Bastion of Free Speech

"May you live in interesting times" is an ancient Chinese curse reserved only for the most deserving. Happiness to the Chinese is mostly about tranquility, harmony and stability, and anything that disturbs the equations that result in these makes life difficult and hence interesting. Going by this, Afghanistan, for long interesting, is an even more interesting place these days. It's fraught with all kinds of possibilities, with very few bearing any worthwhile optimism. Afghans are notoriously fractious, quick to make deals and quicker to renege, and drawing blood comes much too easily to them.

With the collapse of the USSR, western oil interests have suddenly acquired an intense desire to provide the new Central Asian republics with the warm water port that eluded the Russians for almost three hundred years. Afghanistan sits bang in the middle of a region with immense possibilities and where geo-political tectonic plates also collide. These days when Afghanistan becomes more interesting, it is inevitable that the world around it also becomes so. Clearly it is time to read Afghan history anew, if a new course has to be charted out for it.

The Americans and their British henchmen have taken the Bagram airfield outside Kabul, which could be a prelude, a major deployment of forces. The predominantly Tajik Northern Alliance forces now under Gen. Muhammad Fahim Khan and notionally owing allegiance to the Tajik leader and onetime Afghan President, Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani, now control Kabul. Gen. Fahim Khan, who took over after the assassination of the legendary Ahmad Shah Massoud, has already called for a military council, a euphemism for a junta, to rule Afghanistan till such time other more constitutional arrangements are made. Clearly he sees little role for a UN that is merely a handmaiden of the western powers.

The Uzbek militias led by that notorious and frequent turncoat, Abdul Rashid Dostum, a former carpet salesman and pro-Communist general now bankrolled by the CIA, control Mazar-e-Sharif. The Iranian backed Hazara and hence predominantly Shiite, Hizb-e-Wahadat army under the command of Abdul Karim Khalili has taken central Afghanistan including the important Bamyan province. Another Tajik general, Ismail Khan, long blessed by Moscow has once again taken his old bastion, the town of Herat. A Taliban garrison mostly consisting of Pakistani, Arab and Chechen fighters still holds Konduz against Northern Alliance onslaughts.

In the predominantly Pashtu southern Afghanistan the anti-Taliban but nevertheless fundamentalist forces of Maulvi Yunis Khalis, a Ghalji warlord, have occupied Jalalabad. The Taliban leader, Mullah Omar was once a follower of Khalis, so we get a good idea as to where he is coming from. In the meantime the CIA supported Hamid Karzai, the head of the Poplazai clan of the dominant Durrani tribe of southern Afghanistan, at the head of a recently assembled army is contesting the Taliban's control over Kandahar. Thus, Afghanistan today is effectively partitioned.

While all this is happening an ex-King, the eighty-seven year old Durrani, Zahir Shah, impatiently waits in Rome hoping to be restored to a long gone throne. With so many uncertain ingredients brewing in the Afghan cauldron it is not surprising that to many in the West this ex-King should seem to be the one who could cool the brew down and contain it.

Fleeing elements of the Taliban militia have fled into the tribal agency areas of Pakistan where the writ of the Pakistani government does not run. Its unlikely that Gen. Musharaff will allow the either western aircraft to bomb these forces or send its army into these areas to cut them down. The Taliban will live to fight again.

Afghanistan as it exists today, notionally as one country, consists of four major nationalities. The largest of these are the Pashtu speaking Pathans who comprise a little more than forty percent of the population. The Pathans are concentrated in the southwestern part of Afghanistan. The other major nationalities are the Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras who are dominant in the northern half of Afghanistan. Quite clearly this could be a basis for the partition of the country we know as Afghanistan.

Sir Olaf Caroe who served in British India's North-West Frontier Province from 1916 before becoming the Viceroy's Foreign Secretary in 1934, and who was the last British governor of the NWFP in 1946-47, is also the author of The Pathans, described as the locus classicus of Pathan history. Caroe emphatically states that historically Pathans and Afghans refer to the same people. The Pathans, who live east of the Durand line, now in Pakistan, speak a variant of the Pathan language - Pakhtu. These Pathans live in the mountainous areas and are made up of tribes such as the Afridis, Orakzais, Shinwaris, Bangash and Turis. West of the Khyber, in today's Afghanistan, live the Pashtu speaking Pathans consisting mainly of two great tribes - the Durranis also known as Abdalis and the Ghaljis or Khaljis or Ghilzais. The original script of the poems of Khushal Khan Khatak was in Pashtu.

Historically the Pakhtu speaking Pathans had closer links with India, whereas the Pashtu speaking Pathans were influenced by Persia and many of them consequently spoke Persian. As it evolved the Pashtu speakers began to be referred to as Afghans and their Pakhtu speaking eastern cousins as Pathans. Be that as it may be, the differences though quite narrow are now fairly distinct, like those of the Hindi-speaking people of northern India. The recent attack, seen as a war on Islam has generated a sympathy and new affinity among Pakistani Pathans for their Afghan brethren.

The demand for a separate Pathan or Pakhtu homeland from out of Pakistan has been raised from time to time. The Pakistanis have managed to contain this largely by letting the tribal areas function as self-administered areas. So self-administered have they been that in the course of the recent conflict a US helicopter was brought down over Pakistani territory and the tribesmen had successfully blockaded the roads leading into Jalalabad and Kandahar to preclude any ground attack.

The modern Afghan state, if one can describe it as that now, was established only in 1747 by Ahmad Khan, an officer in a corps of Afghan mercenaries in Nadir Shah's conquering Persian army. Soon after Nadir Shah was murdered, the Afghan corps now commanded by Ahmad Khan decided to cut out on their own and carved themselves an Afghan state. The Durrani Ahmad Khan at the age of twenty-four was soon after elected Shah of Afghanistan by a meeting of the chiefs of the various tribes called a loya jirga which was held near Kandahar. In his twenty-six year reign Ahmad Khan, now Ahmad Shah raided the Indian plains eight times. In 1752 he annexed Lahore and Kashmir. In 1761 he defeated the great army of the Maratha Confederacy at Panipat, paving the way for the extension of the British Empire to all of North India. In 1823 the Sikhs annexed Kabul and for a hundred years after that control passed into various hands till in 1929 the Barakzai line now represented by ex-King Zahir Shah came to power. Zahir Shah was overthrown by his brother-in-law and first cousin, Mohammad Daud Khan, who proclaimed a Republic. The rest we know. Incidentally the Americans hope that a similar loya jirga meeting in the twenty-first century can be persuaded to "elect" Zahir Shah king once again!

What is not so well known is that the Al-Qaeda, against who the USA is now at war, was established with the assistance of the CIA to make life difficult for the Soviets in Afghanistan. There is much to suggest that the Taliban was masterminded by not just Pakistan's ISI but also by the British intelligence agency, MI6. In 1996 the Taliban, stiffened by a regular Pakistani brigade, drove out the government of Burhanuddin Rabbani and the Pashtu faction of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who were busy fighting each other. Hekmatyar now waits in Iran raising an army preparing to make his entry, and possibly to dispute the USA's attempt to install Hamid Karzai as the leader of all the "Afghan" Pathans. Hekmatyar was once the darling of the ISI and could very well become that once again.

What is also not so well known is that since 1996 important members of the Saudi royal family began channeling huge amounts of money to Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda and other extremist groups in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Yemen and Central Asia? A major contributory factor to this was the evolving internal political dynamics in Saudi Arabia. The US National Security Agency has for long had the intercepts confirming this. (For more on this see Seymour Hersh's article in The New Yorker of October 22, 2001). But the Saudi's typically have won themselves immunity from any scrutiny by shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business to US companies like Halliburton, headed till recently by US Vice-President Dick Cheney. Only after September 11 did the Saudi's stop funding the Taliban.

What is interesting is the revelation that Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, the incapacitated king's half brother, has been wanting to crack down on the all pervasive corruption in his country because the resultant disaffection was pushing thousand of young Saudis towards extremism. Many of these are now, dead or alive, in Afghanistan. The Saudi royals were, apart from other things, quite clearly buying themselves internal peace by funding extremism overseas. But the faction opposed to Abdullah and US corporations fattening on Saudi contracts wanted business to be as usual. Have you noticed how Dick Cheney has gone subterranean after the crisis erupted?

We can truly expect a most interesting period in Afghanistan. For the moment we might get some respite in Kashmir, but only some and not for long. Even our friend Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani is on record telling the journalist Eric Margolis in 1979: " Allah will guide our hands…. We will build a government according to the Sharia…. We will be a nation of Muslims." Then for good effect as Margolis bids him goodbye saying: "Inshallah, we will meet one day in Kabul!"; Rabbani replies: "Inshallah my friend, and perhaps in free Kashmir as well!" Such are our friends. And as for the Pathans, this is what Khushal Khan has to say:

"No great deed will be wrought by the Pathans,
Heaven ordains that petty should be their achievement;
I seek to set them straight, they straighten not;
Crooked is the vision of the well-intentioned."

Copyright(c) Mohan Guruswamy, 2001. All rights reserved.