What Is Kabul to Us?
The Taliban are attempting to impose a new moral order in Afghanistan and they are doing it at gunpoint. The Afghan experience has lessons for the rest of South Asia, rent by violent dissension everywhere.
Would Islamic fundamentalism take over northern Afghanistan? Would it enter Panjshir, which, in the 1980s, had kept out the Russians themselves? What would happen to ex-communists in Balkh and Mazar-i-Sharif, including Babrak Karmel and Anahita Ratebzad? Would the new alliance in the internal game of "round and round the mulberry bush" between Ahmed Shah Masood and Rashid Dostam, succeed, where previous improbable heavy dancers had "all fallen down"? Were northern ethnic warlords going to drive Pathan mullahs from the south and east out of Kabul and re-establish a relatively modern, and less sexist government?
By October-end, the press, notoriously quick on the draw with conclusions about future scenarios was predicting that the Taliban would have Kabul imploding in their faces. The city had blown down previous rulers who sought to change traditional ways of political culture and had seen internecine warfare from the times of Amanullah and Bacha-i-Saqao in 1929 to those of Prince-President Daud, and then Nur Muhammad Tarakki, Hafizullah Amin, and latterly, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Burhanuddin Rabbani and Najibullah.
The Western journalists, who live on Chicken Street (Kabul´s version of the pony-tailed foreigner-infested Thamel of Kathmandu), had begun to be cynical about old stories, that Afghan politics was paradigmatic of buzkashi, the crude form of polo where horsemen grab after a disembowelled sheep´s carcass. They had started to look forward to the days when bottles of Scotch would be easier to get, and women could once more be glimpsed unveiled.
Afghanistan had petered out from world headlines by late autumn, even as the rocketry continued to whine between contesting parties in the plains north of Kabul, and south of the Salang Tunnel in the Hindu Kush. The anti-Taliban northern ethnic coalition however, has teetered to a halt near the military airfields of Bagaram and Shindand on the flanks of the Hindu Kush. In addition to Kabul, the Taliban still hold the western city of Herat, which lies between the Uzbeks in Balkh, the Turkmen in the northwest, and the Iranians in Meshed (who are sympathetic to the northern coalition and antagonistic to Sunni fundamentalists who have oppressed and treated as heretics, Shiahs between Herat and Kandahar in the west central hills of the Hazarajat).
The Taliban are wedged firmly across the Russian-built highway from the southeastern Afghan border past the Bolan Pass and Quetta in Pakistan to the Afghan northwestern frontier on the Turkmenistan border south of Mary (Merv). They appear to have achieved the objective of securing those routes which they set out to in early 1994 offering protection to convoys using the rhetoric that this would improve tourist traffic to Herat and the Turkmen Desert.
Few in the world were then aware of even that rhetoric. And if the present status quo persists, Pakistan will have secured an alternative route to northern Central Asia with its natural gas and oil as well as the presently untapped metal and gold reserves. This route is much shorter than the northeast-southwest passage by rail from Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, through Saraakhs and Meshed to the Gulf and thus into the Arabian Sea. In a sense, the latter route represents two sides of a triangle with its base being the Pakistan-Turkmen line running through presently Taliban-held territory. It gives Pakistan a strategic position in Hither West Asia—a position that provides "deep defence" against Central Asian (as CIS surrogates) or Iranian threat, and releases its armed forces, to that extent, to engage India in the east.
The press does not find much of interest in these arcane geopolitical details. In December, the same Calcutta newspaper, which has been so titillated by the lynching of an ex-communist who had liquidated (as its American news agency sources told it) "thousands" of anti-communists in Kabul prison, had a small snippet in its inside pages reporting the death from cancer in a Moscow clinic of ex-president Babrak Karmel, Najibullah´s predecessor and patron of General Dostam. Equally small snippets reported on how the Kabulis were bemoaning the Taliban´s insistence on using plastic instead of paper (which should be better used for the holy word) for pack bags, much as they bewailed the royal order forcing them to wear European hats and suits during the days of Amanullah (the ill-fated last Barakzai monarch) just before his downfall in 1928; and how Westerners in Chicken Street dash around buying stocks of toilet paper since it has been rumoured that paper will be banned even for personal sanitation.
Beyond this transition from tragedy to farce, as history repeats itself in a more macabre way in Kabul seventy years later, however, lie deeper problems. Not just of this kind reported in a back page some time ago: moderate Taliban leadership, presumably sensitive to State Department and Pakistan Presidential rule blandishments, are seeking to build, through talks in Mazar-i-Sharif, a coalition between the ex-communist Dostum, a dissident Shiah in the West and their still fundamentalist Sunni selves. Beneath this recursive trend of coalition of ideology, improbable only to the US fundamentalism of Huntington´s "clash of civilisations" lie factors of loose texture which are the warp and weft of the modem Afghan polity.
Tribal Fissures
Afghanistan can hardly be relegated, as Western journalists in their blase manner do, to the Grand Guignol of genocide in Srebrenica and Ruanda-Burundi or mass slaughter in Hobart, Dunblane or Oklahoma. They practise President Clinton´s naive reductionism about a Western Orientalist set of images—an image of ferocious mountaineers, incapable of governing themselves, whether in Yugoslavia, Central Africa, the Caucasus, or the hillknots from Kurdistan to Karakoram all the way from Turkey to Kashmir, and requiring State Department mediation or UN police forces to keep them in order. Let us first consider some geo-cultural specificities.
Afghanistan became a sovereign state in the modem sense of the term, with a feudal sense of nationality, if not a civil society, only a little over 200 years ago. That happened when Ahmed Shah Abdali, a southern Afghan tribal chieftain, carved it as his principality out of the ruin of Nadir Shah´s brief Iranian successor state to the Safavids (1501-1736). Before that, the only well-known Sultans in Afghanistan had been the early 16th-century fugitive from Ferghana, Babur, who used Kabul to invade North India, and the 11th-century Ghaznavid and Ghorid Sultans Mahmud and Muhammad, who raided the Indus Plains.
Abdali´s grandson Shah Shuja had his imperial domains whittled down to the west of the North-West Frontier of the Indus Basin up to the Oxus in the north, the Helmand Basin in the South north of the Baluchistan waste littoral of the Arabian Sea and Kandahar and Herat in the west. This 19th-century residual mountain domain was a fragile political integration, which Amir Dost Mahomed and much later Amir Abdur Rahman and his son Amir Habibur Rahman could hold against the imperialist clutches of both Russian and British expansionism.
But between the First and Second Afghan Wars (1838-42 and 1878-80), the political domain fissured around the cities on the four sides of the Afghan compass. Tnbally dominant clans among the Pathan people held social and economic authority over the countryside, divided not just ethnically, but also by Islamic sects. They were equally fractured in terms of differentiated access to trade routes—to Baluchistan and Sindh, to Peshawar and the Punjab, to Chitral, Gilgit and Ladakh, to the Southeastern Bukhara Emirate across the Amu Darya, to Merv of the Turkmans, and to Meshed in Iran.
This fragmentation is not a creation of imperialism or Soviet occupation or US-Pakistani arms buildup against the Russians, though each has contributed its share to chaos, endemic to the Afghan political culture. Only iron nerves have held the balance and then only too briefly.
The making of the Afghan centralised state under British pressure from the east since the 1880s, initiated by the later Barakzai Amirs, was cumulative and ephemeral. Equally so was the reformulation of their absolutism into a neo-Kamalist modernisation under Amanullah in the 1920s. It practised the same aggrandising state rapine of the South Asian eighteenth-nineteenth century principalities, briefly built by Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan in Mysore, Mahadaji Sindhia in Gwalior, or Ranjit Singh in the Punjab. Like them, it had no traditional legitimacy to establish hegemony, the sort that even the House of Gorkha has been able to establish over Kathmandu Valley since the late eighteenth century despite fratricidal court intrigue for controlling Nepali absolutism.
Without even such feudal absolutist legitimacy and representing far more deep-rooted traditions of tribal dissonance and regional strife over trade tolls and ethnic differentiation, the Loya Jirga, or tribal sovereignty, of the Afghan monarchy became the pawn of Prince Daud´s Marxisante court intrigues, backed by Karmel´s Communist Parcham faction. This destroyed the Afghan monarchy in the early 1970s. In quick succession came the role of the Khalq faction in the new Republic in 1979, leading to Soviet occupation, the intensification of mujahedin insurgency, and the present endemic civil warfare which has now continued for almost two decades now.
Cat´s Cradle
In this crisis of state and society, it is too often forgotten that Afghans had intellectual as well as trade contacts which were not national but extra-territorial. They studied in the madrasas (theological seminaries for Islamic morality) of Bukhara, Iran, even Al-Azhar as far west as Cairo, and certainly in revivalist Islamic seminaries of North India such as Deoband, north of Aligarh (since the middle of the nineteenth century) and further east in Lucknow or Azamgarh. They had spiritual affinity with Naqshbandi and Qadiri Sufi traditions of Central Asia, with Shiahs of Iran and Tajikistan, and with the orthodox ways inculcated by Shaikh Ahmed of Sirhind in India, known to later Muslim generations in Pakistan and West Asia as Mujaddid-Alf-i-Sani. Afghan maulanas who supported the old monarchy were certainly traditionalist and orthodox, but they were not uneducated and certainly they maintained, however brittle, a culture of tribal compromise and hospitality which, while fiercely autonomous, was cross-national rather than politically chauvinistic.
Examples may be found in the first and second presidents of free Afghanistan after the downfall of Najibullah. Pir Sibghatullah Mujaddidi, the last of the family of Hazrats of Shor Bazar, 31 of whom were liquidated in the communist crackdown after 1980, was descended from spiritual advisers to the orthodox rulers of Kabul. He was the first consensus choice for the impractical two-year rotating presidential term. Responding to an Indian TV interviewer´s query about Pakistani aid to his group in the war of resistance, he said he could not be inimical to India, from where his ancestors had learnt devoted faith in the great Mujaddid whose cognomen he bore. Sarhind was his spiritual home. In this conflation of territorial boundaries (Sirhind is in Pakistan now) he reminded one of Nepalis who through the ages have looked to Benares and Darbhanga for their cultural learning, to Calcutta for their modern values in the days of British rule, and now through Delhi to the consumerist Western world.
On the other hand, Maulana Burhanuddin Rabbani, the next President, who failed to leave office after completing two years, and became known for Indian support of his Tajik militias of Ahmed Shah Masud in contradistinction to Pakistani support first of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and then of the Taliban mullahs, was educated at Al-Azhar in Africa. The cultural mix of Islam all the way from Hindustan to the Maghreb is part of the Afghan intellectual loose texture.
But this loose fabric is shot through by distinct strands which give its culture particular colours, religious sectarian as well as ethnic. South and east are Pathan in their regional composition, with affinities to cousins and km in the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan; west are Hazaras of the central hill fastnesses and Turkoman around Herat with affinities divided between the Shiah brethren of the Hazaras in eastern Iran and Turkomans of the CIS Republic of Turkmenistan; north are Uzbeks in Cisoxania with socialist sympathies similar to those of the people in Uzbekistan across the CIS border; the northeastern Tajiks with ethnic affinities with the Badakshani villages across the border in Tajikistan, but with no sectarian affinities with Shiah Tajiks of the autonomous region of Gorno (mountain) Badakshan in the Republic of Tajikistan. Sectarian tensions are generally at cross purposes with the ethnic cross-border alignments.
In this cat´s cradle of conflict and cooperation, further compounded by shifting alliances between segments, sectarian moieties and factions of coalitional political groups calling themselves, jamiat (gathering), Wahdat (union) or Hizb (party) of the faithful of Islam, the fact of resistance to the Russian invaders no longer unites. In Mazar-i-Sharif and the mineral rich region round Shibarghan close to the Uzbek state border, the rulers are militia who fought for Najibullah as late as the 1980s and they have not forsworn affinities with CIS and particularly Uzbekistan. Close to them in an anti-Taliban and anti-Pathan alliance to defend Loval valley are the Tajiks of Rabbani and Masood, so that one may say that the Russian troops who hold the CIS border still have indirect influence over northern Afghanistan, much as their ancestors had over northern Iran in the early twentieth century, under the terms of the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907.
Thus the Russian Federation is still one of the major players in the new "game" for control of Kabul, and thus of the Afghan state. It must, however, be noted that after the Dostum-Masood alliance in October, when Iranian foreign policy took the initiative to work with India and Boutros-Ghali´s UN, in defence of that anti-Taliban alliance, the Uzbeks who neighbour Mazar-i-Sharif were marked by their absence in the Tehran conference to reach consensus on a peace settlement. An Uzbek-Taliban realpolitik coalition cannot be ruled out.
Bull Ring of Civil War
The other party to the early 20th-century convention to carving up Iran exists no more. There is no political structure such as post-colonial British India. The British have withdrawn from political influence through the Commonwealth of Nations and are now interested in multinational trade and bilateral industrial promotion ventures in South Asia—very much as subaltern officers of US superpower superordination. The US, now the informal residuary legatees of British imperial interests in littoral Asia, are keenly interested in controlling Shiah Iran´s radical rhetoric of resisting the "Satanic" Empire of the Atlantic.
The State Department seeks to sanitise the Afghan civil war, so that anti-Pakistani forces seeking freedom from the financial and patronage liens of the anti-Soviet resistance movement which was regulated from Peshawar and Quetta do not join up with Iran and India. And neither does it want them to work out independent bargains with Central Asian post-communist state formations about oil and natural gas resource transfers from points of extraction by end users and by Western entrepreneurial agencies which facilitate this exploitation.
This new game is one of sanitisation of an area earlier turned into a bullring of civil war by the Cold War rivalry of USA and USSR, and their surrogates of Afghan communists and Pakistani-financed mujahedin. The US agencies find it in their interest to deflect Uzbeks and Tajiks from controlling the Pathans and upsetting an old ethnic equation of Afghan state power. This is the context in which the Taliban are treated as democratic insurgents against an ethnic regime, which usurped power by corruptly breaking compacts to rotate it among different elements of the mujahedin so that all resistance fighters against the communists could have their share of power.
The Taliban refugees of the southern and eastern Pathan provinces, uprooted by the civil war and educated in madrasas in Pakistan, are refugees often of the second generation without the loyalty to traditional political culture that indigenous citizens, even first generation refugees, cling to. These second-generation deracinees with grievances but armed with sophisticated weaponry call themselves not just mullas (practitioners of religion) but Taliban (novitiates in a new morality). They are fighting an utterly new type of civil war for our recent times, one that challenges in private homes and public streets the "actually-existing Socialism" of national literacy, women´s enlightenment, or the patriotic financial austerity of the mixed economy at bayonet point.
This new morality is, of course, fundamentalist. But it is not the statist, constitutionalist, bourgeois patriotic fundamentalism, say of the Sangh Panvar of the Hindu Right of India, the Buddhist chauvinists in Sri Lanka, or the BNP/Ershad patronage controllers in Bangladesh. It is far more private and individualist, its legitimacy basing itself on the call of conscience, frustrated by political, bureaucratic and judicial corruption in post-colonial decadent state forms, for puritanical authenticity, rigid moralism, and recourse to corporeal violence on the body of offenders through public flagellation performances, reminiscent of medieval shows of fanaticism. It has worked in a milieu of "permanent dissension" (as distinct from "permanent revolution") in which pubic morality or the sacredness of political accords and compromises has been seen to have crumbled. After all, Rabbani and his Tajik praetorian guards, as well as the Uzbek militias who betrayed Najibullah to the victorious mujahedin five years ago, flouted the compromise accords to share power by loya Jirga consensus every two years.
It is this private, individualist defence of legitimacy which acts as a new morality for the Jamiat-ul-lslami in South Asia. It validates the ideology of Maulana Abul Al Maudoodi´s epigoni; be it noted that the students´ wing of thejamiat-i-lslami is known as Jamiat-i-Tulba. Tulba and Taliban are alternative plural forms of talib (which means novice or religious student). Here lies the link between the Jamiat-i-Islami of Pakistan, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence spooks of General (retd) Hamid Gul (the political mentor of cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan) and Afghan fundamentalism resurgent.
This new concatenation of ideological and armed force is fuelled by the frustration of a generation, let down by the corruption and hypocrisy of their elders, and is manipulated by arms, drugs, and mercenary trafficking, by an unholy alliance between the sanitisation of radical Islam and export of the backlash of reactionary moralist Islam. It is this which gives a novel dimension to the struggles between Kandahar and Herat on the one hand, and Mazar-i-Sharif and Panjshir on the other for control over the autonomy of the latter. This is a conjuncture as much intellectual as geopolitical, which is the base of the rhetoric or rocketry, air strafing, and destruction of town quarters and villages in the Afghan hills. It is this conjuncture, which has to be transformed, before the trauma of the hills can even begin to be cleared. And it is not clear how such a transformation towards a new sanity can come.
Brezhnevite, Islamic Zero-Sum
This is the dilemma which Kabul posits to South Asia. The horrors of Afghanistan caught like Laocoon in the coils of post-civil war anarchy can await Kashmir or Bodoland, in the way that they have rent Jaffna, and have traumatised the psyche of Indian Punjab or Pakistani Baluchistan and now Sindh. This is the horror of internecine militancy against the state and the counter dependent domestic militarisation in the interests of elite factions, intent on grabbing niches at gunpoint within the ruling class, instead of mobilising popular non-violent consensus.
The horror may go away when South Asia forgets the experience since the 1960s and 1970s of armed groups being conjured up to destabilise regions in the name of autonomy for "Liberation Fronts" or "Liberation Tigers". But the ancillary experiences of Nagaland, Bangladesh, Mizoram, Eelam, the Jummas in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Kashmir, or the suppression of segmentary demands of Uttarakhand, Darjeeling or Bodoland by other segmentary state elites are scored deep in the South Asian consciousness. These searing experiences make it incumbent on the popular consciousness of South Asia to combat the last twenty years of Kabul´s history and seek a newer, more positive morality than zero-sum games, whether Brezhnevite or Islamic. Only thus can the popular sense of peace and progress be reasserted.
As matters stand in 1997, three years before this unhappy century ends, the search for a morality, newer than the barbarities of fundamentalism is not in high key evidence yet in South Asia.