Will we have to compromise with the Taliban? Kailash Chand draws some difficult lessons from history
Perpetuating the search for a solution in Afghanistan, the defeat of the Taliban through military means is like a foreign country trying to rid Britain of British National Party supporters by armed invasion. The Taliban inherited Osama bin Laden as a poison pill from the past when they came to power in 1996 and have learned a bitter lesson about what it means to lend state support to a prominent terrorist group. It is high time the West encouraged the Afghan government to open the door to those members of the Taliban who are willing to abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens, and facilitated moderate elements of the Taliban to share power in a democratic Afghan system. A solution of this sort would provide the West with an honourable exit from the Afghan trap. It would also provide immense relief to the Afghan population, the helpless victims of an endless war.
The people of Afghanistan have been the victims of great power rivalry and foreign occupation ever since Ahmed Shah Durrani founded the state in 1747. Afghan society is traditionally divided on ethnic grounds. Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group in the country. However, the population also consists of Tajiks, Hazaras, Aimak, Uzbeks, Turkman and other small groups. This has been the root cause of most feuds. External powers, ranging from the Persians, imperial Britain, tsarist Russia, Nazi Germany, the United States and the Soviet Union have played out their great rivalries on the hapless Afghans.
The Russian invasion in 1979 started all the terrible problems which are still afflicting Afghanistan today. The Soviets sent troops into Afghanistan for a number of reasons. First, they wished to expand their influence in Asia. They also wanted to preserve the Communist government that was established in the 1970s, but was collapsing because of lack of support other than in the military. And the Soviets wanted to protect their interests in Afghanistan from Iran and Western nations.
The Americans were determined to “do a Vietnam” on the Russians. In this enterprise, Pakistan became the staging post and a trusted ally for pumping in arms and funds for the Afghan freedom fighters.
Approximately one million Afghans lost their lives as the Red Army tried to impose control for its puppet Afghan government. Up to two million still live outside their homeland – the largest refugee population in the world. Millions more fled abroad as refugees. By 1979, guerrilla opposition forces, popularly called Mujahidin (“Islamic warriors”), were active in much of the country, fighting both Soviet forces and the Soviet-backed Afghan government with active support of the American CIA and the ISI of Pakistan.
The Soviet Union fought for a decade in Afghanistan and ended up in a morass and humiliation. In 1989, after the Soviet withdrawal, the government steadily lost ground to the guerrilla forces. In early 1992, Kabul was captured and the guerrilla alliance set up a new government consisting of a 50-member ruling council. Burhanuddin Rabbani was named as the interim president. In late 1994, a militia of Pashtun Islamic fundamentalist students, the Taliban, emerged as an increasingly powerful force. But who, precisely, are they?
Recent studies have pinpointed their origin to the infamous ISI, which carefully selected young Afghan refugees living in Pakistan, and to their being educated in Islamic Madarasas placed under the overall control of a certain Mullah Ahmed. He not only taught them the tenets of Jihad, but also combined it with their military training under the military wing of the ISI. The money poured in from Osama bin Laden and the Arabs of the Middle East, besides Libya and the perennial sources of drug trafficking.
The Taliban systematically reduced Afghanistan to a medieval Islam period by enforcing the wearing of the burqa for women, debarring them from basic education and imposing the Koranic blasphemy law. From then on, the country served as the base for terrorists who attacked American citizens on American soil on September 11 2001. It also harboured their associates.
Then Americans entered Afghanistan after September 11. The Taliban was overthrown, but its guerrilla war goes on.
The history of Afghanistan says that no power, neither Britain in the past nor the Soviet Union in modern times, has been able to discipline, much less suppress, the defiant tribal groups. Foreign troops are only the grist to their mill to the claim that the aim is to curb their religion, Islam.
After nine years, the Americans and their allies are nowhere close to winning the war. Their military strategy is not working and their political strategy has foundered. Psychologically, a defeatist mindset now pervades Western military and political policymakers. And we must not forget that, since 2001, the fighting in Afghanistan has been overshadowed by another war instigated by George W Bush: the conflict in Iraq.
Since 2001, more than 900 Americans have died in Afghanistan, along with more than 240 British personnel. For what noble cause are these young men dying? This is the question being asked with increasing weariness and insistence in Britain and the United States, as well as in the other countries contributing troops to the Afghan war. Now Barack Obama’s plan to send 30,000 more soldiers to help subdue the Taliban, reinforce the corrupt regime in Kabul and to continue drone attacks in Pakistan until the inevitable American retreat, seems an incoherent fantasy.
The military strategy of the West in general and the US in particular in Afghanistan makes no sense unless it is accompanied by a bold political initiative to bring the war to an end by means of a negotiated settlement. Without an urgent political plan to end the fighting — something in the nature of political shock therapy — the war will drag on, costs and casualties will mount and America’s decline, already painfully evident over the past decade, will gather pace.
The signs of America’s waning influence and the rise of emerging powers are everywhere. America, the largest creditor nation, is now the largest borrower in world history. US failures in the “war on terror” have revealed the limitations of American military power, just as its role in provoking the global economic crisis has revealed the shortcomings of American economic leadership.
The US troops and other forces fighting with the Nato alliance in Afghanistan need to know why they are there. Their political leaders should make it clear that they are not there either to fight Pashtun nationalism, nor are they there to turn the shaky status quo in Afghanistan into permanent security for all the population. Neither of these aims is achievable.
The West needs a credible strategy for stabilising Afghanistan and for drawing support away from the minority core elements of the Taliban, such as Mullah Mohammed Omar and the conservative junta that took power in Afghanistan in 1996 and harboured terrorists headed by Osama Bin Laden.
Gordon Brown and Barack Obama need to push for a national unity government in Kabul to broaden its base of support and help develop a more decentralised administration of a country that has always been a loose collection of tribes and districts. Such decentralisation would allow the West to spread its resources to regional leaders rather than concentrating them in the hands of Hamid Karzai and his clique.
A power-sharing deal will have to done with the Taliban (not all members of the Taliban are terrorists) if Afghanistan is to have any semblance of a peaceful future. Most Taliban fighters, unlike al Qaida, are indigenous Afghans and are not likely to leave the country.
The fact that many of the Taliban are both peripheral and indigenous means that, if Afghanistan is to build a participative political process, more moderate members of the Taliban will have to be included. Without that, nothing short of a miracle can prevent an ignominious and tragic defeat for the world’s remaining superpower in a place that is often referred to as “the graveyard of empires”.
