The day that changed
Afghanistan By M K Bhadrakumar
The eruption of anti-government,
anti-American rioting on Monday in Kabul has
inevitably led to post-mortems about what
happened. This in turn has led to the drawing up
of checklists of failures on the part of the
"international community" (read the United States
and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization - NATO)
and the Afghan government in their inability to
provide troops, security and funds for
reconstruction and nation-building to the Pashtun
tribes in southern Afghanistan.
A few
additional details have also been thrown in as
regards Afghanistan's drug economy, the nexus
between drug traffickers, "warlords" and corrupt
bureaucrats, the pompous lifestyle of the
expatriate community
singularly unmindful of the extreme poverty
surrounding their sequestered life, and of course
the venality that comes in the wake of any
invading army.
The story is complete. It
is utterly familiar. This was how Saigon used to
be in the 1960s.
But these accounts
meticulously count the trees - leaving one to
wonder how dark and deep the woods might be.
Therefore, when Tim Albone, correspondent for The
Times of London in Kabul, wrote that he believed
the riots could mark a turning point in the Afghan
situation, it caught attention as a unique
description. Albone wrote:
I've been in Kabul for nine months
and there has never been anything like this
before. There is a real feeling in the air that
today Kabul changed. There has been a lot of
fighting in the south but this has been mainly
between the militias and the American forces ...
I've spoken to friends who work in Iraq and they
say that there was one day when it all changed.
That could be the case here ... They [Afghans]
have realized that they can take on the police
and take on the Americans - they could easily do
it again.
What distinguishes Monday's
rioting is that Kabul is a largely Tajik city. It
seems the agitators carried posters of Ahmed Shah
Massoud, the legendary "Lion of Panjshir" who led
the Northern Alliance during the anti-Taliban
resistance and was assassinated by al-Qaeda on the
eve of the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US
and eliminated from the political equations with
clinical precision, just as Afghanistan's need of
his leadership would have become most pressing.
The agitators in Kabul burned banners of
President Hamid Karzai. The violent incidents had
heavy anti-Karzai and anti-American overtones. It
is a very bad sign indeed that the Tajiks, who
constitute about 30% of Afghanistan's population,
are openly turning against Karzai, caricaturing
him as an American puppet.
Yet the
groundswell of Tajik alienation should not have
come as a surprise. Anger was building up at the
systematic neglect that the Afghan government
meted out to Panjshir (Massoud's power base) over
the recent period.
Any serious
observer of the Afghan scene would have noted as far
back as March that something fundamental was changing in
Afghan political alignments. Former president
Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani, the politically
astute Tajik leader who founded Jamiat-i-Islami as
an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood in the late
1960s, and played a key role in the Afghan jihad,
refused point-blank to put blame on Pakistan for
the growing instability in Afghanistan.
Instead, he went on to exonerate Pakistani
officials - this at the end of March, when Karzai
was mounting a virulent campaign that Pakistan was
supportive of the Taliban's resurgence.
More important, Rabbani did this in the
course of an interview with the Pakistani media.
He was evidently carrying his message across to
the Pakistani audience - conveying in subtle terms
his antipathy toward the dispensation in Kabul and
at the same time renewing his old links with
Peshawar and Islamabad.
It takes time and
effort to comprehend the quicksands of Afghan
politics. Not many would even know that Rabbani,
who headed the mujahideen government in Kabul
(which was overthrown by the Taliban in 1996),
also had covertly funded the Taliban militia in
the late-1994-early-1995 period. In Rabbani's
estimation at that time, the Taliban were capable
of vanquishing Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was the
principal adversary of the Rabbani government.
The twin pillars of Jamiat-i-Islami
ideology - Islam and Afghan nationalism - are
also, curiously, the driving force behind today's
Afghan resistance spearheaded by the Taliban.
Herein lies the "terrible beauty" (to borrow the
words of W B Yeats) of what happened in Kabul on
Monday.
Rabbani recently spelled out his
political platform in some detail during an
interview with a publication from Dushanbe, the
capital of Tajikistan. Some extracts from the
interview hold the key to the shape of things to
come in the Afghan political landscape. Rabbani
said:
Westerners, because of their
corrupted culture, want to prevent things that
are beneficial to the Muslims. Besides, they
entice us toward things that are harmful to our
[Muslim] society. For example, why shouldn't an
Islamic country such as Iran use nuclear
technology? It does not want to make any nuclear
bomb, but wants to use nuclear technology. The
goal of Westerners is that an Islamic country
should not develop. Thus, all these cries of
conspiracy and uproar are because Islamic
countries should be denied the fruits of
development, they should rather serve as markets
for those countries so that they get raw
materials, produce goods and sell them back to
Islamic countries.
Now, Americans have
shown their attitude to human rights in Abu
Ghraib and Guantanamo. It is surprising that
they disallow girls from going to schools
wearing a headscarf. But they will not get away
with this in Afghanistan ... We consider this a
conspiracy against our religion, our freedom and
security. They talk about women's issues, while
thousands of women die, and nobody cares for
them. But that does not stop them from talking
about "moral corruption". They haven't come here
for the reconstruction of Afghanistan, but they
have come here to corrupt us ...
The
regime that rules our country stands against the
wishes of the entire nation ... In Afghanistan,
our policies should be defined by our nation,
not by any foreign country. The current Afghan
government's policies are not acceptable to the
Afghan people. We must protect our freedom. If a
foreign country gives aid, that should be
without any strings attached. If the donors put
conditions, we should not accept such
aid.
It does not require much
ingenuity to see that Rabbani's platform can
easily converge with that of the Taliban-led
Afghan resistance - or of Hekmatyar. In fact, the
Canadian daily Toronto Star reported recently that
clerics in Kabul mosques had been urging
worshippers to join the resistance against
Karzai's government and the occupation troops.
The report said, "Some imams here [Kabul]
believe the time is ripe to call for holy war
[jihad]." There have been reports of weapons from
the northern regions in the possession of
erstwhile Northern Alliance elements finding their
way to the Taliban in the south. Political divides
are getting blurred.
Much of the Tajik
alienation has arisen out of the easing out of two
important Tajik leaders, Mohammed Fahim and Yunus
Qanooni, from Karzai's government. These leaders
enjoy grassroots support among Tajiks. The summary
fashion in which Karzai removed them from office
humiliated the "Panjshiris" as a whole.
In
fact, it was in the most bizarre way conceivable
that Karzai chose to sack the charismatic former
foreign minister, Abdullah (another close aide of
Massoud), from his post in March. According to
Abdullah, he was intimated about his removal by
telephone while he was on an official visit to
Washington. Abdullah said he had met with Karzai
just before leaving Kabul for Washington but the
latter assured him that his portfolio wouldn't be
affected in any cabinet changes.
"It
[removal from cabinet] did come out of the blue
because no one had talked to me or consulted me
about it beforehand," Abdullah claimed.
Yet another factor of disaffection among
the Tajiks is the deliberate attempt by the Karzai
government to limit the Tajik presence in the
Afghan National Army. To add to Tajik resentment,
Karzai has subjected Panjshir to "benign neglect"
by not allocating any substantial development
funds for the region's reconstruction. Karzai's
political intention would have been to bring the
cradle of Tajik nationalism to its knees, while at
the same time pandering to Pashtun chauvinism with
a view to consolidating a power base in the
Pashtun regions in the south and southwest.
But the tactic has not worked, as the
Taliban's resurgence shows. Meanwhile, Karzai's
ties with the Tajiks (who were his erstwhile
allies and supporters in the 2002-05 period)
soured. Karzai may be unwittingly preparing the
ground for a consolidation of pan-Afghan
nationalism.
The indications are that
Karzai has also alienated other Northern Alliance
groups. It is intriguing as to where exactly
Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek leader from the northern
Amu Darya region, currently stands in political
equations.
Karzai appointed Dostum as
chief of staff in March in a smart move aimed at
removing him from his power base in the north and
bringing him to live and work in Kabul. It soon
began to dawn on Dostum that his job carried more
rank than responsibility. Feeling belittled, he
stormed out of Kabul and returned to his native
Shibirghan. The relatively placid northern
provinces have since become volatile.
The
paradox is that Karzai is winning all the petty
political skirmishes. He choreographed the entire
spectacle in April leading to the resounding
endorsement of his cabinet appointees by
parliament. He deftly manipulated the internal
divisions in the newly elected parliament and
capitalized on its inexperience. The
Brussels-based think-tank International Crisis
Group, which was supportive of Karzai, criticized
him for preventing the Afghan parliament from
becoming a viable working body.
No matter
the post-mortem reports regarding the eruption of
violence in Kabul on Monday, the shift in
political templates is the central issue. It seems
a critical mass is developing around which an
Afghan resistance transcending ethnic divides may
take shape. Against this background, NATO is not
helping matters by posing as a lone ranger.
Almost all Afghan ethnic groups enjoy
kinship with neighboring countries. Therefore, in
any enduring Afghan settlement, Afghanistan's
neighbors must be made stakeholders. NATO, on the
other hand, is wasting precious time, lost in the
thought of making 2006 a "pivotal year" in its
history.
True, NATO has come into physical
possession of a country far away from Europe,
where it is at liberty to act without the prying
eyes of international law. NATO is understandably
keen to prove its grit in safeguarding Western
interests in tough conditions - and indeed to
claim a raison d'etre for itself.
But the riots in Kabul are a reminder that
Afghanistan is a country that is deceptively easy
to invade but almost impossible to occupy. The
unseemly haste with which all fair-skinned
Westerners had to run for cover on Monday showed
that discretion would be the better part of valor.
M K Bhadrakumar served as a
career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for
more than 29 years, with postings including
ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-98) and to Turkey
(1998-2001).
(Copyright 2006 Asia
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