Afghanistan's myths


	November 30, 2001	atimes.com

Central Asia/Russia

Afghanistan's myths
By Mushahid Hussain

ISLAMABAD - As Afghanistan's second international war in a decade enters a new phase, interesting similarities are emerging between the manner of the Soviets' exit from Kabul in 1989 and the Northern Alliance's entry into the capital this month.

On both occasions, Pakistan was instrumental in helping the United States alter the Afghan status quo - in 1989, in the defeat of the red army, and in 2001 in the ouster of the Taliban. Then, as now, a political vacuum exists in Kabul. The United Nations is seeking to fashion a broad-based administration through the Bonn meeting this week. It is actually one of two meetings that convened on November 27 - one in Germany to fashion a new post-Taliban regime under UN auspices, with most of the non-Taliban factions and groups present, and the other in Islamabad under World Bank auspices for putting together plans for Afghanistan's reconstruction.

In Pakistan today, as in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, a military regime presides over the country. Both military rulers, General Zia ul-Haq and President General Pervez Musharraf, were treated as virtual pariahs by two US presidents before "new realities" propelled a somersault in United States policy toward Pakistan.

In January 1978, US president Jimmy Carter declined a stopover in Pakistan in between trips to Iran and India, where he officially elevated India to the status of a "pre-eminent power in South Asia". In March 2000, president Bill Clinton, after five days of euphoria in India, where he granted New Delhi the status of a "natural ally" in the emerging "special relationship" between India and the US, reluctantly agreed to a five-hour stopover in Islamabad. There, he refused to be publicly photographed with Musharraf.

But the similarity between the two situations ends there, because the second Afghanistan war is being conducted in a qualitatively changed regional scenario.

The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), through its 100-man Afghan Task Force, ran the largely covert war of the 1980s, unlike the current role of US troops via bases in Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Russia, China, India and Iran are de facto allies of the United States, helping America defeat the Taliban and trace Osama bin Laden.

South Asia now has two nuclear-armed adversarial neighbors, Pakistan and India, with opposing positions on the insurgency in Kashmir that began after the Red Army's pullout from Afghanistan.

The biggest question lurking in the minds of Pakistanis is whether America's "rediscovery" of Pakistan will be sustained this time. They ask if Washington will tread a different path from the past, when the United States simply walked away from Afghanistan after the defeat of the Soviet Union in 1989.

According to The New York Times last week, among the things that US Secretary of State Colin Powell has committed US diplomats to do, "even before the military work [in Afghanistan] is fully accomplished", is to help assemble a Muslim-led peacekeeping force in Afghanistan and establish a stable government there, repay and reassure the government of Pakistan, try to defuse the explosive border dispute in Kashmir and seek a new relationship with Iran.

This ambitious regional agenda has endorsement from the European Union as well. The Belgian prime minister, in Pakistan after a visit to India, told Musharraf during a media conference on November 24 that "2002 may be the year for a political solution of Kashmir dispute" given the "new international environment".

A new beginning on a realistic basis between Pakistan and United States is only possible if both countries come to terms with the past, shedding the self-serving myths peddled to promote failed policies. A couple of these myths are noteworthy.

The first myth is that the "joint jihad" in Afghanistan by the United States and Pakistan had not begun before the entry of Soviet troops in Kabul in 1979.

As a 1998 interview of Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to a French newspaper, said, "According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahideen began in 1980, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. But the reality is completely otherwise: It was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul," Brzezinski was quoted as saying. "And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention."

In other words, Afghanistan had already emerged as a pawn in the superpower "Great Game" prior to the Soviet invasion, with the US strategy to trap Moscow by trying to "induce" the Red Army to intervene. Brzezinski added that the "secret operation was an excellent idea, [as] we now had the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War".

When the interviewer for France's Le Nouvel Observateur asked Carter's national security adviser "do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?", he gave a very matter-of-fact answer, reflecting a cold calculation of the US interest: "What is most important for the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"

In other words, if the price for the United States to achieve the break-up of the Soviet Union was in the form of the Taliban's emergence, which US policies helped create, then it was worth it from their perspective.

The second myth pertains to the Taliban and bin Laden. When the Taliban emerged on the scene in 1996, the United States saw in Taliban control a semblance of stability that met two key US goals - an environment conducive to US-built oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia via Afghanistan to Pakistan, and in countering Iran on its western flank.

In fact, Robin Raphel, then US assistant secretary of state for South Asia, through her visits to Kandahar to meet the Taliban leadership and Zalmay Khalilzad, now Bush's main adviser on Afghanistan, advocated in 1997 that the "United States should engage the Taliban" since "the Taliban do not practice the kind of anti-US-style fundamentalism practiced by Iran".

At the time, bin Laden, apart from being a CIA-backed holy warrior against the "Evil Empire" during the Cold War as late as 1996, or even 1998, was not yet on the top of the US hit list for the Muslim world. US media reports say that Sudan was willing to extradite bin Laden but that the Clinton administration then felt that "it was lacking a case to indict him in US courts".

Likewise, the interview last month of the former Saudi head of intelligence, Prince Turki al Faisal, by a Saudi newspaper, has not been refuted - it said that just before the US cruise-missile attacks on Afghanistan in August 1998, Taliban supremo Mullah Omar was apparently agreeable to handing bin Laden to a third country.

If both Pakistan and the United States accept that their past policies failed, a realistic premise for new policies toward Afghanistan and a new bilateral relationship will have been set.

(Inter Press Service)