Deadly Afghan Déjà vu
In the side street of Kabul, the angry crowd had been gathering since nightfall. Daggers drawn, they advanced menacingly up to the gates of the mission. Taking cover of darkness, some Afghans entered the compound and set fire to a building. Embassy staff confronted the intruders and engaged in hand-to-hand combat.
Several were cut down by swords. This was the attack on the British garrison in Kabul on 1 November 1841, in which the Famous British explorer-diplomat Sir Alexander Bumes and his staff were hacked to death. But it could very well fit the description of the attack on the Pakistani embassy in Kabul in September 1995, in which diplomats were lynched and the mission burnt to the ground. In Afghanistan, history is always repeating itself—in the same place. In this land of deadly deja vu, fresh blood of 20th century wars are spilt on earth that contains the bleached bones of warriors who fell in battles centuries ago.
Scenes of historic carnages with place names like Gandamak, BolanPass, Herat, Charasyab are today´s new battlefields. The crackle of jezails (long-barrel musket used with deadly accuracy against the British) and the glint of blood-stained swords are replaced by helicopter gunships, stinger missiles and ´Stalin´s Organs´—the dreaded multiple-rocket launchers. Afghanistan today is a theatre of war where medieval rivalries are being fought out with the most efficient killing machines ever designed.
The ignominious retreat of the British officers and their families with Gurkha and Sikh guards from Kabul in 1842 remains a reminder of the fierce xenophobia that fuelled Afghan resistance against outsiders. Of the 16,000 soldiers, civilians, women and chil¬dren who left Kabul on foot in the bitterly cold morning of 1 January 1842, one British doctor rode into Jalalabad a week later. He told a horrifying tale of how the retreating garrison was cut to pieces one by one as it struggled through snow-bound passes.
Today, down the hill from where British lookouts at jalalabad Fort 150 years ago spotted the lone survivor emerge through the snow, charred shells of burnt-out aircraft litter the side of the runway at Jalalabad´s airport. One layer of wreckage dates back to mujahideen attacks on the Soviet bases that existed here, white the layer above it is the detritus of the fearsome battles between rival factions after the Soviet withdrawal.
Kabuli People
The Afghan airline Ariana stilt flies Jalalabad-Kabul, but that is about the only domestic route it still does. Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif are all controlled by anti-govemment forces of the Uzbek general Rashid Dostam to the north and the Pakhtun-led student soldiers of the Taliban to the south. Dostam and the Taliban, as they advance in a pincer towards Kabul, together control half of Afghanistan.
The other half of this fragmented country is still in the hands of the government led by the Tajik president Burharmddin Rabbani and his Defence Minister. The former guerrilla commander, Ahmad Shah Masoud. With the fall of the western city of Herat to the Taliban in October, the government in Kabui has no land links to the outside world. Ariana´s cargo flights to New Delhi provides a vital last life-line. Meanwhile, the Taliban uses its own captured airliners to fly in consumer electronics from Dubai and carry on a thriving smuggling business into Pakistan to finance its war effort.
Kabul´s war-weary citizens are hunkering down for another dark and heatless winter as the Afghan factions drag the country into its 16th year of war. For an outside visitor, it is hard to imagine the deprivation of this once-proud capital, which has been a stopping-off point for Subcontinent-bound overland trav¬ellers from the middle ages till the hippy era. One-third of the city lies in ruins´ that are so absolute that even long-time locals cannot tell street comers anymore. The neighbourhoods that are relatively intact are peppered with landmines.
Kabul survived intact during the Soviet-mujahideen war from 1979 till 1990. Since then, however, it has been rocketed and shelled into rubble: first during die siege by the Pakistan Hezb-e-Islami chieftain, Gulbadin Hekmatyar, and more recently during the Taliban bom¬bardments of the southern suburbs.
Since 1992, Kabulis have had virtually no power and no water supply. Even kerosene lanterns are a luxury and water has to be pumped from wells. Food is scarce, but thanks to smuggling across the battle-front south of the city, edibles are still trickling into the capital. However, the people have to pay exor¬bitant prices in hard currency. Yet, some locals still seem to have die fuel to run generators to tune into satellite television.
Kabul´s people do not watch the news much: news is all around diem. Television-watching is an escapist exercise, providing a flicker of sanity amidst never-ending mayhem. They have learnt to live with fear. The whoosh of an incoming rocket, or puffs of artillery from beyond the Bala Hissar fortress overlooking the city, now elicit little more than a raised eyebrow.
The Pakthun Factor
The Russians were badly mauled because they underestimated Afghan resistance and failed to learn from the mistakes of the British a century ago. The fight with the Pakistan-based mujahideen was a superpower proxy war, but the civil war after the Soviet withdrawal in 1990 has been fuelled by regional rivalries. Afghanistan is at the vortex of the geo-strategic interests of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, Russia and the new Muslim republics of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kirghizia.
Overlapping ethnic, sectarian and ideo-logical rifts are tugging at Afghanistan, with a foreign backer standing firm behind each party. Historical vendettas and bad blood tinge ties between domestic factions, and to make things more complicated, groups change their allegiance with confusing regularity. Gen. Dostam used to be a key Soviet ally, but switched allegiance to the mujahideen in the nick of time. He protected the government in Kabul from Hekmatyar´s on slaught in 1992, then fell out and allied himself with Hekmatyar. At the moment, Dostam is on the same side as the Taliban because Afghan Uzbeks (Dostam is one) cannot stand Afghan Tajiks (Rabbani).
The dramatic rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, its blitzkrieg-like advance from Kandahar to Herat and now to Kabul´s out¬skirts , have provoked speculation about where their support comes from. There are clues. "We want to form an Islamic government based on the precepts of the Holy Koran and recommendations of the Prophet," explained a Taliban commander in Herat, Sayed Abdul Malek, to a visiting French journalist recently. Since the fall of Herat, women there can no longer go to school or work.
There is now general agreement thai, the Taliban has been trained, funded and guided primarily by the Pakistani military, and in particular, its powerful security wing, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISO. The reason is largely the so-called ´Pakhtun Factor1. Afghan Pakhtuns have blood ties with Pakistani Pakhtuns of the Northwest Frontier Province (N WFP). Afghan Pakhtuns had ruled Kabul in an almost unbroken line since the 18th cen-tury, until they were replaced by Rabbani´s Tajik-dominated government in 1992. During the Soviet war, Western aid channeled through the IS1 in Pakistan mostly ended up with Afghan Pakhtun mujahideen groups, primarily Hekmatyar´s Hezb-e-Islami.
In the post-Soviet power struggle in Kabul, Pakistani Pakhtuns backed their compatriots across the border. But then Hekmatyar was sidelined by Rabbani and Masoud, and the insult became too much for Pakhtuns on both sides to stomach. The Taliban, then, is their joint instrument to overthrow the Tajiks. The trouble is that the Taliban is mostly made up of young conservative Sunnis from the madras as of Baluchistan, which means that they are anathema to Iranian-backed Af¬ghan faction leaders like Ismail Khan of Herat. This tangle has brought Teheran-Islamabad relations to their nadir, and squandered de¬cades of careful nurturing of Iran by successive Pakistani governments.
The Taliban´s first rush towards Kabul in March was stopped on its tracks by a massive counter-attack by Rabbani´s largely-Shi´ite Jamiat Islami. This time, they have been more successful. Even so, one learns quickly in Afghanistan that nothing is what it seems. The Taliban is divided into two factions: the Durranis and the Ghilzai. The ISI has coddled the Ghilzai tribes across the border from Peshawar, but presently Taliban is domina¬ted by the royalist Durranis from southern Afghanistan.
It is difficult to say how the ISI plans to tackle this complication, but the Taliban cub could grow into a ferocious adult that ignores its commands. Meanwhile, the Pakistan foreign office and Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto are making desperate attempts at damage control by mending fences with Iran. Bhutto´s visit to Tehran in early November did little to allay Iranian fears, however. Official Teheran news¬papers shed traditional diplomatese to biast Taliban and its Pakistani supporters—even accusing Pakistan of collaborating with the United States to sabotage Asian solidarity!
Pakistan´s diplomatic isolation, many agree is caused by its over playing the Pakhtun card in backing Taliban. And the policy has come in for stinging attack even within Pakistan. "Most thinking Pakistanis are far from euphoric about the Taliban´s military prowess and its recent, somewhat over-publicised successes," says Pakistani scholar Eqbal Ahmad. "They are seriously worried about the consequences of Pakistan being drawn into the Afghan quagmire."
Pakistan Isolated
Just as the Afghan crisis has been blamed for the explosion of sectarian violence in Karachi, the rise in the power of the drug barons in the Taliban issue shows signs of spilling over and destabilising Pakistan´s politics. Reports of an abortive coup by generals sympathetic to the religious radicals sent jitters throughout the Country. According to Pakistani commentator M. B. Naqvi, many army officers are believed to be sympathetic to the "fundamentalist agenda" in the military, which is a legacy of the Islamisation process started by the late President Zia-ul Haq. This is the background to the support provided to the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Ironically, by wrecking Iran-Pakistan relations the Taliban has undermined another Zia-ul Haq strategy; to give Pakistan ´strategic depth´ by bending over backwards towards the west (Iran) in order to balance India´s overwhelming presence to the east. Today, not only are relations frosty with Iran, but much to Islamabad´s consternation, the Indians have been busily repairing and refurbishing the Afghan Air Force at its base in Bagram outside Kabul. The Mig-21s flying out of Bagram have already proved their worth in blasting the Taliban frontlines. This unlikely convergence between the strategic interests of Iran, the United States, Russia and India has isolated Pakistan.
Says Eqbal Ahmad: "Moscow has been supportive of Rabbani and views both Taliban and Hekmatyar with apprehension. The role of India and the United States is minimal, and Washington knows that whoever rules in Kabul will be amenable to U.S. influence."
Islamabad´s original economic game-plan was to bring peace in Afghanistan so it could profit from being the conduit for Central Asian trade, It would then offer Karachi as the access to the sea. But Afghan peace has become a distant dream, and with a whole chunk of southern Afghanistan in its hands, it is the Taliban rather than Pakistan that is profiting from Central Asian trade, which continues clandestinely. Some Taliban-watchers say the group is also financing its war by taxing the smugglers: a revenue source that gives it greater independence from its Pakistani mentors.
For the moment, the focus is on Kabul and which way the front line will move in coming months. If Hekmatyar joins forces with Taliban from the south, and if Dostam can deploy his newly-acquired weaponry from Uzbekistan, the battle for Kabul will have begun in earnest. But even if Taliban succeeds in taking Kabul, the Tajiks under their warrior chief Masoud will just take the war to the mountains and keep on fighting guerilla-style, much the same way he battled the Russians. Looking down from the Khyber Pass at the rugged, barren valley that descends down to Jalalabad, visitors are whipped by a bitter winter wind that howls down from the Hindu Kush. It is a blast from the past, bringing back ghosts of history´s travellers who have passed this spot. Today´s developments in Afghanistan have become inextricably linked Lo events on this side of the Khyber, and to the Subcontinent beyond.