Discussing the Afghan Imbroglio (1998)

The Afghan Imbroglio

For most of the modern age, Afghanistan has consistently been used as a
pawn in world power games. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, both Britain and Russia vied for control over the volatile
mix of tribes that constitute that great country. It is the fact of
Afghanistan's ethnic heterogeneity - it is the home of Pashtuns,
Tadjiks, Uzbeks, Turkomens, Baluchis and Hazaras - that has combined
with a legacy of imperial interference to impede the formation of a
coherent 'Afghan' identity and exacerbate her historical plight.

Like so many so -called 'third world' countries, Afghanistan's path to
development has been shockingly swift and often brutal. Ideological
prejudices held by successive central governments have led to short
bursts of industrialization which attempted to drag ordinary Afghans
along a route to an inorganic Western model of civilization. These
attempts at 'modernization' have often had the opposite effect to the
one intended, as a resentful rural population has frequently risen in
revolt, and remains largely uneducated and poverty-stricken to this
day. Whatever their political hue, governments in Kabul have
consistently sought to extend their power throughout the countryside,
with similarly disastrous results.

The troubles we in the West commonly associate with Afghanistan began
in earnest in the late 'sixties. Economic distress culminating in
famine racked the country, and in the cities student protest movements
coalesced around two opposing ideologies - Islamicism and Marxism. Many
notable figures, such as the radical Islamic fundamentalist Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar and the future President Najibullah, were undergraduates at
this time. The stage was being set for the decades of civil strife that
followed.

Traditionally, the Afghan monarchy had existed as a bulwark of
stability against the ravages of time, but the modern age had truly
arrived. King Zahir Shah, who vacillated and dithered as the crisis
worsened, was increasingly attacked by these dynamic young zealots as a
relic of the past, and was finally deposed in 1973 by one General
Mohammed Daoud - an 'Afghan Nationalist' backed by Soviet arms and
money, who modelled himself vaguely upon Nasser. This was the
flashpoint that led the deeply religious rural clans to take up arms
against what they saw as an un-Islamic central government.

Daoud proved to be a vain and unstable character that Moscow began to
view as increasingly incapable of pacifying the notorious Afghan
countryside. He himself was deposed by the Marxist PDPA (Peoples
Democratic Party of Afghanistan) in 1978, an act which was thereafter
glorified by the Party's ideologues as the 'Saur (April) Revolution'.
Since its inception the PDPA had been racked by endemic faction
fighting, and was at that stage under the control of the ultra-left
Leninist Khalq ('The People'). The new President Nur Mohammad Taraki
instigated one of the most appalling regimes to date in Afghanistan:
torture was routinely and casually perpetrated against many sections of
society that Khalq declared to be its enemies; troops entered the
countryside to swiftly and abruptly alter centuries-old land ownership
agreements - which Muslims hold to be sacred - in a matter of minutes;
drunken PDPA supporters publicly burned the Koran. The military
campaign of the rural Mojahedin (soldiers of the holy war), sparked by
Daoud's takeover, was intensified.

The Soviet government became increasingly concerned that they had
backed another chaotically undisciplined group, and sided with the more
pragmatic Parcham ('The Banner') faction, which sought an accommodation
with the urban middle classes. President Hafizullah Amin, who had
deposed and murdered Taraki several months earlier during a power
struggle within Khalq, was assassinated and the balance of power
shifted in December 1979, this time backed up by a full-scale Soviet
invasion. The international ramifications of the Afghan wars were
becoming increasingly apparent, as Pakistan, which sought a reliable
ally in preparation for a possible future conflict with India, stepped
up it's support for the most radical of the Mojahedin factions,
Hezb-i-Islami (Party of Islam). A United States now led by the hawkish
Reagan flooded the region with arms. The imperial interference begun by
Britain and Czarist Russia was being continued in a new, modern
form.

The nine long years of war that followed were to be one of the
contributing factors behind Perestroika in the USSR, and the Red Army
commenced an ignominious withdrawal in 1988. Against all the odds, it
took a further four years for the regime of Dr Najibullah (who
succeeded the first Parchamite President, Babrak Karmal, in 1986) to
finally collapse, but peace was still to be a distant prospect. The
leader of the large and relatively moderate Jamiat-i-Islami (Society of
Islam), the French-educated intellectual Burhanubbin Rabbani, became
President amidst an army of Mojahedin that had for twenty years been
too preoccupied with fighting the common enemy to concern themselves
with the development of shared goals.

Once again, the age-old dichotomy between city and countryside began to
re-emerge. A new Islamic sect composed of ultra-reactionary students
seeking the establishment of a repressive theocracy, the Taleban,
declared war against a Kabul regime that in its view represented a
watered-down version of atheistic Marxism. The inevitable collapse of
the Rabbani government and the seizure of power by the Taleban in 1996
(which led to the shooting of Najibullah, who had sought refuge in the
UN compound in 1992, and the macabre public hanging of his body) was
followed by a new phase of civil war that continues to this day, with
the ever-present shifts in allegiance and fortune that have
characterized Afghanistan for decades. The Taleban is now opposed by a
predominantly northern army of former communists and disgruntled rural
chieftains originally led by a General Dostun, but now, since Dostun's
defeat and exile in Turkey, by the charismatic veteran Mojahedin
commander Ahmed Shah Masood.

Today, in 1998, the Western news media is curiously silent about
Afghanistan. The Cold War is over, the American and Soviet presence has
long since disappeared. The major powers seem to be strangely
unconcerned with facilitating a peace process in that country. It would
seem as if, as ever, now that she is no longer of strategic importance
to the West, she has abandoned to a terrible fate. Ordinary Afghans
care little about the kind of regime that exists in Kabul, as long as
they are free to carry on their age-old traditions of praying, working,
feasting and going to market. Perhaps Afghanistan's best hope lies in
the restoration of the monarchy, as her path along the road to
modernity has been a brutal one, and in any case, a western-style
parliamentary democracy means little to an overwhelmingly rural nation
of herders and farmers. The world must wake up and recognize the
mistakes of the past, and help them achieve their goal of a peaceful
and happy Afghanistan.

Postscript (2003): I failed throughout this article to adequately draw
the readers' attention to the vagaries of ethnic rivalry and tribalism
in Afghan politics. It is useful to point out at this stage that the
'Northern Alliance' tended to attract Turkic peoples such as the Uzbeks
and Tadjiks, whereas the Taleban was almost entirely Pashtun.