The quest for an Afghan settlement
The settlement of the security forces in Afghanistan must be in accordance with the ethnic map. Photo: AFP and lib.utexas.edu
Thucydides, the historian of ancient Greece, believed that peace is only a short-lived armistice in a natural state of perpetual war and this has been the doleful experience of Afghanistan. The country has bled and continues to bleed from the wounds inflicted on it by external aggression, internal conflict and ethnic strife. Ever since Ahmad Shah Abdali founded the kingdom of Afghanistan in 1747, its people have been the victims of relentless violence. After Abdali's death in 1773, his kingdom crumbled and spurred rivalry between imperial Britain and Russia which played itself out as the "great game" of the nineteenth century. The last three decades have been particularly violent and Afghanistan became the only country in the world to be invaded and occupied twice by superpowers. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 29 December 1979 to February 1989 triggered a fierce liberation struggle the successful culmination of which contributed to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The last battle of the Cold War was thus won and fought by Muslims for the so-called free world. The decade-long war was unique in the sense that it was a completely decentralized conflict fought in hundreds of war theatres through the length and breadth of 647,500 square kilometers of rugged Afghan terrain. There was no central figure no Mao Tse Tung, no Ho Chi Minh, no McArthur or De Gaul around whom the people could rally. The nation-wide jubilation and the nationalist upsurge that invariably marks such a triumph were therefore absent from Afghanistan. Instead the war-hardened local commanders consolidated themselves in their respective areas and the fighting continued transforming itself from a heroic war of liberation into an ugly contest for power. The hope of peace became as illusory as a mirage in the desert. After the Soviet withdrawal, the next phase of the conflict was against the Moscow-installed Najibullah regime which ended with the latter's ouster on 28 April 1992. The Pakistan-brokered settlement through the Peshawar and Islamabad accords of 1992 and 1993 proved disastrous because Burhanuddin Rabbani, the ethnic Tajik leader of the Jamiat-e-Islami, refused to step down as president of Afghanistan after his term expired in July 1994. Consequently the writ of the government was confined to Kabul while mujahideen commanders established warlord zones in the rest of the country. The warlords were a law unto themselves and imposed their own arbitrary fiat in the areas they controlled. In Kandahar, the main road to Herat on the one hand, and to Chaman in Pakistan on the other, had toll posts and barriers at virtually every kilometre, where local commanders exacted fees and whatever other extortions they decided upon on any passing traffic. The lives and honour of ordinary citizens were at their mercy. It was against this backdrop of chaos and anarchy that the Pashtun-dominated Taliban movement emerged. In the last week of August 1994, Mullah Omar set out with forty-five followers from a madrassa in Maiwand, Kandahar, to punish a commander who had molested a local family. It was neither ideology nor religious fervour that accounted for their subsequent success. It was the war-weariness of the populace which made them welcome any force that could deliver them from the hands of brigands. They hungered for the restoration of peace and the semblance of an honest administration no matter how harsh its system of justice. The local commanders who surrendered to the Taliban brought with them substantial quantities of weapons and ammunition. With each success the ranks of the Taliban swelled with veterans who had fought against the Soviets. However, it was not through force of arms but the persuasiveness of their message that the Taliban were able to triumphantly sweep first the eastern and then the western part of Afghanistan. It had been claimed that Kabul could sustain a siege for more than a year but its surrender to the Taliban came virtually overnight on 27 September 1996 with only 200 casualties. The reaction of the US to the Taliban soon after they had taken Kabul was one of cautious support. The first formal American pronouncement came on 18 November 1996 at the UN conference in New York of countries with interest in Afghanistan. The statement of the US delegate was built around three elements. First, that the Taliban were entirely an indigenous movement; second, their success had nothing to do with military prowess, and; third, the way to moderate their extremist worldview was by engaging with them. However instead of engaging with the Taliban the international community isolated them and, as a consequence, Afghanistan became the breeding ground for terrorist outfits. Five years later the fateful 9/11 attacks occurred prompting the US-led invasion of Afghanistan and the destruction of the Taliban regime. Nine years into the conflict, the 47-member coalition forces have been unable to quell the insurgency despite the overwhelming fire power at their disposal. In the past twelve months there has been a 50 percent increase in violent incidents and the Taliban presence has spread to the north and west of the country. The NATO summit in Lisbon from 19-21 November 2010 besides working out a new strategic concept as well as deciding on missile defences and NATO-Russia relations also set a deadline for the withdrawal of international forces form Afghanistan by 2014 while endorsing the reconciliation process initiated by President Karzai. It is likely that the decisions of the summit will be reaffirmed in US policy review on Afghanistan scheduled in December 2010. For his part, the commander of the International Security Assistance Force and US Forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, has crafted his counter-insurgency strategy on the four interlocking elements of "clear, hold, build and transfer." The last of these poses the formidable difficulty of who to transfer to particularly in the Pashtun belt which is overwhelmingly dominated by the Taliban. By the end of this year, NATO will have trained approximately 150,000 troops and 100,000 police. But the officer class is predominantly Tajik and Uzbek who belong to the minority ethnic groups. There has however been an effort to recruit more Pashtuns but these are from the minor tribes in the smaller provinces. Traditionally the Afghan officers have been from the Ghilzai tribes of the eastern provinces of Khost, Paktika and Paktia which are collectively known as the greater Paktia region. The problem arises here is that the dominant influence in this region is that of the Al Qaeda-supported Haqqani network. Similarly, there has been little effort recruit Pashtun soldiers from the Durrani tribes who are preponderant in Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan and Zabul. In the final analysis, it is the quest for national cohesion in a heterogeneous population that defines the Afghanistan problem. Peaceful coexistence among its ethnic groups led by the Pashtuns has been alien to the Afghan experience. The key to durable settlement in Afghanistan is that the future dispensation and the security forces must be in accordance with the ethnic map of the country. Any other arrangement will be unstable and only prolong the agony of the Afghan people.
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