AFGHANISTAN: PAKISTAN'S BLACK HOLE
by B.Raman
In a special issue brought out in 1988 on the state of
affairs in the Northern Areas (NA) of Pakistan (Gilgit and Baltistan), the
"Herald", the prestigious monthly journal of the
"Dawn" group of Karachi, had described the NA as the world's
last colony.
Thirteen years later, the world has two colonies today
---the NA and the Taliban-controlled area of Afghanistan--both colonised
and ruled by Pakistan's military- intelligence establishment.
While the NA is ruled directly by this establishment,
the Taliban-controlled Afghan territory, constituting about 90 per cent of
the area of the country, is ruled indirectly through the Taliban, an
organisation of about 50 Mullahs or clerics, most of whom are in their
late 20s or early 30s except its Amir, Mullah Mohammed Omar, who is
believed to be about 40 years old.
Certain common characteristics define these Mullahs:
* Many of them, though stated to be Kandahari Pakhtuns,
feel more comfortable talking in Urdu, the Pakistani official language,
than in Pushtoo, their mother tongue, or Dari or Farsi, taught in the
schools of Afghanistan before 1992 and used for official purposes by the
then Government of the country. This is attributable to the fact that
they were either born in Pakistan or grew up there.
* None of them except the Amir distinguished
themselves in the jehad against the troops of the erstwhile USSR and of
the then President Najibullah before 1992. Accounts by Taliban spokesmen
and its supporters in Pakistan project the Amir as having played a
legendary role in the jehad against the Soviet troops, during which,
according to them, he lost an eye. However, these accounts are
unverifiable and his detractors allege that he actually lost his eye as
a child while playing with other children in Quetta.
* Many of them started their career as clerics in
Pakistan Army units. The late Zia-ul-Haq, a devout Deobandi, had a large
number of clerics inducted into the Education Department to teach the
Holy Koran and the Arabic language to school students and in Army units
to teach the Holy Koran and to conduct the daily prayers. This policy
was continued by the subsequent civilian Governments too under pressure
from the military- intelligence establishment and the religious parties.
Thus, even before their capture of power in Kandahar, Herat, Jalalabad
and Kabul between 1994 and 1996, many of these clerics had a long
history of association with Pakistan's military-intelligence
establishment, having been paid Government servants of Pakistan.
* Having spent practically all their lives in
Pakistan, few of them knew Afghanistan outside Kandahar before they were
placed in power by Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment.
Though the presently Kandahar-based Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Amir, is
now projected as the supreme religious and political leader of the
country, he had never been to even Jalalabad, not to talk of Kabul.
His
knowledge of the world was restricted to Quetta, Peshawar and Kandahar.
* Never having fought before 1994, few of them had any
military experience and hardly ever having lived in the country before
1994, none of them had any political and administrative acumen. The
post-1994 battles, which led to the Taliban ostensibly assuming control
over 90 per cent of the country's territory, were largely waged by
militias, consisting of Pakistani servicemen and ex-servicemen, trained
jehadists of Pakistan's Islamic parties and the dregs of Najibullah's
army and of the various Pakhtun-dominant Mujahideen groups, which had
distinguished themselves in the battles against the Soviet troops in the
1980s. Since the Taliban has had no experience of running the
administration, the administrative chores in the capital Kabul and in
the rest of the country are largely performed by retired Pakistani civil
servants assisted by the dregs of the civil administration of Najibullah.
There has been a clear division of responsibilities
between the clerics of the Taliban on the one side and the serving and
retired public servants of the Pakistani military-intelligence
establishment and civilian Government services on the other. While
retaining a strict control over political, military and administrative
affairs, Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment has left
considerable autonomy of functioning to the Taliban in religious matters.
As a result, the obscurantist fervour of the Taliban has
assumed an autonomous momentum of its own as was seen in its suppression
of the political, economic and social rights of women, its export of
terrorism in the name of jehad to the Central Asian Republics (CARs),
Chechnya and Dagestan in Russia and even Xinjiang in China, much to the
discomfiture of Pakistan, and its recent destruction of the Buddha statues
of Bamiyan.
The Taliban rejects foreign allegations that it is
running training camps for Islamic terrorists in its territory. It does
admit, however, that there are camps where Muslims from different nations
study the Holy Koran and the Sharia, learn to live, work and eat together
and are trained in the use of weapons of self-defence so that they could
protect themselves and their religion. It compares such camps to the
Israeli kibbutz and criticises what it describes as the hypocrisy of the
non-Islamic world in accepting the kibbutz as legitimate centres for
community living and self-defence, but denouncing similar camps in its
territory as terrorist training camps.
It does not deny that Osama bin Laden, reportedly
related by marriage to the Amir, has been given sanctuary and hospitality
in its territory. It points out that the decision to let him come and live
in Afghan territory was taken by the Burhanuddin Rabbani Government, in
consultation with the Benazir Bhutto Government, before it captured Kabul
in September, 1996, and criticises the US for campaigning against the
presence of bin Laden only after the fall of the Rabbani Government.
It
asserts that it keeps a tight watch over his activities to prevent him
from indulging in terrorism and is prepared to hand him over for a trial
only if the trial is to be held according to the Sharia in an Islamic
country.
The Taliban's obscurantist fervour is now threatening to
infect the civil society in Pakistan itself, aggravating the sectarian
divide between the Sunnis and the Shias and the medievalisation and the
warlordisation of the die-hard Islamic elements, particularly in the
Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the North-West Frontier
Province (NWFP). This has consequently given rise to the oft-expressed
fears of a possible Talibanisation and medievalisation of Pakistan itself.
Pakistan is not the first country to be affected by the
contagion of Islamic fundamentalism. Many other Islamic countries had
earlier seen the rise and, sometimes, even triumph of fundamentalist
elements. But, what distinguishes Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan from
that in other countries is the irrational mindset of those in the
forefront of the fundamentalist drive.
This irrational mindset, totally at variance with the
teachings of Islam, is seen in their words and actions such as their
emphasis on the religious duty of the Muslims to acquire weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) not only to defend the Islamic State of which they form
part, but also their religion, their oft-expressed willingness to consider
using WMD, if necessary, to defend Islam, their chattelisation of women
etc.
The Pakistani madrasas, which have been the breeding
ground of this religious irrationality, had infected the clerics too, whom
Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment had constituted into the
Taliban. The establishment turned a blind eye to it in its eagerness to
use the Mullahs to assume control over Afghanistan, but today its folly is
threatening to come home to roost.
The recent action of the Taliban in dynamiting the
statues of the Buddha in Bamiyan is but one more expression of this
irrationality inherited by the Mullahs of the Taliban from their mentors
and masters in Pakistan. Earlier, they enslaved the women of Afghanistan
in the name of Allah, looted the Buddhist cultural treasures in the Kabul
museum in 1996 in the name of Allah, massacred the Uzbecks of
Mazar-e-Sharif and the Shias of Bamiyan in the name of Allah and have now
sought to destroy Allah Himself or rather a manifestation of Allah in the
name of Allah.
The destruction of the statues of the Buddha was not the
first act of cultural and religious vandalism in Afghanistan that is a
veritable Pakistani colony. An equally outrageous act of vandalism was
seen after Najibullah was overthrown in April 1992 and after the Pakistani
led and staffed militias captured Kabul in September, 1996.
In April 1992, after the Mujahideen captured power in
Kabul, Lt.Gen. (retd) Hamid Gul, Ms.Benazir Bhutto's Director-General of
the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in her first tenure, Lt.Gen. (retd)
Javed Nasir, DG, ISI, under Mr.Nawaz Sharif, and many other senior
officers of the military- intelligence establishment rushed to Kabul to
take possession of the Soviet-supplied Scud missiles from the armoury of
the fallen Najibullah's army. After doing so, they helped themselves to
whatever Buddhist artifacts they could lay hands on in the Kabul museum.
Those left behind by them were loaded into Pakistani
army trucks by Pakistani military and intelligence officers in September
1996 and shifted to Pakistan for being sold to international art
smugglers.
Major-General Naseerullah Babar, Ms.Benazir Bhutto's
Interior Minister, and Gen. Pervez Musharraf, her Director-General of
Military Operations (DGMO), justified the shifting of the artifacts to
Pakistan by saying that they would be kept in the safe custody of the
Pakistan Government and restored to Afghanistan once the fighting ended
and a Government enjoying the support of all ethnic groups was set up in
Kabul.
International media and public opinion closed their eyes
to this cultural vandalism reminiscent of the vandalism perpetrated by the
Nazis in the occupied territories during the World War till the
"Guardian" of the UK and the "Sydney Morning Herald"
of Australia exposed it in articles published last year.
Against this background, the absence of feelings of
outrage in large sections of Pakistani society and in the regime itself
and the muted reactions of Gen.Musharraf, the self-styled and self-exalted
Chief Executive of Pakistan, over the destruction of the Buddha statues
should not be a matter of surprise.
What should be a matter of surprise and concern to all
right-thinking persons is that after the initial expression of outrage,
the rest of the world seems to be trying to rationalise, in retrospect,
the Taliban's act of vandalism with the argument that the isolation of the
Taliban and the lack of engagement with it might have contributed to its
outrageous act.
This is exactly what Pakistan and the Taliban want the
world to believe. During a visit to the US in March, Syed Rahmatullah
Hashemi, a senior representative of the Taliban designated as the roving
Ambassador, projected the Taliban's action not as an act of irrationality,
but as an act of rage over the refusal of the UNESCO and some Western
Governments to permit the Taliban to use for drought relief the funds
sanctioned by them for repairing the war-damaged statues of the Buddha.
A
similar argument is being peddled by Pakistan's military- intelligence
establishment. It would be a great tragedy for the civilised world were
the Taliban and Pakistan to escape the consequences of this despicable
act.
It needs to be underlined here that for the last two
years the Taliban's religious shoora had been debating the necessity and
the advisability of destroying the statues. While all the members were
agreed that these statues had no place in an Islamic society, some
Mullahs, with greater exposure to the outside world than the rest, argued
against their destruction lest it further isolate the Taliban. By February
last, this minority view could no longer prevail.
Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment, which
tightly controls the Taliban administration and its intelligence agency,
would have been aware of this debate and of the final decision to dynamite
the statues. If Gen.Musharraf had wanted, he could have prevented it, but
he chose not to intervene lest, by doing so, he antagonised the jehadi
parties in Pakistan.
Though many US analysts project Gen.Musharraf as a
liberal-minded Muslim, throughout his career he was known for his
proximity to the Islamic religious parties, a proximity which was
strengthened during the Afghan war of the 1980s. Since coming to power in
October, 1999, he has shown himself to be amenable to pressure from the
Islamic parties and has been conceding, one after the other, their
demands. Even independent Pakistani analysts say that the religious
parties have won more concessions from the General during his first 18
months in office than they could during the first 18 months of Zia.
The Pakistan Army in general and Gen.Musharraf, in
particular, look upon the role of the Pakistani military-intelligence
establishment in contributing to the defeat of the Soviet troops before
1988, to the overthrow of Najibullah in 1992 and to the capture of the
control of large areas of Afghanistan through the Taliban post-1994 as a
major success story, which, in their perception, has restored the morale
of the establishment shattered by the defeat in the then East Pakistan in
1971. They hailed the perceived success in Afghanistan as the triumph of
their long pursued quest for a strategic depth in that country which could
be exploited to their advantage in the event of another military conflict
with India.
While increasing sections of Pakistani civil society
have started worrying that the so-called strategic depth is inexorably
turning into a strategic black hole from which Pakistan may have
difficulty in extricating itself, if it does not do so immediately, the
military-intelligence establishment has been living in a make-believe
world of its own, as it did in East Pakistan in 1971, thinking that its
policy has started paying dividends. It has been blind to the creeping
deleterious effects of its involvement in Afghanistan on Pakistan's own
future as a nation. Among such effects are:
* Pakistan's continuing diplomatic isolation.
* Its serious economic difficulties to which its
involvement in Afghanistan too has contributed considerably. In an
article in the "Nation" of December 29, 2000, Mr.Ahmed Rashid,
the well-known Afghan expert of Pakistan, described the economic price
being paid by Pakistan for its involvement in Afghanistan as follows:
" The present Taliban war budget is estimated to be around US 100
million dollars. Of that, 60-70% is derived from the revenues of the
smuggling trade, some 30-40% from the drugs trade and about 5-10 % from
direct financial aid. Pakistan has been paying some US 10 million
dollars a year for the salaries of Taliban administrators in Kabul and
other aid, while until 1998 Saudi Arabia was also a major financial
contributor. Terrorist groups also help fund the Taliban. Bin Laden
funds an Arab brigade and helps fund Taliban offensives against the
Northern Alliance. Pakistan and recently Turkmenistan provide other
indirect aid such as fuel, technical help in maintaining airports and
aircraft, restoring electricity in major cities, road construction and
military supplies to keep the Taliban war machine functional."
This
estimate does not include the pay and allowances of the serving and
retired Pakistani military and civilian officers serving in the Taliban-controlled
territory which are directly paid to them by the Islamabad Government
and incorporated in the budget of the General Administration Department
of the Pakistan Government.
* Aggravation of sectarian clashes in Pakistani
territory, with the Sunni terrorist groups operating from sanctuaries in
Afghanistan, with the complicity of the anti-Shia elements in the
Taliban.
* Dangers of a possible Talibanisation of the
Pakistani society.
* The setback to Pakistani hopes of emerging as the
gateway to the external trade of the Central Asian Republics and of
benefiting from energy supplies from the Central Asian Republics.
* Setback in relations with Iran.
Despite the active involvement of serving and retired
Pakistani military personnel in the militias, the Taliban has not so far
been able to overwhelm the militias of the Northern Alliance led by Ahmed
Shah Masood and dislodge them from the 10 per cent of the territory of the
country controlled by them. Though much inferior in numbers and poor in
equipment, the militias led by Ahmed Shah Masood have been fighting an
intrepid war of attrition and making the Taliban militias bleed.
What stands in the way of their reversing the Pakistani
colonisation of the rest of Afghanistan is the lack of support from the
Pakhtuns of southern Afghanistan. It would be incorrect to view the entire
Pakhtun population of southern Afghanistan as supporting the Taliban.
There are undercurrents of anger against the Taliban amongst the Pakhtuns
which manifested themselves in at least one abortive attempt to overthrow
the Taliban after the US bombing of the terrorist training camps in
October, 1998, and a failed attempt to assassinate Mullah Omar in Kandahar
in August 1999, by exploding a car laden with explosives outside his
house. Some of his relatives were killed, but the Amir himself escaped.
The angry sections of the Pakhtuns are reluctant to
co-operate with the Northern Alliance, which consists largely of the
Tadjiks and other non-Pakhtun ethnic minorities. They do not want to be
projected by the Taliban and its Pakistani masters as traitors to their
community.
Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment controls
effectively not only the Taliban militias, but also the newly-established
intelligence agency of the Taliban, as the successor to the Khad, whose
headquarters are established in Kandahar. It is believed that Qari
Ahmadullah, who was heading the newly-established Taliban intelligence
agency and was designated as the Minister for Security, is actually an
officer of the ISI of Pakistan who works in the Taliban under the cover of
a Mullah. He used to work in the Afghan Division of the ISI under Lt.Gen.
Mohammed Aziz, former Deputy Director-General of the ISI before March,
1999, who subsequently became the Chief of the General Staff (CGS) and is
now one of the two Corps Commanders in Lahore.
Through its control of the intelligence agency of the
Taliban, the ISI has been able to detect in advance and frustrate the
efforts of the anti-Taliban sections of the Pakhtuns to organise
themselves and rise against the Amir.
In the absence of support from the Pakhtuns, the
Northern Alliance is thus not in a position to reverse the Pakistani
colonisation and restore the lost independence of Afghanistan, but it has
been able to make the Pakistani involvement a costly adventure for
Pakistan as a nation.
It is said that growing sections of Pakistan's civilian
bureaucracy, particularly those in the Foreign Office and in the economic
Ministries, are convinced that the Afghan involvement is proving to be
counter-productive and that Pakistan's economy would never be able to come
out of its present comatose state and the Pakistan State would never be
able to come out of its diplomatic isolation unless and until the
military-intelligence establishment's involvement in Afghanistan and its
use of the Taliban is ended.
During a conference of Pakistan's regional Ambassadors
held in Islamabad earlier this year, most of the Ambassadors, including,
surprisingly, Mr.Riaz Khokkar, its Ambassador in Beijing, known as a hawk,
were reported to have strongly called for a re-consideration of the Afghan
policy, but their advice was rejected by Gen.Musharraf and his Corps
Commanders. Lt.Gen. Mahmood Ahmad, DG of the ISI, was reported to have
told the Ambassadors: " I have no doubt in my mind that Pakistan's
policy will prevail because Allah is on our side."
This is typical of the wishful-thinking mindset, which
prevails even amongst those senior officers of the military, not generally
identified with the religious fanatics. This mindset makes them believe
that Allah is on the side of Pakistan, whether it be in Jammu &
Kashmir or in Afghanistan or in dealing with their economy and that what
they lack in intelligence, perspicacity and vision, they could make up by
invoking the name of Allah to convert failures into successes.
It is in India's national interest that the independence
of Afghanistan be restored as early as possible, that the country be again
united under an enlightened leadership and that the medieval Taliban is
consigned to the dustbin of history. Before 1992, India has had a long
history of warm friendship with the people and leadership of Afghanistan.
The leaders of all the ethnic groups felt more comfortable with India than
with Pakistan or even with the erstwhile USSR. They used to come to India
for rest and recreation and for their medical treatment.
Large sections of the non-establishment Pakhtuns of the
NWFP and Balochistan, who opposed the partition of India in 1947, always
looked up to India for inspiration and many of their leaders nursed warm
ties of personal friendship with the leaders of the Congress (I), whom
they or their parents had known from the days of the independence
struggle. The present new generation of Congress (I) leaders has not taken
interest in nursing these ties and the other political parties, including
the present ruling coalition, have not been able to cultivate and sustain
such ties of friendship with the Pakhtuns.
If India has to play its due role in restoring the
independence of Afghanistan, it has to interact closely not only with the
leaders of the Northern Alliance and provide them with the required
political, moral and diplomatic support, but also with those Pakhtun
leaders, who have been unhappy with the Pakistani colonisation through the
Taliban. There has to be a comprehensive, well-thought-out, consistent
Afghan policy worked out and implemented by the Government .
Any policy towards the restoration of the independence
of Afghanistan is unlikely to succeed in the present unipolar world order
without the support of the US. Even though the new Bush Administration has
reiterated its adherence to the Clinton Administration's policy towards
the Taliban, which culminated in the imposition of sanctions by the UN,
there are some indications that once the Administration settles down,
there could be a review of the policy.
It is believed that the officials of the Bush
Administration are worried over the delay in the implementation of the
plans for the exploitation of the energy resources of the Central Asian
Republics and for the entry of these resources into the world market.
They
would prefer that these resources exit the Central Asian Republics through
Afghanistan and Pakistan rather than through Russia or Iran, which would
not be possible until the fighting is ended in Afghanistan. It is in this
context that a debate is likely as to whether the new Administration
should follow a tougher policy in order to induce the collapse of the
Taliban or a softer policy of more engagement in the hope of thereby
moderating the behaviour of the Taliban and bringing it into the
international mainstream.
The policy outcome of this debate could have an
important influence on the fortunes of the Northern Alliance and on the
effectiveness of India's Afghan policy. A more intensive and sustained
interaction with officials of the Bush Administration on this issue is,
therefore, advisable.
Note: Based on a talk delivered by the writer at the
India International Centre, New Delhi, on April 14,2001.
( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet
Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute For
Topical Studies, Chennai. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com
)
