OCTOBER 1, 2001 How Deep Are His Roots?
Bin Laden may be far less popular inside Afghanistan than has been reported
By Richard Evans
With the U.S. poised to take some type of military action against Osama bin Laden, one of the difficult issues is gauging how much popular support the terrorist leader enjoys inside Afghanistan. Contrary to some news reports, bin Laden may actually be quite unpopular with Afghans and even with some elements of the Taliban regime that runs the country.
Some political analysts, including those monitoring the Afghan regime's short-wave radio service, are increasingly convinced that at least some members of the ruling Taliban militia are looking for a face-saving way of ridding themselves of bin Laden once and for all. Indeed, popular support for the Taliban itself has been eroding for years, and it's just possible that Taliban leaders would turn a blind eye to a measured U.S. assault on bin Laden's mountain hideouts.
Although it has not been widely reported, neither bin Laden nor the members of his Al Qaeda terrorist organization are very welcome among Afghans. Indeed, last week the Taliban said that it had delivered a request to him to leave Afghanistan. The request was a surprisingly bold statement of condemnation by the ulema, a group of Afghan Muslim religious leaders. According to the Koran, guests may be asked to abandon a host nation's or person's protection ONLY if they have abused the code of hospitality or have committed an ungodly act.
Bin Laden and his fighters were never invited into Afghanistan by the Taliban. Rather, they date to a previous era when a variety of Arabs, Pakistanis, Sudanese and other partisans came to wage a jihad, or holy war, against the Soviet army, which fought for control of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. Armed, dangerous and unwanted back in their home countries after the Russians left, many stayed on in Afghanistan as unwelcome guests.
"One of the Taliban cabinet ministers recently told me that bin Laden and his people are like a chicken bone stuck in their throat," says Ghulam Zarmawal, an Afghan journalist who has long monitored the region's affairs and retains good contacts in both Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan. "They can't manage to spit him out, and it's too dangerous to try to swallow him."
Questions surround the Taliban's ability to storm bin Laden's well-armed and well-entrenched forces, even if they wanted to. He is surrounded by a reported 1,000 to 3,000 highly motivated zealots. Their bases in eastern and southern Afghanistan are a warren of caves, trenches and vast ammo dumps filled with weapons that the U.S. supplied years ago to forces fighting the Russians. It's unlikely the Taliban, with its limited air force and armor, would be able to capture bin Laden even if it tried.
Western observers sometimes mistakenly refer to the Taliban regime as a coherent, fanatically religious movement devoid of internal divisions or conflict. The truth is actually far from that. The Taliban leadership is in fact an odd alliance of Muslim scholars, religious students who took up arms, former rebel commanders allied with the West against Soviet occupation and former Afghan army officers. Despite reports that bin Laden has given millions in financial assistance to the Taliban, he and his forces are far from universally popular.
Although many Afghans hate the U.S. because it bombed bases in their country with suspected ties to bin Laden, not everyone in the country is anti-American. Nor is there a universal hatred of Americans or the West among the Afghans.
Travelling extensively through wartime Afghanistan as a journalist on 10 trips between 1984 and 1991, I was treated with kindness and deference by the rebel commanders and fighters that were my companions. There seemed little animosity aimed at Americans or other Westerners. Indeed, French, British, Belgian and Italian doctors and nurses often spent extended periods deep inside the country treating local civilians and fighters. The odd lot of food and blankets would occasionally go missing, but serious problems and misunderstandings were rare.
I also encountered foreign Muslim partisans on a number of trips, including the Saudis, Sudanese, Egyptian and Punjabi militants that were already gathering around bin Laden's organization. The organization was ostensibly there to fight the Russians, but rarely seemed to become involved in actual fighting. Even then, the rumors circulated that these foreign Muslims were stockpiling their weapons and waiting for the day they could establish or curry favor with a future Islamic dictatorship.
Support for Osama bin Laden among Afghans and the Taliban may be eroding.
The foreign Muslims I ran across on my trips inside Afghanistan often appeared bitter and paranoid -- sometimes threatening and pointing weapons at me and other journalists, other times accusing us of spying. But I was always protected by my mujahideen escorts, who clearly did not like these foreign Muslims. The Arab partisans didn't mix well with the Afghans -- who are not Arab by ethnicity -- and sometimes looked down on them as inferior. (The majority of Afghans are Pathans, with most Taliban support coming from ethnic Pathans.)
The foreign Muslims tended to stick to their own bases and showed little regard for local customs and manners. Many of their weapons were apparently supplied by the Saudi government as well as by wealthy oil sheiks throughout the Persian Gulf region. And despite Iran's then-terrible reputation for exporting Islamic revolution, I never came across a single Iranian in Afghanistan, although there were rumored to be some operating in Hazarajat, the country's south-central highlands.
"These stateless Arabs [from places such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Sudan] have become the most implacable of all," says Dr. Roy Allison of Britain's Royal Institute for International Affairs. "Unlike the Afghans, they have nothing to lose and nowhere to go."
Just as the Arab fighters have become increasingly unpopular with most Afghans, the once-popular Taliban government also has fallen from grace in the eyes of many. For Westerners to understand the euphoria surrounding Taliban's rise to power back in 1996, they have to grasp the medieval state into which the country had fallen by then. The Soviets' departure in 1989 was followed by three years of civil war and, from 1992 onwards, a period of anarchy in which at least 50,000 were killed and the nation's prime minister sat in the mountains outside of Kabul literally shelling the presidential palace. Looting and murder abounded. Economic activity ground to a halt.
When the Taliban first took power in 1996, it did stop much of the crime and punish the wrongdoers. The streets were safe again, at least in those parts of the country that the Taliban controlled. But as the years rolled by and the leadership became more autocratic, harsh Islamic punishments were introduced and women were robbed of virtually all civil liberties. A four-year drought has also taken its toll on the little agriculture that remains. Against that backdrop, the Taliban religious clerics and military commanders running the country appear ever more powerless and ineffective.
Today, a reported few thousand ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks in the north of the country continue their dogged resistance against the Taliban regime. Indeed, Afghanistan is now so depressed and divided that only indiscriminate bombing of civilians would likely unite them against the West.
Barron's |
