The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan

A Chronicle Foretold

Tariq Ali

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839768217
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Imperialismo

The NATO occupation of Afghanistan is over, and a balance-sheet can be drawn. These essays on war and peace in the region reveal Tariq Ali at his sharpest and most prescient.Rarely has there been such an enthusiastic display of international unity as that which greeted the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Compared to Iraq, Afghanistan became the 'good war.' But a stalemate ensued, and the Taliban waited out the NATO contingents. Today, with the collapse of the puppet regime in Kabul, what does the future hold for a traumatised Afghan people? Will China become the dominant influence in the country? Tariq Ali has been following the wars on Afghanistan for forty years. He opposed Soviet military intervention in 1979, predicting disaster. He was also a fierce critic of its NATO sequel, 'Operation Enduring Freedom'. In a series of trenchant commentaries, he described the tragedies inflicted on Afghanistan, as well as the semi-Talibanisation and militarisation of neighbouring Pakistan. Most of his predictions proved accurate. The Forty Year War in Afghanistan brings together the best of his writings and includes a new introduction.

II

Operation Enduring Disaster
2001–08

5.

Into Pakistan’s Maelstrom

10 October 2001

For the last three weeks Pakistan’s military rulers have been trying to convince the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden and avoid the catastrophe being prepared. They failed. Since Osama is the son-in-law of Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, this was hardly surprising. The more interesting question is whether Pakistan, after withdrawing its own soldiers, officers and pilots from Afghanistan, has managed to split the Taliban and withdraw some of those totally dependent on its patronage. This would be a key aim of the military regime to maintain its influence in a future coalition government in Kabul.

Relations between Pakistan and the Taliban leadership have been tense this year. Last year, in an effort to cement Pak-Afghan friendship, Pakistan dispatched a football team to play a friendly against Afghanistan. As the two teams faced each other in the stadium at Kabul with the referee about to blow the opening whistle, bearded security forces entered and announced that the Pakistani footballers were indecently attired. They were wearing normal football shorts, whereas the Afghans were dressed in surreal long shorts which came down well below the knees. Perhaps it was felt that the rippling thighs of the Pakistanis might cause upheavals in the all-male audience. Who knows? The Pakistani players were arrested, their heads were shaved and they were all flogged in public while the stadium audience was forced to chant verses from the Koran. This was Mullah Omar’s friendly warning shot to the Pakistani military to assert the independence of his leadership and his loyalty to Bin Laden.

The bombing of Kabul and Kandahar by the United States and its ever-loyal British ally will not have seriously affected the fighting strength of the Taliban. The combined force – including Bin Laden’s special brigade of Arabs – is now reported to consist of 30,000–40,000 hardened veterans. Nonetheless, the Taliban are effectively encircled and isolated. Their defeat is inevitable. Both Pakistan and Iran are ranged against them on two important borders. It is unlikely they will last more than a few weeks. Obviously some of their forces will go to the mountains and wait till the West withdraws before attacking the new regime, likely to be installed in Kabul when the octogenarian King Zahir Shah is moved from his comfortable Roman villa to less salubrious surroundings in the wreckage of Kabul.

The Northern Alliance backed by the West is marginally less religious than the Taliban, but its record on everything else is just as abysmal. Over the last year they have taken over the marketing of heroin on a large scale, making a mockery of Blair’s claim that this war is also a war against drugs. The notion that they would represent an advance on the Taliban is laughable. Their first instinct will be revenge against their opponents. However, the Alliance has been weakened in recent days by the defection of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, once the favourite ‘freedom-fighter’ of the West, welcomed in the White House and Downing Street by Reagan and Thatcher. This man has now decided to back the Taliban against the infidel. Sustaining a new client state in Afghanistan will not be an easy affair given local and regional rivalries. General Musharraf has already told Pakistanis he will not accept a regime dominated by the Northern Alliance. This is hardly surprising since his army has been fighting the Alliance for over a decade.

Till now the Pakistan army (unlike its Arab counterparts) has avoided a coup mounted by captains and colonels. It has always been the generals who have seized power and kept the army united, largely by sharing out the pieces of silver. It is an open question whether that will be enough on this occasion. A lot will depend on the aftermath of the current war. A major concern for the overwhelming majority of Pakistanis is that the Taliban, cornered and defeated in their own country, will turn on Pakistan and wreak havoc on its cities and social fabric. Peshawar, Quetta, Lahore and Karachi are especially vulnerable. By that time the West, having scored a ‘victory’, will turn a blind eye to the mess left behind.

As for the supposed aim of this operation – the capture of Bin Laden – this is unlikely to be easy. He is well-protected in the remote Pamir mountains and might well disappear. But victory will still be proclaimed. The West will rely on the short memory of its citizens. But let us even suppose that Bin Laden is captured and killed. How will this help the ‘war against terrorism’? Other individuals will decide to mimic the events of September 11 in different ways.

More importantly, the focus will shift to the Middle East. In Saudi Arabia fierce factional struggle within the royal family is in progress. Saudiologists have long recognized that Crown Prince Abdullah is close to the Wahhabi clerics. But he will still face a bitterly angry population – as will Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. The prospect of eruptions in these two countries is growing and the consequences of the Anglo-American war in Afghanistan are likely to be incendiary.

6.

The King of Greater Afghanistan

30 November 2001

The Pandora’s box of the American Empire is still open, releasing its monsters and fears on a world still not fully under its control. The Northern Alliance is a confederation of monsters. Attaching dissidents to the chains of a tank and crushing them, executing defenceless prisoners, raping men and women, these are all in a day’s work for the guardians of the heroin trade. Blemishes of yester-year? No such luck. We’ve been spared pictures of many of these atrocities, but Arab TV viewers knew what was going on long before the massacre of Mazar-i-Sharif. The Geneva Convention is being violated every single day.

The facts are these: the situation in Afghanistan is inherently unstable. Turf wars have already begun in ‘liberated’ Kabul, though open clashes have been avoided: the West is watching and money has been promised. But once the marines depart, with or without the head of Bin Laden, the alliance will discover that there is no money for anything except waging war. Schools and hospitals and homes are not going to be sprouting next spring or the one after in Afghanistan or Kosovo. And if the eighty-seven-year-old King Zahir Shah is wheeled over from Rome, what then?

Nothing much, thinks the West, except to convince the Pashtuns that their interests are being safeguarded. But judging from past form, Zahir Shah might not be satisfied with the status quo. A document from the German Foreign Office, dated 3 October 1940, makes fascinating reading. It is from State Secretary Weizsacker to the German legation in Kabul and is worth quoting in some detail:

The Afghan minister called on me on September 30 and conveyed greetings from his minister president, as well as their good wishes for a favourable outcome of the war. He inquired whether German aims in Asia coincided with Afghan hopes; he alluded to the oppression of Arab countries and referred to the 15m Afghans [Pashtuns, mainly in the North-West Frontier Province] who were forced to suffer on Indian territory.

My statement that Germany’s goal was the liberation of the peoples of the region referred to, who were under the British yoke … was received with satisfaction by the Afghan minister. He stated that justice for Afghanistan would be created only when the country’s frontier had been extended to the Indus; this would also apply if India should secede from Britain … The Afghan remarked that Afghanistan had given proof of her loyal attitude by vigorously resisting English pressure to break off relations with Germany.

The king who had dispatched the minister to Berlin was the twenty-six-year-old Zahir Shah. The minister-president was his uncle Sardar Muhammad Hashim Khan.

What is interesting in the German dispatch is not so much the evidence of the Afghan king’s sympathy for the Nazi regime. It is the desire for a Greater Afghanistan via the incorporation of what is now Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province and its capital Peshawar. Zahir Shah’s return is being strongly resisted by Pakistan. They know that the king never accepted the Durand Line, dividing Afghanistan and Pakistan, not even as a temporary border. They are concerned that he might encourage Pashtun nationalism.

Islamabad’s decision to hurl the Taliban into battle and take Kabul in 1996 was partially designed to solve the Pashtun question. Religion might transcend ethnic nationalism. Instead the two combined. A proto-Taliban group, Tehrik-e-Nifaz-i-Shariah-e-Mohammed (TNSM) seized a large chunk of the Pakistan tourist resort of Swat during Benazir Bhutto’s government and imposed ‘Islamic punishments’, including amputations. She was helpless to act, but last week Musharraf imprisoned the TNSM leader, Soofi Mohammed Saeed.

Not all the repercussions of this crude war of revenge are yet to the fore, but the surface calm in Pakistan is deceptive. With armed fundamentalists of the Lashkare-Taiba threatening to take on the government if attempts are made to disarm them, the question of how much support they enjoy within the military establishment becomes critical. The inflow of US aid and the lifting of sanctions has persuaded Musharraf’s opponents within the army to leave him in place, but for how long?

Add to that the appalling situation in Kashmir with a monthly casualty rate higher than Palestine, where Indian soldiers and Pakistani-infiltrated jihadis confront each other over the corpses of Kashmiri innocents. If Delhi were to use the ‘war against terrorism’ as a precedent, the subcontinent could implode.

7.

The Dam Will Burst Sooner or Later

2002

After 11 September, Pakistan’s military rulers attempted to convince the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden and avoid the catastrophe in store. They failed. The more interesting question was whether Pakistan, after withdrawing its own soldiers, officers and pilots from Afghanistan, had managed to split the Taliban and withdraw those sections totally dependent on its patronage. This was a key aim of the military regime if it was to maintain its influence in a future coalition government in Kabul. It succeeded in pulling out a large chunk of the Taliban fighters. Some returned to Pakistan. Others were instructed to shave their beards and join some of the factions jockeying for power in Kabul.

I’ve never believed in the myth of Afghan invincibility. True, they defeated the British twice during the nineteenth century, but helicopters, bomber jets and cruise missiles had not then been invented. The Soviet army was defeated because of the massive military and economic aid provided by the United States and the direct military intervention of Pakistan’s ISI. The notion that the Taliban could resist this assault was laughable.

Sustaining a new client state in Afghanistan will not be an easy affair given local and regional rivalries. The first attempt was made after the year-long mujahideen civil war that had followed the collapse of the PDPA regime. In March 1993 the Saudi king, Pakistan and Iran brought the warring Islamic factions together. A detailed semi-constitutional plan based on power-sharing and the creation of a national army which would take over all heavy weaponry was solemnly agreed in Islamabad. It was also agreed that an Election Commission would be set up to prepare the election of a Grand Constituent Assembly, which would vote on a new constitution. Even though rival warlords could barely conceal their distaste at being present in the same room, the Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, was so excited by his own success that he suggested they all fly off together to Mecca and seal the agreement in the Holy City itself. The warlords – leaders of the nine mujahideen factions – smiled benignly and boarded the plane. The Mecca Accord was duly signed in the presence of King Fahd, who was compos mentis at the time. Nawaz Sharif told the Afghans that history and Allah would never forgive anyone who violated an agreement signed in Mecca. But it didn’t work. Hardly had they returned to Afghanistan than fighting broke out between the main factions. General Syed Rafaqat of the Pakistan army provided an interesting, if inadequate, explanation for the civil war:

Five evils gradually slipped out of the holy womb of jihad: weakening of Afghan identity, sharpened focus on ethnicity, emergence of sectarian aspect, the cult of warlordism, and the habit of foreign powers to interfere in the internal affairs of Afghanistan. The first undermined the pride, which all people of Afghanistan had in being known and called Afghans.

Much more had emerged from the ‘holy womb’: an addiction to ready supplies of cash, weaponry and heroin. The first two had dried up once the Soviet Union was defeated. The third remained, and all the mujahideen factions were involved in it in one capacity or another: cultivation, processing, distribution. The factions’ supply routes varied. The Pashtuns used the Pakistani port of Karachi. The Hazaras and Tadjiks found it easier to work with the powerful Russian mafia which controlled distribution in all the former Soviet republics and had a massive base to supply Europe in Albania and, later, Kosovo. Rivalry between the groups was not based so much on ethnic hostility as simple greed. When the Taliban did a deal with the United States in 2000 and agreed to burn the poppy fields under their control in return for $43 million, their rivals in the Northern Alliance were delighted. They now had the monopoly. The Russian mafia had defeated the heroin merchants of Pakistan.

The old warlords who had assembled in Mecca in 1993 were not in evidence at Bonn in 2001. Some were dead. Others preferred to stay at home. This time their representatives, carefully vetted by Western intelligence agencies, handpicked by a veteran UN fixer, Lakhdar Brahimi, and carefully dressed in smart Western suits, were quite happy to mouth a rhetoric that pleased their new hosts. In Mecca, they had thanked Almighty Allah for their triumph against the infidel. This time they were thanking the ‘infidel’ for their victory against the ‘bad seed of Noah’ and ‘false Muslims’. This time they spoke in honeyed tones of ‘one country, one nation, at peace with itself, marching confidently on the road to modernity, and no threat to its neighbours’.

Napoleon’s mother, on being congratulated by courtiers for having so many children seated on the thrones of Europe, responded tartly: ‘But will it last?’

The facts are these: the situation in Afghanistan is inherently unstable. Only fantasists could suggest otherwise. The notion that the Alliance in its present form could last out a few years is risible. Turf wars have already begun in ‘liberated’ Kabul, though open clashes have been avoided. There is too much at stake. The West is watching. Money has been promised. Putin and Khatami are urging caution. But the dam will burst sooner rather than later. The former CIA collaborator Hamid Karzai can always get a job modelling chic Pashtunwear in North America and Europe, the US pro-consul Zalmay Khalizad can return to the White House or Unocal, but what of the dying and suffering people of Afghanistan? Once the Marines depart, with or without the head of Bin Laden, the Alliance will discover that there is no money for anything these days except waging war. The boy-scout propaganda that ‘we’re remaking the world’ is designed for domestic consumption. Schools and hospitals and homes are not going to be sprouting next spring or the one after in Afghanistan or Kosovo. I fear that this story, too, is not done.

8.

So, Was It Worth It?

October 2003

An Exchange with Mike O’Brien, UK Minister for Trade, Investment and Foreign Affairs

Dear Mike,

The difference between Britain and Afghanistan, of course, is that in Afghanistan there is a strong opposition. Karzai is so confident of his popularity in Kabul (his writ does not extend beyond the capital) that no Afghan is permitted to guard him. Elsewhere the various factions of the Northern Alliance and remnants of the Taliban control the country.

The aim of the war and occupation was to capture and kill Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar and shackle al-Qaeda. The result has been a dismal failure. The video earlier this year of Osama and his deputy wearing their Chitrali hats and strolling cheerfully in the Hindukush was a cheeky reminder that on this front the war has been a dismal failure.

Removing the Taliban from power was always a secondary aim. The condition of the population is certainly not better today than before the war. The reconstruction has turned out to be a joke. The women’s liberation talked about so eagerly at the time by the first ladies of Bush and Blair has come to nought. More money is being spent on feeding and housing Western troops than on the war-weary citizens of Afghanistan. And it will end badly, just like the Soviet intervention did in the eighties. I fear another civil war is waiting in the wings.

Yours, Tariq

Dear Tariq,

So scathing, so cynical, so wrong. When I drove through the suburbs of western Kabul, every building I passed had been damaged by twenty years of civil war. You impressively described those wars in your book, The Clash of Fundamentalisms.

But I saw a lot of people in those derelict homes making bricks and rebuilding. They were building because they had hope that the future could be better. I talked to people who were so glad that the Taliban were gone that they had tears in their eyes; women who no longer had to wear the burqa and who could send their daughters to school. I went to a school for the blind to present the children with some braille machines because the Taliban had destroyed them all. ‘Failure’, you say. It’s not wh...