Asia Times: The Taliban are America's new communists


	August 15, 2001	atimes.com

Central Asia/Russia

The Taliban are America's new communists
By Mushahid Hussain

ISLAMABAD - The last battle of the 20th Century's Cold War was fought over Afghanistan, with an international coalition that included most of the West, led by the United States, the Muslim world (particularly Pakistan, plus Saudi Arabia and Egypt) and China.

Iran, while opposed to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, stayed out since the United States was supporting the Iraqi invasion of Iran during 1980-1988.

This American-supported jihad (holy war) against "godless communism" lasted from 1979 until 1989, when the Red Army was forced to withdraw from Afghanistan. Two years later, in 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

Ironically, the first big battle of the 21st Century also centers on Afghanistan, is again led by the United States, and focuses on jihad, but with an important difference: How to counter it through yet another international coalition, bigger and broader than the one before. The enemy is the Taliban, rulers of Afghanistan, who harbor dangerous "foreign guests" like Osama bin Laden. This emerging informal coalition of countries that broadly have a shared fear and antipathy toward the Taliban includes the United States, Russia, China, the Central Asian states, Iran, Turkey and India. Pakistan, as a friend of Afghanistan, is out of group.

The new buzzword is "terrorism", and the main instrument to combat it is the United Nations Security Council, which on July 30 passed a key resolution to station monitors on the Afghan border to ensure compliance with an earlier resolution for sanctions against the Taliban for harboring Osama bin Laden and allowing "terrorist training camps on its territory". Fifteen experts from what the United Nations calls the Sanctions Enforcement Support Team will be based in neighboring Pakistan, China, Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, to ensure that sanctions regarding trade, travel and arms supplies for the Taliban are being stringently applied. The team's main focus would be on Pakistan, the only neighbor to have diplomatic relations with the Taliban regime.

This latest pressure, similar to strict sanctions on Iraq, comes on Afghanistan as it seeks to cope with the worst drought in recent history, which has dislocated 5 million people plus 4 million refugees based in Pakistan and Iran. There are also more than 10 million small arms in circulation that fuel the long-standing civil war in Afghanistan.

The United States and the United Nations condemn the Taliban for allegedly supporting terrorism, but praise the regime for banning poppy cultivation. In her August 2 statement in Islamabad after meeting Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan in Islamabad Mullah Zaeef, the US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Christina Rocca welcomed the Taliban's ban on poppy cultivation and offered US$1.5 million to the United Nations to help the Taliban sustain the ban. After their meeting, the first high-level contact between the Taliban and the Bush administration, the Taliban ambassador proclaimed: "We do not consider the United States as our enemy, Russia is our enemy."

At the same time that the United States is busy building a new coalition against the Taliban, leading American experts on Afghanistan like Selig Harrison, a senior research fellow at the Century Foundation in Washington, has accused the Central Intelligence Agency of having "actively encouraged the creation of Taliban" in 1994. This, he said, was probably as a counter to Iran, which was then seen as a "threat" to US regional interests, adding that the "CIA made the historic mistake of encouraging Islamic groups from all over the world to come to Afghanistan".

Notwithstanding these ironies, the United States' objectives on Afghanistan are a continuity of the Clinton approach with some minor differences. The anti-Taliban alignment is being promoted in a multilateral framework, unlike the Clinton administration's "go it alone" approach, whose hallmark was the August 1998 bombings of Afghanistan and the Sudan for their alleged sponsorship of terrorism.

This time, the focus is the United Nations, with two resolutions already in place, and the G-8 summit in Genoa, which also passed a resolution against the Taliban on July 26. The European Union has already invited the Taliban's principal adversary, commander of the opposition's Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Masood, to address the European Parliament, according him "legitimacy" as an alternative to the Taliban that rules most of Afghanistan.

The United States is also building close security ties with two of Afghanistan's Central Asian neighbors. The commander-in-chief of the US Central Command (CENTCOM), General Tommy Franks, visited Tajikistan in May and US-Tajikistan military cooperation, including training, is in the cards. The United States and Uzbekistan may also have a joint working group on terrorism, with a focus on Afghanistan, along similar lines that the United States has established with Russia and India.

In another departure from the Clinton approach, the Bush administration is trying to play down its "obsession" with bin Laden, endeavoring to focus on "the issue [of terrorism] rather than the individual".

Washington enforces punitive measures on the diplomatic front, while humanitarian assistance that is worth $132 million for refugee relief and rehabilitation for drought victims continues, making the United States the largest single humanitarian aid donor to Afghanistan. US actions in this regard run parallel to the Russia-China initiative called the "Shanghai Six", which established in May an anti-terrorism center at Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyyzstan, with Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan being the other members of this grouping.

Issues such as the destruction of Buddhist statues in Bamiyan province of Afghanistan, followed by the controversy over identity markings for Hindus and other non-Muslims in Afghanistan, and now the row over the arrest of 24 aid workers of the non-governmental organization (NGO) Shelter Now International, have not helped the Taliban. International pressure is likely to increase on the Taliban. Only time will tell whether sanctions will prove affective, or be counter-productive as in the case of Iraq.

(Inter Press Service)

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