Afghanistan After the Taliban
By OLIVIER ROY
nytimes.com
DREUX, France
Twenty years of war have left Afghanistan so
devastated that the only remaining basis for politics lies in
ethnic and regional factions. Efforts to unite Afghans with
a class- based ideology failed years ago with the end of
Afghan leftist parties and of Soviet support. The Taliban's
own Islamist appeal promised, for a time, to transcend
factionalism and unite Afghans on a religious basis. That
promise has gone unfulfilled.
Taliban Islamic fundamentalism has become, in recent
years, too rigid, simplistic and oppressive to retain
Afghan loyalties and too closely associated with the
foreign methods and ambitions of Osama bin Laden and
the Arab and other guests in his circle. Increasingly, it too
has become reliant on regional and ethnic loyalties, in this
case the loyalties of Pashtuns — who make up the great
majority of Taliban followers — and in particular
Pashtuns from the Kandahar region.
Against this background, any post- Taliban government
will have to, at least in the short term, cobble together a
coalition based on recognizing the country's various
centers of power. Britain and Pakistan agreed Friday that
such a government must have "every key ethnic group
included," as Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair, put it
after meeting with President Pervez Musharraf of
Pakistan. Ideological affiliations, for now, do not make
sense in Afghanistan.
The main opponents of the Taliban are united in the loose
coalition of the Northern Alliance. The late Ahmed Shah
Massoud's forces hold the northeast; they are mainly
Tajiks (Sunni Persian-speakers) and constitute the best
military units. Around the city of Mazar-i-Sharif in the
northeast, Gen. Rashid Dostum continues to head a small
force of local Uzbeks. The main power in the northwest is
Ismail Khan, who is a Sunni Persian speaker but does not
consider himself Tajik. Finally, the country's center is
populated by Shiite Persian speakers. They are mainly
represented by the Hezbe Wahdat, a formally pro-Iranian
group.
None of these movements has total control of its area.
There are also dozens of local warlords — truly the
plague of Afghanistan — who will take whatever power
they can grasp, and will shift loyalties in a moment.
The armed opposition to the Taliban inside Afghanistan,
then, is mainly based on non-Pashtuns. Pashtuns joined the
Taliban in 1996 as a kind of protest against being
excluded from the central power, which was then headed
by the non-Pashtuns who would later form the Northern
Alliance. But the Pashtuns are themselves not united:
eastern Pashtuns, who straddle the border with Pakistan,
also feel alienated by the hegemony of the Kandahar
Pashtuns who dominate the Taliban. The eastern Pashtuns
have never had a political movement of their own and
usually rely on temporary gatherings of tribal elders,
called jirga, which find a consensus as necessary on
specific issues then disband.
How to set up a political settlement in such a complex
landscape? A first point is that despite ethnic antagonisms,
no Afghan ethnic group claims independence or seeks
attachment to a neighboring country. Afghanistan's Tajiks,
for example, are not hoping to join up with Tajikistan. All
Afghans claim to be Afghan and want a unified country —
with fair shares of power for their own groups.
Nevertheless there is no precise census showing the
relative numbers of each group. Pashtuns may form the
largest group, but probably not an absolute majority.
A second point is that if the Northern Alliance joins with
Pashtuns to form a coalition, such an entity might represent
Afghan ethnic diversity adequately enough to begin stable
government. The agreement made in Rome between the
Northern coalition and the exiled king, Muhammad Zahir
Shah, is a good omen. The king, himself a Pashtun from
Kandahar — although his mother tongue is Persian —
plausibly represents the continuity of the Afghan nation.
That continuity, through decades of conflict and
devastation, has all but disappeared from the Afghan
scene; the king may well be the only means of bringing it
back.
However, the Pashtuns around the king are mainly exiles
with very little constituency inside Afghanistan. To be
effective, a post-Taliban government will need a third
element: tribal leaders from the Kandahar region.
The greatest immediate challenges to such a government
will be, first, to pry southern Pashtun, particularly
Kandahari, loyalty away from the Taliban — and second,
to moderate the influence of Pakistan. Will southern
Pashtuns support the Taliban when conflict with the
United States finally arrives? There are many signs of
disaffection. In the beginning, Pashtuns were happy with
the Taliban's re- establishment of law and order and of a
Pashtun regime in Kabul. Soon, however, many became
upset by the Taliban's purist onslaught on tribal customs,
and resented being forced into the army and commanded to
cease growing opium poppies at a time of profound
economic desperation.
Finally, the growing ideological radicalization of the
Taliban's leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, has run
counter to the trend against ideology in Afghanistan.
During the last year, Mullah Omar has become more and
more isolated. He has not met with the Taliban
government in Kabul, preferring to seclude himself in
Kandahar and rule through a small inner circle of local
clerics and foreign radicals, whose leading figure is Mr.
bin Laden.
Many decisions taken in 2000 and 2001 bear the mark of
that puritan influence: destroying the Buddhist statues in
Bamiyan, requiring non- Muslims to wear insignia and
arresting foreign humanitarian workers for Christian
proselytizing. The growing influence of "Wahhabis," as
they are called in the region — meaning that their concept
of religion is based on the puritanism of official Saudi
Islam — has created a nationalist backlash among many
Afghans.
If Pashtun loyalty to the Taliban is weakening in
Afghanistan, it probably remains strong among Pakistan's
16 million Pashtuns, who live along Pakistan's border
with Afghanistan. Pakistani ethnic Pashtuns are heavily
influenced by Taliban-style fundamentalism and hold
many key positions in the Pakistani government, army and
security services.
Pakistan has long used both ethnic and religious leverage
to influence Afghanistan, whether through the Pashtun
fundamentalist warlord and politician Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar in the 1980's or the Taliban after 1994. This
policy has been driven by Pakistan's desire to use its own
Pashtun minority, and other Pakistanis who lean toward
fundamentalism, as tools to bring Afghanistan into its
sphere of influence.
If Pakistan is now ready to get rid of Mullah Omar and
Mr. bin Laden, who have become liabilities, it will still,
following the well established pattern, try to promote
some other brand of Pashtun Islamism. It will probably
work to undermine the coalition around the king and play
on America's presumed inability to engage in
state-building for any length of time.
If Pakistan does pursue such a policy, it would recreate
the conditions that brought the Taliban to power in the first
place. To give Afghanistan a real chance for peace,
Pakistani influence will have to be either dramatically
altered or aggressively minimized. America and its allies
should strengthen the coalition around the king by enticing
southern Pashtuns to join. Afghanistan should be returned
to all Afghans.
Olivier Roy is author of ``Afghanistan: From Holy War
to Civil War'' and ``The New Central Asia.'' |
