Nation, Ethnicity and the Conflict in Afghanistan

Political Islam and the rise of ethno-politics 1992–1996

Raghav Sharma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367596378
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317090120
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Ethnic and tribal loyalties in Afghanistan provided the lethal cocktail for the violent conflict that engulfed the country following the collapse of the Soviet backed government in 1992. The ensuing fighting between mujahideen groups paved the way for the tectonic social and political shifts, which continue to shape events today. What accounts for the emergence of ethnicity, as the main cause of conflict in Afghanistan? What moved people to respond with such fervour and intensity to calls for ethnic solidarity? This book attempts to make sense of ethnicity's decisive role in Afghanistan through a comprehensive exploration of its nature and perception. Based on new data, generated through interviews, field notes and participant observations, Sharma maps the increased role of ethnicity in Afghan national politics. Key social, political and historical processes that facilitated its emergence as the pre-dominant fault-line of conflict are explored, moving away from grand political and military narrative to instead engage with zones of conflict as social spaces. This book will be of interest to students and scholars working in politics, ethnic studies and security studies.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315597409-1

It is very difficult to have a unified narrative or understanding of the period between 1992 and 1995/1996. Everybody has a different understanding of it. For some groups for instance such as the Hazaras and the Uzbeks that was the first time in over 100 years that they emerged as players in the national politics … developments between 1992 and 1996 completely shifted the balance of power. It in a sense moderated a lot of claims and at the end it created a lot of space that will effect Afghanistan’s history for the course of the next 100 years in terms of power sharing, in terms of the definition of legitimacy and in terms of whole idea of citizenship.

(Interview, Sharifi, Kabul, 2012)

The cardinal argument of this book is that the nature and sheer duration of the conflict has fundamentally changed the basic contours of social–political relations of groups and communities with each other as well as with the state in Afghanistan. ‘Ethnicity’, an ancient Afghan social fact, has been politicized by the conflict well beyond its original frame and pushed, by heightened ‘disarticulation’ between national minorities and the Afghan state, to the political centre-stage. This seminal shift is marked by the entry of new social groups into the political arena, accentuated by the active involvement of external actors through their ethnic or sectarian proxies. These critical shifts began to crystallize during the years of incessant extreme violence under mujahideen rule (1992–1996). Its far-reaching implications are vividly borne out in the changing conceptions of ‘nation’ and ‘ethnicity’. Hence the disturbing irony that ‘conflict’, despite its lethal destructive edge, carries a certain transformative dimension.

Consider in this context the clarification in the aftermath of the defeat of Kabul’s Taliban rulers by Lakhdar Brahmi, United Nations’ Special Representative in Afghanistan, concerning the ‘ethnic balance’ in the proposed new order of Constitutional Governance: ‘the ethnic balance we have tried to work out here is, I think, 11 for the Pashtuns, eight for the Tajiks, five for the Hazaras, three for the Uzbeks and one or two for the others, the smaller groups’. ¹

Lakhdar Brahimi’s clarification concerning the social composition of the proposed post-Taliban Afghan order of Governance was reflective as much of a desire on the part of the international community to put in place a more orderly and inclusive political arrangement, as an emphatic acknowledgement of ethnicity having emerged as one of the key determinants for legitimizing political arrangements. Prior to mujahideen rule, such neat firm formulation of governance in terms of ethno-political equations would have sounded unreal and impolitic.

Changing conceptions of ‘ethnicity and ‘nation’ in the Afghan case are to be seen in the fervent renegotiation of social–political equations, marked by the emergence of new formations emboldened by the pervasive sway of normative expectations of equal standing and opportunity, as the basic due of Afghan nationals to everyone. The tragic irony that informs this rhetoric of parity is instructive. Fierce insistence upon ethnic parity happened in the midst of general breakdown of institutions and norms. Shifts induced by the conflict in the long entrenched social equations dramatically underscore the meaning and significance of a ‘conflict zone’ as a ‘social space’ inhabited by living people with robust human expectations. That also enables us to grasp the vehemently simplistic analytic frames that posit ethnicity as the primordial unchanging social substance. Specifically, such analysis sees the Afghan conflict as a battle between neatly ascribed groups locked in binary opposition. Equally misplaced are explanations that see the conflict solely as naked contest for power; ethnicity, merely a contingent instrument for personal power and aggrandizement.

Olivier Roy speaks of the primacy of ethnicity as signifying the ‘failure of political Islam’. That in some measure indeed holds true. But the word ‘failure’ sounds excessive. It fails for instance, to account for the enduring power of pan-Islamic rhetoric to invoke legitimacy, mobilize and compel allegiance even within the discourse of national minorities. Hence the critical need to take a rigorous look at ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nation’ as both concept and as lived experience, through the long duration of incessant extreme violence and militarization. In the Afghan case, that has meant the enigmatic simultaneous prevalence of raw brute force and the rhetoric of some overarching normative: pre-eminently, Islam and ethnic parity. And between the two abides a relationship intensely ambivalent and enigmatic.

The defeat of the Soviet backed Najibullah government in April 1992 with the help of concerted Western military–political support was hailed in Islamic circles as the moment of high achievement and glory for the Islamic Ummah. But the stunning triumph of mujahideen arms was also in some ways an anti-climax. Olivier Roy sees in the aftermath of this dazzling military victory, a kind of silent subtle unravelling of ‘political Islam’. This unravelling and failure stems, in the words of Roy, from political Islam’s conception of the Islamic order in which ‘ethnic identities, tribal segmentation and power relationships are thought of as ethical shortcomings, forms of ignorance or sin’ (Roy, From Holy War to Civil War 12–13). The huge fact that looms decisively through all the incessant fratricidal blood-letting among the various mujahideen factions (1992–1996) is the unprecedented power of ethnicity’s political salience. Inevitably, that shift came to colour much of the contemporary Afghan social and political discourse. That in turn shaped academic discourse, as also larger contemporary perceptions concerning the texture of the Afghan social fabric. This kind of understanding has often been deployed not only to reconstruct the past, but also to anticipate the future and make sense of possible social and political outcomes. Scant attention has been paid to changes that the prolonged conflict injected into Afghan society; treated invariably as neat, compartmentalized and unchanging. Such a frame assumes that the Afghan conflict stems essentially from a clash inherent between primordial ethnic solidarities. It overlooks almost entirely certain vital socio-political processes that conflict sets in motion towards fierce rigidity, in what always subsisted amidst relatively fluid social boundaries. To clarify the nature and implications of this drift towards greater rigidity, detailed reference to the Afghan social and political texture prior to the conflict is clearly in order.

Certain forces and compulsions during mujahideen rule (1992–1996) inflected the conflict along an essentially ethno-political axis, even as the Islamic rhetoric of ideological purity became more strident and aggressive. The critical detail in this context concerns the scale and ferocity with which ethnicity came to be politicized, as a consequence of the role that external actors came to play through their local proxies, in pursuit of narrow strategic interests of their respective nation states. No one was given a choice to stay out of the conflict. And that meant virtual recasting of ‘ethnicity’, an ancient social fact, into a new kind of formidable political instrument of mass mobilization.

The Afghan conflict during this period came to be marked by a surprising paradox. The continually heightened ethno-political salience stands forth vividly in the social support base of the major political players, which increasingly came to be tied firmly to a particular ethnicity. And yet, with the exception of the Hizb-i-Wahadat and the Junbish-i-Milli, ethnicity seldom finds explicit mention in contemporary political rhetoric or programmes. ² On the contrary, parties such as the Jamiat-i-Islami, composed pre-dominantly of Tajiks, sought to pointedly project their pan-Afghan credentials.

Leading narratives of the Afghan conflict have largely taken recourse to oversimplified frames of reference. Implicit in that is the categorization of Afghan society into more or less neatly territorialized ethnicities. Such an analytical mode and categorization violates the living facts of the actual reality on the ground. It has spawned policy formulations that are disturbingly ill-informed at the highest level. Instructive in this regard are certain proposals meant to sort out the Afghan quagmire. Foremost among them is the forcefully argued proposal put forth by the distinguished former US diplomat Robert D. Blackwill. Using the platform of the influential US think tank Council for Foreign Relations, Blackwill has presented a case for the partitioning of Afghanistan along ethnic lines:

De facto partition of Afghanistan is the best policy option available to the United States and its allies … We would devote nation-building efforts to the north and west region where, unlike the Pashtun, people are not conflicted about accepting U.S. help … Washington should not wait to change its objective and strategy in Afghanistan until even more U.S. blood and treasure have been lost in a fruitless quest among the Afghan Pashtun.

(Blackwill, A De-facto Partition for Afghanistan)

Partition as a solution to the endemic violence and conflict is based on weak conceptual and historical foundations. Blackwill’s partition argument appears in fact to be subtly premised on categorical ethnic stereotyping, which ascribes as inherent in Pashtuns a certain fundamentalist predisposition. More surprisingly, the argument is based on the empirically flawed certainty that ethnic groups are more or less frozen and geographically bound neat cultural units. The futility of such an analysis is tellingly underscored on two counts: first, as demonstrated in Chapter 2, the social–cultural history of the region now known as Afghanistan does not affirm such neat categorizations of territorial–ethnic divides (Adamec, Historical and Political Gazetteer of Afghanistan; Bellew, Races of Afghanistan; Elphinstone, Account of the Kingdom of Cabul; Wilber, Afghanistan). Second, as shown at length in Chapter 5, the dynamics and raw details of political alignments and realignments through the long brute decade of the 1990s sharply underscores the irrelevance of the simple binary logic of neat ethnic allegiances and choices. The line of argument that this work seeks to spell out stands in clear opposition to the proposition concerning the unchanging primordial character of the Afghan social reality, put forth for instance in the works of Rasul Baksh Rais (Rais, Conflict in Afghanistan; Recovering the Frontier State) and Amalendu Misra (Misra, The Labyrinth of Violence). That kind of explanatory frame takes several forms: for instance, hypothesis grounded broadly in the realist tradition that seek to make sense of the political dynamic from the perspective of a security dilemma, or in terms of some imperative of redistributing economic and political resources.

The attempt is to move away from one-dimensional explanations that hinge on the primordial ethnic prism. The recent historical past of Afghanistan that specifically attempts to make sense of and come to terms with the modern reality that began to close in around the nineteenth-century merits studied attention and reflection. Hence the compelling need and relevance of thick historical reference to the hundred years beginning from the late nineteenth century to the closing years of the twentieth century.

Nation, ethnicity and the conflict

A word concerning the use of terms would be apt at this stage. Throughout this work, and particularly in Chapters 3 and 4, the term ‘conflict’ as opposed to ‘civil war’ has been used to characterize the period under consideration. ³ One of the cardinal assumptions upon which conflicts are classified as ‘civil wars’ is the belief that such conflicts take place within the territorial borders of a state and involve the state or its claimants as one of the principal combatants engaged in conflict with armed opposition groups seeking to take control of the state (Fearon and Laitin, Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War 76; Sambanis, What Is Civil War? 829–830). Within this political–territorial frame, the scale of the conflict is neatly quantified: to qualify as ‘civil war’ the conflict is supposed to result in a total of at least 1,000 battle-deaths during each year of the war (The Correlates of War Project n.d.) with at least 100 people killed on both sides (Fearon and Laitin 76). Such definitions entail analytic frames fraught with problems. For instance it obscures and conceals the transnational sources and causes that have fed and sustained the Afghan conflict and tends to spawn a biased understanding of the conflict and possible remedies for a way out.

Lewis Coser’s usage of the term ‘conflict’ marks a more meaningful semantic salience. Coser defines conflict as ‘a struggle over values and claims to a scarce status, power and resources in which the aims of the opponents are to neutralize, injure or eliminate rivals’ (Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict 8). Coser’s definitional frame rescues in the words of Horowitz the discourse on conflict, from ‘rigid definitional fiats’. Most significant it also allows for an engagement with a range of issues at stake that invariably underlie the incompatibility of positions adopted by opponents in a conflict and the methods employed for furthering their aims (Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict 95).

Meaningful engagement with the dynamics of the Afghan conflict would inescapably have to reflect and come to terms with the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘ethnicity’. Almost all social–political impulses in our times seem in some significant measure to be informed by expectations and aspirations that these two concepts nurture and give rise to. Specifically, the challenge is to clarify as to how these concepts are understood and come to operate in the Afghan context across time and space. Ethnicity in the Afghan context has invariably been a fluid social fact, shaped in considerable measure by the situational milieu. Therefore, ascriptions predicated on neat ethnic categorizations need close interrogation. Such interrogation is the foremost requisite for making sense of ethnicity as a living social reality, which for instance has often tended to deflect and resist pan-Afghan political mobilization. Also, it is exceedingly important to remember that the concept of ‘nation’ as formulated in the constitutional documents of Afghanistan, has been consistently an inclusive one. Conscious care seems to have been taken to mark the ‘nation’ as something distinct and larger than ‘ethnicity’. Afghanistan, like many other nation-states in the making, has grappled and struggled to clarify and internalize as to what and how, the idea and imaginary of the Afghan nation is to be constituted.

Historically, contestations concerning the idea of Afghan nationhood invariably played out along three cardinals: ethnic representation, secular governance and Islamic ideals. Between the three cardinals, a certain unresolved tension inevitably persisted. But the critical detail that stands clear and enduring is that none of the three cardinals could be entirely discarded for long. True, the principal cardinal of contestation under the aegis of Zahir Shah’s monarchy in the late 1960s and 1970s, was between the concept of an Islamic nation and a secular nation. But the monarchy’s manifest bias in favour of Pashtuns meant in effect oblique re-inscription of ethnicity as the pivotal predicate. Also true indeed, the Soviet supported Afghan Marxist–Leninist rulers sought after the overthrow of the monarchy to endorse and authorize a discourse exclusively along the secular– socialist cardinal. But within few years, they felt compelled to devise some significant space for the two excluded cardinals of ethnicity and Islam. The stunning triumph of the mujahideen, fervent fearless champions of Islamic solidarity, while seeking to institute Islam as the exclusive cardinal of life and order, oversaw in essence the fierce consolidation of ethnicity as the supreme political fact. The subtle shift away from Islamic solidarity towards ethnic solidarity is underscored by a parallel shift in the Afghan discourse characterizing the conflict: use of the expression jung or war, in place of jihad or ‘striving’ or a ‘struggle’ in the way of god too (Maley, The Afghanistan Wars 59). Ethnicity’s ability to subdue the deeply shared adherence to Islam and shape the sense of legitimate Afghan nationhood testifies both to the dense historical entrenchment of social heterogeneity, as well as socio-political transformations engineered in recent years by conflict.

To make sense of ethnicity’s decisive edge in recent years, one has to take a deep comprehensive look at the shifts and changes in the texture and perception of ethnicity and nation across time and regions in Afghanistan. Upon that would also hinge the answer to a critical concern this work seeks to address: What accounts for the emergence of ‘ethnicity’, during the period 1992–1996, as the pivot and cardinal of contestation? Implicit in that question is the consideration that signifies, as it were, the final threshold of legitimacy: What was it that moved the people to respond with such fervour and intensity to endorse the call of ethnic solidarity?

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (December 1979) and the bitter-armed conflict that ensue...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Biographies
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of acronyms
• Glossary
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Nation and ethnicity in Afghanistan
• 3 From ideology to identity: framing the ethno-political turn in the Afghan conflict (1992–1996)
• 4 Historical drivers of the Afghan conflict: role of the nationalizing state, national minorities and external actors
• 5 Afghanistan under Mujahideen rule (1992–1996): ethnicization of the conflict
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index