In its keenness to assert the primacy of its national interests
and strategic objectives through any means, the US has over the years, through the covert
operations of its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), made heroes out of surrogates, whose
only qualification was that they were prepared to do its bidding. Ultimately, it ended up
with the mortification of seeing these heroes of yesterday becoming the Frankensteins of
today, endangering the very US national interests to protect which they were initially
created.
Afghanistan provides a good case study of this. The dramatis
personae in the two-decade-old Afghan tragedy --whether Osama bin Laden and his
terrorists' mafia, Mullah Mohammed Omar Akhund and his Taliban Shoora or the innumerable
"Mujahideen" commanders playing havoc in different parts of the country in the
name of Islam--- were all the original creations of the CIA, ably assisted by Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
Through their depredations, they have made Afghanistan perhaps
the only country in the world to register a decline in population with that of Kabul
reduced by half and with the largest proportion, anywhere in the world, of widows with no
male relatives.
They have turned Afghanistan into a breeding ground of medieval
obscurantist forces which have been spreading their tentacles to Dagestan and Chechnya in
Russia, the Central Asian Republics (CARs), Xinjiang in China, Pakistan itself, Kashmir in
India, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Southern Philippines.
They have made Iran, hitherto the bete noir of the US, appear, in
comparison, like a model, moderate Islamic state, and sought to frustrate the US strategic
objectives and business interests in the Central Asian region.
And they have created for the US State Department a situation
where the choice is not among various policy options, but policy nightmares.
The way the Taliban, which was backed by the US from its creation
in July,1994, to its capture of Kabul in September,1996, has heaped indignities on the
women of Afghanistan and reduced them to less than human beings in the name of Islam, is
without parallel anywhere else in the world.
While justifying the attitude of the Taliban towards women's role
in society, the Taliban Ambassador in Islamabad, Maulvi Saeedur Rahman Haqqani, said at a
seminar at Islamabad on May 2: "In Muslim societies, we respect and cherish our
women. We treat them like precious jewels and keep them in an ornamental box."
What is the ground reality?
Under the pre-1992 Najibullah Government, 70 per cent of the
academics--members of the teaching faculties of schools and
colleges--- 60 per cent of the medical personnel and 30 per cent of the Government
servants in Afghanistan were women. They played an active role in politics and diplomacy
too.
This high percentage was due to the spread of higher education
amongst women and also due to the shortage of men to occupy civilian jobs because of the
enlistment of a large number of men in the army to fight the "mujahideen".
After its capture of Kabul in 1996, the Taliban removed all girls
from educational institutions, banned any fresh induction and sacked all women from jobs
where they might have to interact with men. They are now allowed only in those jobs in
which their interaction would be only with other women. Wearing of burqa was made
obligatory.
The Taliban has promised to at least partially restore the
educational rights of women after the war ends and after the economic situation improves.
One doesn't know when that would be.
The result:
* Increase in instances of suicide
by war widows unable to support their children.
* Before 1992, Kabul did not have
a single woman beggar. Today, it has an estimated 35,000, most of them children and
widows--former academics, doctors, nurses and government servants--with no other means of
feeding their children. Visitors to Kabul have remarked on their shock and indignation at
the Taliban when they discovered that behind many a burqa of beggars approaching them for
alms stood an English or French or Russian-speaking woman, highly educated with a
sophisticated and cultured mind. They have been heartlessly sacked for no other reason
than that they are women. The Mullahs' anger is particularly directed at women who had
their higher education in Hindu India, Communist USSR or the "decadent" West,
where, according to the Mullahs, women are allowed to "run around like wild
animals."
* Some Western non-Government
Organisations (NGOs) started a vocational training centre where the children of these
widows could be trained in some craft so that they could support themselves and their
mothers. The Taliban has banned the enrollment of girls in this centre. As a Pakistani
columnist has remarked: " It would seem that for the Taliban, training boys and girls
together would be unislamic, but letting them beg together in the streets is not so."
* Women are banned from witnessing
any sports meet. The only public gathering at which their presence is allowed and even
encouraged is to witness the stoning to death of convicts for adultery.
The anti-woman attitude of the Taliban was evident even from
October,1994, onwards when it started curtailing the rights of women in town after town
captured by it, but the outside world reacted against it only after the Mullahs started
enforcing their orders not only against Afghan women in the entire territory under their
control, but also against foreign women working in the offices of international
organisations and NGOs after the capture of Kabul.
Next to women, the Shias have been a major target of the
brutalities and indignities of the Wahabi-Sunni-dominated Taliban Shoora and its militia
called Lashkar Mohammadi. Public observance of Moharrum has been banned. So too the Shia
tradition of their women joining the men in prayers during Moharrum and visits to graves
of their relatives.
The "News" of Pakistan (April 26) has quoted Mr.Ghulam
Mohiuddin, a Shia leader of Afghanistan, as stating as follows: " Even the Hindus in
India allow the Shias to practise their religion, but the Taliban are denying us this
basic right."
After the Taliban captured Herat on the Iran border and,
subsequently, the Bamiyan province, both areas, where the Shias were in a majority with a
large sprinkling of Ismailis, there were reportedly large-scale massacres of the Shias and
forcible re-settlement of the Shias in the Sunni-majority villages in the rest of
Afghanistan and their replacement by Sunnis brought to Herat and Bamiyan from other
provinces. This is being done to reduce the Shias to a minority in their traditional
homelands.
The Taliban has only three achievements to its
credit---improvement of law and order, restoration of electricity supply in towns and
resumption of farming in 70 per cent of the cultivable land in the country.
Better law and order has been through rigorous enforcement of
Islamic punishments such as amputation of arms and stoning and crushing to death. Such
punishments have been at tremendous cost to human dignity. Some Pakistani analysts have
pointed out that such punishments have been more frequent against non-Pakhtuns and Shias
than against Pakhtuns and Sunnis.
The Taliban's agricultural policy has benefitted poppy
cultivation more through priority in fertiliser distribution to poppy farmers than
cultivators of other agricultural products.
While offences such as theft, housebreaking, murder, rape,
adultery, sodomy etc are immediately punished after a sham of a trial, there is no Islamic
punishment for heroin production and smuggling.
In response to outside pressure, the Taliban has destroyed about
35 heroin refineries in its territory, but there are many more left untouched. It has
refused to reduce the area under poppy cultivation on the ground that the 10 per cent
agricultural tax is its major source of revenue.
Another well-known--but not admitted-- source of revenue is
heroin smuggling. There is a strongly suspected nexus involving the poppy farmers, all of
them Afghan citizens, the heroin producers, all of them Pakistani drug barons resident in
the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and in the Federally-Administered Tribal areas
(FATA) of Pakistan and 30 Mullahs constituting the Kandahar-based Taliban Shoora with
Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Amir, at the top.
The only effective arm of the Taliban administration has been the
militia, which has brought 90 per cent of the country under its control within five years,
and the Ministry for the Promotion of Islamic Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. A new
intelligence agency has been created and placed under the direct control of the Amir.
The militia is a hotchpotch of students from the madrasas in the
NWFP, Balochistan and Sindh, former Pakhtun officers and soldiers of the late Najibullah's
Soviet-trained armed forces and Pakistani ex-servicemen and serving military personnel,
given leave of absence by the Pakistani military, to enable them assist the Taliban.
During important battles, the militia is also assisted by
Pakistani militant organisations such as the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the virulently
anti-Shia Sipah Sahaba Pakistan and the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Arab volunteers of bin
Laden's Al Quaida.
Despite its hotchpotch character, the discipline and religious
motivation of the militia have remained surprisingly strong and it has fought extremely
well against the forces of the Northern Alliance led by Gen. Ahmed Shah Masood.
The large casualties suffered by the militia during the battles
for Mazar-e-Sharif in 1997 and 1998 and the battles in Bamiyan in 1998 and 1999 do not
appear to have affected its morale. However, there have been reports of difficulties being
faced by the Taliban in making fresh recruitment to make up for the losses--particularly
from the Durrani sub-tribe of the Pakhtuns, which has been the main recruiting ground till
now.
The rest of the administration is in a chaotic state. There is no
functioning central bank; nor are there any gold reserves and officially accounted for
foreign reserves. The tax collection machinery is ineffective.
There is no public scrutiny of Government policies, decisions and
actions, no open discussion of the state budget, no policy and decision making
infrastructure. Policy and decision options are not examined for their likely impact on
Afghanistan's future and on its relations with the rest of the world before being adopted.
The Amir and his associates in the Shoora look upon themselves as
on a divine mission and there is a touching, but disturbing faith in divine intervention
to help them out of problems. Since they have convinced themselves that they have been the
beneficiaries of divine guidance, they do not feel the need for human guidance and advice.
The non-clerical, civilian bureaucracy has consequently been
reduced to merely an instrument for carrying out the decisions of the clerics, without any
voice in policy and decision making.
This delusion of a divine mission has also made the Amir
insensitive to public opinion not only inside the country, but also in the rest of the
world. The Amir is strongly motivated by the Pakhtun concept of "izzat"
(self-respect) and tends to look upon any suggestion of concessions to international
opinion as an affront to his "izzat".
This should explain his obstinate refusal to respond to outside
pressures for controlling the spread of terrorism, to expel bin Laden and to control
heroin production and smuggling.
Afghanistan, under the Taliban, has two capitals --the
administrative capital at Kabul, which is the seat of the Government which interacts with
foreign interlocutors, and the spiritual capital at Kandahar, where the Amir, his Shoora
and the intelligence agency headquarters are located. The Amir hopes that Kandahar would
one day become the spiritual capital of triumphant Wahabi-Sunni forces in Dagestan,
Chechnya, Xinjiang, Pakistan, Kashmir, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Southern Philippines.
The Amir hails from village Nodeh and grew up in village Singesar
in the Mewand District near Kandahar. Mewand is as holy and historic a place for the
Pakhtuns of Afghanistan as Kosovo is for the Serbs. According to Afghan historians, it was
at Mewand, that the Pakhtuns trounced the advancing British troops.
Malalai, a Pakhtoon woman of Mewand, earned a heroic reputation
by fighting shoulder to shoulder with her male brethren and rallying them against the
British troops. What an irony of fate that the descendants of this heroic woman should
find themselves chained inside a burqa by the descendants of her male brethren!
It was as a protector of women's honour that the Amir won the
admiration of the Pakhtuns of Kandahar in July, 1994, when he gathered a group of boys
from the local madrasas, raided the house of a local "Mujahideen" commander, who
had become notorious as a rapist, and killed him. From a protector, he has since
degenerated into an oppressor of women's rights.
The fact that the 35-year-old Amir, who is affectionately known
as the one-eyed Amir because of his having practically lost an eye in the war against the
Soviets, hailed from the legendary Mewand District gave him a halo in the eyes of the
simple, God-fearing, proud Pakhtuns and they followed his commands implicitly.
Instead of leading them into the new millennium to make
Afghanistan once again a tolerant, progressive Islamic state with equal rights for women
and men, for Muslims and non-Muslims, for Pakhtuns and non-Pakhtuns, for Sunnis and Shias,
he has chosen to lead them back to the middle ages in the name of God.
The Amir is a man with little exposure to the world outside
Kandahar and its environs. It is said he has never travelled to the non-Pakhtun areas. He
has never been to Kabul since it was captured by the Taliban in September,1996. He hardly
knows Pakistan outside Peshawar.
He lets the Mullahs of the Government in Kabul interact with
domestic as well as foreign interlocutors for finding a solution to the tragic war and for
ending the isolation of Afghanistan in the international community. Since they do not know
the Amir's mind while negotiating, one has the strange spectacle of the interlocutors from
Kabul reaching agreements in principle to subsequently find these agreements rejected by
the Amir. This has been happening repeatedly.
Pakistan's influence in Afghanistan is restricted to the
administration in Kabul, which has many Pakistani advisers. Its influence over the Amir is
uncertain.
The Prime Minister, Mr.Nawaz Sharif, is intelligent and rational
enough to realise that the obstinacy of the Amir and his Kandahar-based Shoora in dealing
with issues such as the deportation of bin Laden, women's rights etc is creating serious
difficulties for Pakistan in its relations with the US, that the anti-Shia and anti-Iran
policies have caused a set-back to Pakistan's relations with Iran and that the Taliban's
obscurantism has frustrated Pakistani aspirations of emerging as the gateway of Central
Asia.
However, he is unable to assert himself because there are too
many Pakistani cooks spoiling the Afghan broth. On the one side are the religious
fundamentalist parties with Maulana Fazlur Rahman of the Jamiat Ulema Islam (JUI) in the
forefront egging on the Amir and his Shoora to stick to their hard line. On the other side
are the Intelligence Bureau (IB), the ISI, the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI),
the present army chief, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and his Chief of the General Staff (CGS),
Lt.Gen. Mohammad Aziz.
During her second tenure as Prime Minister, Mrs. Benazir Bhutto,
who distrusted the ISI, let the IB working under the supervision of her Interior Minister,
Maj.Gen. (retd) Nasirullah Babar, handle the Amir and his Taliban. Maj.Gen. Babar, a
trusted officer of her father, the late Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, was the head of the Afghan
desk of the ISI under her father and claims that he could make the Afghan Pakhtuns dance
to Pakistan's tune.
Mr.Sharif transferred the responsibility to the ISI. The then
Maj.Gen. Mohammad Aziz, who was the No. 2 in the ISI, also directly supervised the Afghan
desk.
When Mr.Sharif appointed Lt.Gen. Khwaja Ziauddin, who comes from
a family of Pakistan Muslim League loyalists, as the DG of the ISI in October last, Gen.
Musharraf, who distrusts Ziauddin, had Maj.Gen.Aziz promoted as Lt.Gen. and posted as the
CGS instead of posting an already serving Lt.Gen. to this important post. Simultaneously,
he had the responsibility for handling the Taliban transferred to the DMI and reportedly
ordered that Lt.Gen. Aziz would continue to supervise this work.
Addressing the English-speaking Union of Pakistan at Karachi on
April 13, the army chief said that the collapse of the Taliban would lead to a
disintegration of Afghanistan, which would not be in Pakistan's interest. He is of the
view that Pakistan should continue to back the Taliban unmindful of US pressures and let
time moderate the policies of the Mullahs.
Since the middle of last year, there have been indications of
unhappiness amongst the Mullahs of the administration in Kabul, who have to bear the brunt
of the international criticism regarding the Taliban's policies on bin Laden and women's
rights, over the unbending obstinacy of the Amir and his Mullahs of Kandahar.The Shoora
was even reported to have foiled a coup attempt and made a number of arrests.
Mullah Mohammad Rabbani, the head of the interim ruling council
in Kabul, who occupied the No 2 position in the Shoora and who was projected as the most
trusted man of the Amir, was reported to have developed differences with the Amir when the
latter rebuked him for not taking a strong line during the visit of Mr.Bill Richardson,
the then US Permanent Representative to the UN and now the Energy Secretary, to Kabul in
April, 1998.
It is said that since then, Mullah Rabbani no longer enjoys the
same trust of the Amir as before and spends more time in Dubai for medical treatment than
for doing his job in Kabul. There were also unconfirmed reports of his having been
replaced by Mullah Abdul Kabir, Governor of Nangarhar. In this connection, our earlier
note titled "Osama bin Laden: Rumblings in Afghanistan" of Dec.22,1998, may
kindly be seen.
The Shias of not only Afghanistan, but also Pakistan have been
seething with anger against the Amir for the massacres of the Shias of Herat and Bamiyan.
The Shias have a long memory for atrocities perpetrated on them as one saw in the death of
Zia-ul-Haq in the plane crash of August,1988.
The NWFP has many Hazaras, the same tribe to which the Shias of
Bamiyan belong, and the Hazaras are known to bide their time, even if it meant years,
before avenging atrocities committed on them.
The recent (August 24) unsuccessful attempt by unidentified
elements allegedly to kill the Taliban Amir at Kandahar through an explosion outside his
house should not, therefore, have come as a surprise to those having their ears close to
the ground in Afghanistan and the NWFP to detect signs of a possible tremor, if not a
quake..
B.RAMAN
(
4-9-99)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet
Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies,
Chennai. E-Mail address: corde@vsnl.com )
