Release of the Pashtun knot
After the war ends in Sri Lanka, it is the Pashtun region of Southasia that will remain the most violent corner on earth. The depredations of the Taliban and al-Qaeda are set to continue, and new US President Barack Obama stepped into the White House with promises to withdraw from Iraq but get deeper into Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Obama intention is clearly to deal with the threat posed by al-Qaeda once and for all, so we should stand prepared for blunderbuss military action, drone attacks and extra-territoriality in crossborder forays. All of which will deliver more suicide bombers, assassinations and the collapse of fragile civilian regimes. It is important to consider the US involvement not as a fait accompli expanded, but rather to question whether the pain and dislocation in northwestern Southasia is justified by the Western interest.
The Pashtun region on the two sides of the Durand Line harbours the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, as well as non-Taliban militants. None of these, meanwhile, have anything in common with the secular and the Sufi, which are an intrinsic part of the local heritage. This is the region of Abdul Gaffar Khan, the Frontier Gandhi, who resolutely rejected the Subcontinent's partition on the basis of religion. The Pashtun hills and valleys are replete with the history of mendicants who sought an inclusive spiritual rather than ritualistic path to attainment.
This was the first region to adopt Buddhism outside the Ganga plain where the Sakyamuni lived and preached. And yet the descendants of the land blasted the Bamiyan Buddhas in a fit of blind barbarism, and al-Qaeda has introduced extraneous Arab and other elements. The Taliban and al-Qaeda ethos is condemnable where it seeks to interpret Islam in its narrow, doctrinaire manner, where women are relegated to the status of chattel, where the lives of others can be snuffed out on the basis of a cleric's call, and where suicide bombers entrap young men and women to wreak devastation.
The question is whether the American military push into Afghanistan and Pakistan is going to give release, with the increasingly unpopular Hamid Karzai in Kabul and the reluctant allies in the tottering new democracy in Islamabad. When it comes to Afghanistan-Pakistan, India is willing to remain silent spectator, letting the US take the lead. The Pakistanis feel there is a ganging-up against them; the non-Pashtun among the Afghans seethe in anger. Balochistan remains a powder keg, and the Kashmir question remains the age-old thorn. The Chinese and Iranians are nervous bystanders, one waiting to see how Xinjiang is affected by Islamic extremism on the one hand, the other keeping tabs on the evolution of politics in Balochistan and western Afghanistan.
As far as the Obama Doctrine for Southasia is concerned, the question arises as to whether this is the way to avenge the attacks of 9/11, converting Afghanistan-Pakistan into a theatre of war. It is one thing to countenance the local governments and warlords fight each other with politics, populism and arms, and quite another to make it a stage for the playing out of global geopolitics. The further question is whether the cure of bloodletting will get rid of the cancer, or whether the cancer will not simply expand elsewhere. Do the Pashtun civilians who live on the ground not have a right to voice their own views on the matter, or are they to be lambs for slaughter for the 'greater good'? Are they to suffer for the arming of the Taliban for fighting the Soviets, the initial American action that gave muscle to the monster ideology?
Talk, challenge, confront
We seem to be experiencing a shifting of the tectonic plates of geopolitics as the Western world engages with the Pashtun lands of Southasia. There are suggestions that, given the instability in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the overseas powers would like to see a reasonably stable crossborder Pashtun entity in place. If this idea germinates and strikes roots – and there may be many takers within Southasia itself – what kind of readjustments would occur to the north, south, east and west? How would the dominoes fall? The White House's exclusive focus on this part of Southasia has the potential to dislocate the rest of the region in ways that we may not imagine at the moment. For times are different from the 1970s, when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, and the campaign would not remain isolated to the north and west of the Durand Line this time around.
As to what should be the right response to continued militancy, it is clear that the US and NATO interventions have thus far been inappropriate. Such actions have built animosities and have not let the give-and-take of local power politics to provide a sustainable resolution in a volatile land. It is also true that the regional geopolitics between Islamabad-New Delhi-Kabul has proved a non-starter, while the larger arena including China, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan can only watch with anxiety.
What has been missing in all of this is a cross-Southasia civil-society initiative to engage the local chieftains to challenge the internationals, and to confront the establishments of Afghanistan, India and Pakistan. It is as if we lack the agency to do anything, locked as we are all into our individual nation-state dogmas, and content to allow the Americans to sort out the problem while watching and criticising from the sidelines. In that sense, the emerging problems in the Pashtun lands of Southasia are clear evidence of the failure of the intelligentsia of all Southasia. If it ever wakes up from the stupor of statism, it may even come up with courage of its convictions, and propose some solutions on how to generate a localised resolution in the northeast, based first and foremost on the principles of human rights, democracy and decency.