by far in its effects and aftereffects that still linger
on. For instance, the difficulties that US air forces
had in destroying the Tora Bora tunnels and hideouts in
Afghanistan during its attacks in late 2001 are due to
Reagan's decision to repair them to their original state
and perhaps to improve these facilities for a guerrilla
force to use as safe havens against the Soviets in the
1980s.
Although physical damage in Afghanistan
was horrible in those eight years of active warfare, the
far more serious damage was political. Reagan's war
destroyed the second Afghan middle class that had grown
up under the pro-Soviet regimes in Kabul. In the holy
name of anti-communism, Reagan's war decimated the
entire secular side of the polity that used to be led,
strangely enough, by Marxist-led parties in that
country.
Earlier, the traditional middle class
had been more or less evicted by the Marxist regimes.
But the job done by Reagan's supposedly pro-freedom and
pro-democracy mujahideen was so thorough that virtually
no secular element physically survived.
What the
mujahideen could not do between 1992-96 - when they were
bickering and ran a regime that was an epitome of a
non-government - their successor, the Taliban,
completed.
Since the Taliban, Afghanistan does
not have any bit of unity or stability, or even a middle
class, to speak of. It is an ad hoc collection of tribes
and various Islamic sects, with no domestic mediating
influence or power among them. The US government had to
invent, in an ersatz manner, the state of Afghanistan.
But what was being done in Afghanistan was done
through the help and instrumentality of the Pakistan
army. The first requirement of the 1979 war in
Afghanistan was people imbued with anti-communist zeal.
Pakistan helped manufacture as well as mobilize the
Islamic extremists and trained and indoctrinated them
into first-rate mujahideen.
The war was fought
in the bogus name of Islam, funded and led mainly by the
US government, though nominally by Afghanistan and
Pakistani mujahideen.
The biggest damage was not
physical, although it was horrible enough in
Afghanistan. It was spiritual and political. Inevitably,
a new Islam came into being. What began to emerge in the
1980s was politically different from what the Pakistanis
knew as Islam.
The Islam that Pakistanis knew
was recognized on all sides, even by dictators, as being
able to countenance democracy and all fundamental
rights. But in the 1980s, the official propaganda by
General Zia ul-Haq, the darling of Reagan and the US
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was that Islam and
democracy could not go together.
Islam was now
thought to require dictatorship - his own, of course.
But other mullahs gained tremendous importance by virtue
of their close cooperation with the army and their
provision of raw material for Reagan's war in
Afghanistan.
All the manpower, rated excellent
by the US government, was provided by Pakistan, while
the United States and other pro-West Arab regimes
provided the funding - and a lot it was.
This
particular legacy to Pakistan includes several things:
unheard-of riches by Pakistani generals who stole and
embezzled maybe up to 70% of all aid from the West.
During that war, the CIA had hit on the idea of
financing it from the sale of heroin from the ample
opium crops in Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal areas.
Hundreds of private-sector factories to manufacture
heroin were set up. A whole culture of smuggling and
drug trafficking grew up, creating a fanatical rich
group of manufacturers and traders of heroin.
This required a large amount of efficient small
arms to protect the precious cargo that was so small in
volume. The Kalashnikov was the rifle of choice. An
uncountable number of Kalashnikovs float around in
Afghanistan and Pakistan as a result - and in Pakistan
they are no longer confined to the tribal areas.
The drug mafia sought support from the emerging
crime syndicates in Pakistan, especially in the port
city of Karachi, and in turn, strengthened them.
Today, the two are virtually married to each
other - the heroin and Kalashnikov culture flourish
throughout Pakistan. But that is just one side of the
picture: the other side comprises non-stop production of
Islamic extremists required for what militants call
Pakistan's own jihad in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
Today President General Pervez Musharraf, the
military strongman of Pakistan, is trying hard to curb
extremism by promoting what he calls "enlightened
moderation".
But his regime depends, like other
politicians of the shady past, on the mullahs, the
mentors of the Taliban. His regime is also promoting
pan-Islamism in the name of pleasing the West by
preaching enlightened moderation to other members of the
Organization of the Islamic Conference.
This
political strategy of the Musharraf regime becomes
pernicious when combined with the influences of the
progenitors of the Taliban. Musharraf's political plans
are strange: he keeps the pro-West and actually moderate
right-of-center parties out in the cold, but relies on
the support of the manufacturers of fanatical
fundamentalists. The people of Pakistan are between the
devil of Islamic extremists and the deep blue sea of
assorted anti-democrats.
