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2 Afghan battle lines become
blurred By M K Bhadrakumar
New fault lines have appeared on the
Afghan chessboard. While the "international
community" kept watch on the obscure lawless
borderlands of Pakistan's tribal agencies for the
Taliban's spring offensive, templates of the war
began to shift - almost unnoticed.
Things
are not going to be the same again. The war is
transforming. Adversarial lines are being redrawn.
The enemy's contours have changed. Front lines are
being abandoned. In
another six to eight weeks,
hot, dry winds will have arrived, bearing fine,
yellow dust that envelops everything, making
appearances even more deceptive. No one will be
able then to tell with certitude who is the
enemy.
Looking back, the ground began
to shift on New Year's Eve, when the lower chamber
of the Afghan Parliament passed a bill that would
grant amnesty to all Afghans involved in any war
crimes during the past quarter-century. The
resolution said, "In order to bring reconciliation
among various strata in the society, all those
political and belligerent sides that were involved
one way or the other during the two and a half
decades of war will not be prosecuted legally and
judicially."
The quarter-century covered
the entire period from the Saur Revolution in the
spring of 1978 through the bloody years of the
Soviet intervention, through the riotous
mujahideen rule and the senseless civil war that
followed, all the way to the Taliban takeover in
Kabul in 1996 until the ouster of that regime in
the autumn of 2001.
For the first time,
Afghans spoke out that they no longer held the
United States in awe. At a single stroke, the
December 31 amnesty move deprived the US of the
one weapon that it wielded for blackmailing the
"warlords" into submission - powerful leaders of
the Northern Alliance groups, the mujhideen field
commanders, and petty local thugs alike.
The prospect of a war-crime tribunal was
held like a Damocles' sword over any recalcitrant
Afghan political personality - be it Burhanuddin
Rabbani, Yunous Qanooni, Rashid Dostum or Rasool
Sayyaf. In the able hands of former US ambassador
Zalmay Khalilzad, it did wonders while ensuring
Hamid Karzai's election as president and in
consolidating US dominance in Afghanistan.
What was astonishing was that the amnesty
bill covered even Taliban leader Mullah Omar and
Hezb-e-Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Clearly,
an Afghan "revolt" was afoot against the existing
political order imposed by the US. Implicitly, it
called into question the raison d'etre of
the war, since the largest group in the
mujahideen-dominated 249-member lower house of
Parliament consists of the elected members of
Hezb-e-Islami besides a sizable number of former
Taliban figures (such as Mullah Abdul Salam
Rocketti) who act as the Taliban's political wing
in Kabul.
A lot of homework had obviously
gone into the initiative. Afghan leaders, with
their native wisdom, estimated that the war was
going nowhere and that the chance of "victory" by
the US, which was never good, had probably passed.
They saw ahead that the superpower, which arrived
full of hubris, might well depart humbled. They
wished to be on call when the time came.
Of course, it was apparent to anyone that
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was a
divided house and that the United States' old
European allies didn't share its apparent
intention to turn Afghanistan into a client state
under a NATO flag from where US power projection
into the Persian Gulf and the Middle East and
South Asia and Central Asia would become possible.
Most important, Afghans estimated that as
in Iraq, dialogue would become unavoidable, and a
regional solution involving Afghanistan's
neighbors might become necessary. They were deeply
skeptical whether Washington would stay the
course. They could hear the Taliban's distant
drums approaching Kabul's city gates.
The
amnesty move unleashed a wave of political
activism in the subsequent few weeks, leading to
the formation of the new United Front early last
month. The platform of the United Front is
interesting. It calls for a parliamentary form of
government; it wants to deprive the president of
the power to appoint provincial governors (who
should be elected officials instead); it demands
changes in the electoral laws from the present
so-called non-transferable system to a
proportional system, etc. It speaks of dialogue,
reconciliation and power-sharing.
But
evidently the United Front is bent on cornering
Karzai in a typical Afghan way - incrementally but
relentlessly, until his political nerves give way
and his US support becomes redundant. It is
harshly critical of the Karzai government's
ineptitude and corruption, and it draws attention
to the great suffering of the Afghan people.
In the sphere of foreign affairs, the
United Front vaguely seeks "coordination" with the
foreign forces present in Afghanistan, and leaves
it at that for the present. Significantly, it
calls for the official recognition of the
international border between Afghanistan and
Pakistan - known as the Durand Line.
At
first glance, the United Front lineup resembles
erstwhile Northern Alliance - Burhanuddin Rabbani,
Mohammed Fahim, Yunous Qanooni, Abdullah, Ismail
Khan, and Rashid Dostum. But curiously, the United
Front also includes two top Khalqi leaders from
the communist era - members of the politburo of
the Afghan Communist Party, General Nur al-Haq
Olumi and General Mohammad Gulabzoi.
They
were close associates of former defense minister
General Shahnawaz Tanai, another top Khalqi
leader, who staged an abortive coup attempt in
March 1990 against the government in Kabul with
the help of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI) and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and eventually fled
to Pakistan seeking asylum.
Khalqis, who
are drawn from the Pashtun tribes, have had a
strong nexus with the Taliban over the years.
Tanai, who is based in Pakistan, used to provide
the Taliban with a skilled cadre of military
officers, who flew the Taliban's "air force",
drove their tanks and manned their heavy
artillery, absolving the need of Pakistani
regulars except in very selective roles. In the
recent years, he has been a visitor to Kabul.
Therefore, questions arise. Is a
far-reaching restructuring of the Taliban going
on? Mullah Dadullah's killing seems part of the
process. It does seem that Hekmatyar and the
mujahideen/Khalqi elements within the Taliban are
slouching toward mainstream politics in Kabul. A
sidelining of the extremist, "jihadist" elements
by ISI could be under way.
Pakistani
President General Pervez Musharraf could be
acting, finally. Hekmatyar has certainly
positioned himself somewhere in the vicinity of
the United Front. He is almost visible. Mullah
Dadullah's killing no doubt strengthens him.
Equally, Taliban leader Jalaluddin Haqqani (who is
second only to Taliban supreme Mullah Omar) too
has a mujahideen pedigree. Also, Haqqani and
Hekmatyar go back a long way. In the Afghan jihad
of the early 1980s, Haqqani was a camp follower of
Professor Rasool Sayyaf (one of the prime movers,
incidentally, of the amnesty move in Parliament).
The mystery deepens insofar as Hekmatyar
also has a strong "Iran connection", having spent
five years in exile in Mashhad after
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