Page 2 of 2 Balkanization of Afghanistan beckons
By Derek Henry Flood
In fact the mostly provincial Afghan Taliban's initial aims were quite narrow. Under the leadership of a village preacher from rural Uruzgan Province called Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban was largely focused on consolidating its rule inside Afghanistan by defeating its domestic opponents in central and northern Afghanistan.
While in the process of imposing its parochial worldview among ordinary Afghans regardless of their sectarian or ethnic identities, Omar's group played host to an array of Sunni movements from across the Muslim world.
From the amorphous al-Qaeda to those with far less grandiose
goals that involved the creation of separatist Muslim-majority homelands such as the Caucasian rebels from the "Chechen Republic of Ichkeria" or the forlorn Uighur militants from China's Xinjiang Province who desired to political secession from the Russian Federation and China respectively.
Though the Taliban harbored al-Qaeda during this period as it did many other radical Sunni movements, the two groups did not in fact share a common Islamist ideology.
The Taliban are a historically Deobandi movement under Islam's Hanafi school of jurisprudence whose ideations originate in the Daurl Uloom madrassa in what is today the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. The Arabs that dominated the political Islam espoused by al-Qaeda were Salafi-jihadi adherents of the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence.
The Deobandi Hanafism of the Taliban with its ingrained Central and South Asian Islamic socio-cultural currents was traditionally at odds with the even more literalist Hanbalism of the Saudi and Egyptian Salafis who have always been at the upper echelon of al-Qaeda's thought cycles.
None of this is to say the two outfits certainly did not make common cause, particularly when facing external challengers such northern Afghan war-fighting groups or the foreign intervention forces suddenly present following 9/11. Though the two very different outfits at times maintained a sometimes mutually beneficial relationship, the working alliance between Mullah Omar's tin pot emirate and the stateless al-Qaeda leadership it hosted was laden with serious ideological and strategic disagreements.
Beyond this, there were schisms within al-Qaeda itself regarding the Taliban's merits in relation its deeply flawed implementation of Islamic law in Afghanistan. Bin Laden was considered by many to in fact be a fairly minor, though notable for his pedigree, player in the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s.
But with the attacks he ordered on the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on August 7, 1998, his presence and notoriety had begun to overshadow Mullah Omar outside Afghanistan. Bin Laden's fame heightened rapidly in neighboring Pakistan in particular when President Bill Clinton clumsily responded to the atrocities in East Africa with a barrage of Tomahawk missiles two weeks later on militant training camps in Khost Province in southeastern Afghanistan.
Bin Laden's relaxed defiance of the American military juggernaut gave him the air of a folk hero among supporters in Peshawar or sympathetic enlisted men in the Pakistani army but it greatly chafed the Taliban's shura council who were not appreciative of the kind of explosive attention al-Qaeda's activities outside Afghanistan were bringing to their desperately impoverished, agrarian nation.
The sort of comparatively abstract millenarian terrorism abroad espoused by bin Laden did not sync with the Taliban's attempts at nascent state re-formation in Kabul.
The Taliban were keenly interested in creating an Islamic state that had its rightful place among the internationally recognized community of nation-states.
To this end, the Taliban sought recognition as Afghanistan's rightful leaders at the UN headquarters in New York. Al-Qaeda was not interested in issues of statehood. Bin Laden's modus vivendi with the Taliban of the 1990s occurred partly to Afghanistan's pre-existing isolation after it was utterly abandoned by outside powers following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
While only their patrons in Islamabad, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh provided them with such diplomatic credentials, the Taliban desired political acceptance by the wider world. They continued to prosecute their war against the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras of the north until they had pushed them back into a slice of Takhar Province and Badakhshan Province bordering Tajikistan.
The rump government of the late president Burhanuddin Rabbani - which still held Afghanistan's seat at the UN - maintained an internally exiled government in the Badakhshani capital of Faizabad.
Mullah Omar had the very earthly goal of destroying or coopting what remained of these ethnic war-fighting groups in order to wrest control of every square kilometer of Afghanistan from Rabbani's faction once and for all. The Taliban created facts on the ground as they battled fighters allied to Rabbani led by Ahmad Shah Massoud and other northern commanders harder and further into a remote corner of Afghanistan with little strategic relevance.
Now several of the state actors that seek to steer Afghanistan toward a quasi-peaceful post-NATO-era settlement suddenly view the Taliban as a legitimate negotiating partner. David Cameron recently hosted Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari, at Chequers, the British prime minister's sprawling country estate northwest of London.
The transparent episode appeared borne out of desperate pragmatism from the NATO side of the aisle. In response to the talk of talks, Zabiullah Mujahid, the lugubrious Taliban spokesman, dismissed the premise as a political farce.
Mujahid told the Associated Press: "There is no change in the policy of the Islamic Emirate of not talking to the Karzai government…the Karzai regime is powerless and installed by others. Real parties to the conflict are those who have committed aggression."
Karzai and Zardari pledged to conclude a peace deal between Kabul and the Taliban within an astonishingly brief six-month period. Considering the existing mutual distrust between Islamabad and Kabul, the factionalization of the Taliban over the last decade, and the fact that since first proposed in January 2012, the Taliban's Doha office has yet to really materialize.
President Karzai's High Peace Council has borne little or no tangible fruit thus far. The brazen assassination by the Taliban of the former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani in his role of head of Karzai's appointed council in September 2011 eroded the idea of the so-called "moderate Taliban" in the eyes of skeptics. Amrullah Saleh, the former head of the National Directorate of Security and outspoken Karzai critic, told the BBC's Hardtalk that the notion of Taliban members who had genuinely moderated their views or reformed their ideology was "an invention."
The inauspicious former office of Abdul Hakim Mujahid, Mullah Omar's envoy to the UN until 2001, photographed on July 5, 2002 in Queens, New York's Flushing neighborhood. Though his efforts were formally halted by the US State Department in February 2001 which said it was enforcing UN sanctions related to the Taliban's refusal to expel Osama bin Laden, when Asia Times Online attempted to visit the office shortly before 9/11, a sign on the door still read "Taleban Islamic Movement of Afghanistan" in Pashto, Dari, and English. Mujahid is presently the deputy chairman of the Afghan High Peace Council appointed by President Karzai as interlocutors with the Taliban and warns of the prospect of renewed civil war should the West entirely abandon Afghanistan after 2014. Credit: Derek Henry Flood
All considered, these factors add up to the notion of a peace deal by summer of this year as an unrealistic, herculean task. The High Peace Council is now led by Salahuddin Rabbani, the slain former president's son.
For its part, Qatar is meant to serve as a neutral space where the concerned parties can come to at least an ad hoc agreement. In many parts of the world, however, tiny Qatar's intentions are met with outright suspicion. Qatari officials operated alongside Libyan rebels during the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, have been active in arming insurgent groups in Syria's bloody revolution turned civil war, and have been the subject of unsubstantiated reports of assisting Salafi-jihadis following the short-lived Islamist takeover of northern Mali.
Though no robed Qatari official appeared alongside the pro-peace troika of Karzai, Zardari and Cameron, the small Emirate is no stranger to hosting rogue Islamists of varying stripes. In the 1990s, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was out of the reach of American authorities while he quietly worked as an engineer at Qatar's Ministry of Electricity and Water.
On the small, lightly populated peninsula jutting forth from Saudi Arabia into the Persian Gulf, it is highly unlikely that Mohammed or other known al-Qaeda operatives were existing without both the knowledge and cooperation of government authorities such as Qatar's, then Minister of Islamic Affairs, Sheik Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani on whose farm Mohammed was thought to have lived before fleeing to Pakistan in advance of a US dragnet. Al-Thani, currently interior minister would not likely object to the Taliban operating openly in the emirate.
So while Kabul, Islamabad, London, Washington and apparently Doha are myopically pushing for a settlement with the Afghan Taliban, the various other non-state groups are barely mentioned if at all as if the Taliban were the sole perpetrator of anti-state violence, presently or potentially.
"…Make no distinction…" An American B52 Stratofortress strategic bomber makes the lengthy run from the obscure British Indian Ocean Territory of Diego Garcia toward the frontline between the ethnic Tajik and Uzbek fighters of Jamiat-i-Islami/Shura-i-Nazar and Taliban trenches amidst the hills beyond the town of Dasht-i-Qala on the cloudless morning of November 2, 2001. The B52 pilots indeed made no distinctions between Taliban front line positions and those held by al-Qaeda and other assorted non-Afghan nationals. Credit: Derek Henry Flood
Outlier Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, believed to be sheltering in Pakistan, still commands a potent insurgent movement called Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan that is not under the Taliban umbrella and which is opposed to the Afghan central government. Unlike the Taliban, HIG maintains a legal, tangible political office in Kabul and views itself as a hardline Islamist political party undergirded with strains of Pashtun nationalism.
The Haqqani Network, a familial cross-border hybrid criminal-insurgent group allied to the Taliban but autonomous in nature, has barley been mentioned in big-think public pronouncements about the possibility of creating a lasting peace in Afghanistan.
And then there are the previously mentioned war-fighting organizations whose allegiances lay primarily along ethnic and sectarian lines. Groups such as Jamiat-i-Islami, Junbesh-i-Milli, and Hezb-i-Wahdat can easily be reactivated in the event of a major Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan. The leaders of these groups have stores of weapons, cash, and bitter memories from a time when there were no Westerners present in their beleaguered Afghanistan.
It is not difficult then for them to posit darker future scenarios where identity-based warfare will return in the event of a full-scale collapse of the central government in Kabul which has an unhealthy dependency on wealthy donor nations dating back to the Bonn Agreement.
Though independent minded Afghans of all stripes have no desire for any form renewed Pakistani hegemony over Afghanistan, it is the recalcitrant northern-based leaders who fought so bitterly in the late 1990s, that feel their factions have the most to lose.
Dr Abdullah Abdullah photographed in the garden of his home on November 4, 2009 as he announced his exit from that year's bitterly contested presidential election with Hamid Karzai. In 2012, on the prospect of talking to the Taliban in Qatar, rather than Kabul or Kandahar, Abdullah told Iran's Fars New Agency: "We want negotiations with Taliban under the supervision of the United Nations and on Afghan soil." Credit: Derek Henry Flood
When the Taliban swiftly rose to power from Kandahar to Kabul from 1994-1996, ruling Afghanistan's Pashtun belt hugging the Pakistan border was insufficient. Mullah Omar's commanders envisioned themselves as the whole of the country's rightful, righteous rulers.
The minority ethnic factions originating in the anti-Soviet jihad may not want to but are prepared to retreat into their pre-Karzai era selves if push comes to shove.
Following the fall of Taloqan on November 11, ethnic-Tajik militiamen of Jamiat-i-Islami/Shura-i-Nazar mass on the frontline near the town of Khanabad during the siege of Kunduz City on November 15, 2001. If the leaders northern Afghan war-fighting groups genuinely believe the Taliban will try and retake the country after the exit of ISAF troops, it is not hard to imagine will quickly reconstitute autonomous militias like these. Credit: Derek Henry Flood
In this context, having Pakistan and Qatar broker a settlement which reintegrates the Taliban into Kabul's spare ministry buildings or in the future formally cedes it territory in Pashtun-majority provinces in the south and east to the exclusion of all the other surrounding players in Eurasia may result in a future Afghanistan that resembles elements of the country's unfortunate past.
Derek Henry Flood is a freelance journalist focusing on the Africa, the Middle East and South and Central Asia. He has covered many of the world's conflicts-both major and minor-since 9/11 as a frontline reporter. He blogs at the-war-diaries.com. Follow Derek on Twitter @DerekHenryFlood
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