'The Making of Afghanistan' - By Pankaj Mishra
dubli...@gmail.com
By Pankaj Mishra
The New York Review of Books November 15, 2001
It is hard to imagine now, but for students at Kabul University, 1968
was no less a hectic year than it was for students at Columbia,
Berkeley, Oxford, and the Sorbonne. A king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, had
been presiding over the many ethnic and tribal enclaves of Afghanistan
since 1933. But he knew enough of the world elsewhere to attempt,
cautiously, a few liberal reforms in his capital city, Kabul. The
university had been set up in 1946; a liberal constitution was
introduced in 1964; the press was technically free; women ran for
public office in 1965. By the Sixties, many students and teachers had
traveled abroad; and new ideas about how to organize the state and
society had come to the sons of peasants and nomads and artisans from
their foreign or foreign-educated teachers.
In the somewhat rarefied world of modernizing Kabul, where women were
allowed to appear without the veil in 1959, communism and radical Islam
attracted almost an equal number of believers: to these impatient men,
the great Afghan countryside with its antique ways appeared ready for
revolution. It was from this fledgling intelligentsia in Kabul that
almost all of the crucial political figures of the next three decades
emerged.
Less than five years after 1968, King Zahir Shah was deposed in a
military coup by his cousin, the ambitious former prime minister
Mohammad Daoud. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fn1 [1] Daoud
initially sought help from the Communists, whose influence in the army
and bureaucracy had grown rapidly since the 1960s: together, they went
after the radical Islamists, many of whom were imprisoned or murdered
for ideological reasons. But when Daoud, wary of the increasing power
of the Communists, tried to get rid of them, he was in turn overthrown
and killed. In April 1978, the Communists-themselves divided,
confusingly, into two factions, Khalq and Parcham, that roughly
corresponded to the rural-urban divide in Afghanistan-assumed full
control of the government in Kabul, and in their hurry to eliminate all
potential opposition to their program of land redistribution and
indoctrination-an attempt, really, to create a Communist society
virtually overnight-inaugurated what two decades later still looks like
an ongoing process: the brutalization and destruction of Afghanistan.
Within just a few months, 12,000 people considered anti-Communist, many
of them members of the country's educated elite, were killed in Kabul
alone; many thousands more were murdered in the countryside. Thousands
of families began leaving the country for Pakistan and Iran. Many
radical Islamists of Kabul University were already in exile in Pakistan
by 1978; some of them had even started a low-intensity guerrilla war
against the Communist government. Several army garrisons across the
country mutinied, and people in the villages, who were culturally very
remote from Kabul, began many separate jihads, or holy wars, against
the Communist regime.
Earlier this year, in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, I met Anwar,
whose father and uncle were among the earliest Afghans to take up arms
against the Communists. They weren't Islamists. Anwar's father, a
farmer, lived in a village north of Kabul, near the border with what is
now Tajikistan, and, although he was a devout Muslim, knew little about
the modern ideologies of Islam that had traveled to Kabul University
from Egypt, Pakistan, and Iran. It was Anwar's uncle, an officer in
Zahir Shah's finance ministry in Kabul, who was a bit more in touch
with them. He was friendly with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the
prominent radical Islamists at Kabul University, who sought refuge in
Pakistan in the mid-1970s after a failed uprising against Daoud and the
Communists.
In the beginning, the Russians were busy with consolidating the
Communist hold over Kabul and securing the country's main highways, and
they seemed very far from rural Afghanistan, which in any case had had
for years relative autonomy from the government in the capital city.
But later, with the aggressive campaigns of land reforms and Marxist
indoctrination emanating from Kabul, resistance built up swiftly
throughout the country. Anwar's father and uncle joined one of the
Mujahideen groups that, though equipped only with .303 Lee Enfield
rifles, managed to keep their region free of Communist influence. Then,
in December 1979, the Soviet army entered Afghanistan in order to
protect the Communist revolution, which was also being threatened by
factional fighting among Afghan Communists and rebellions by the army;
and the position of Anwar's family became more precarious.
In 1983, Russian planes bombed the villages Anwar and his relatives
lived in, in retaliation for attacks on Afghan army convoys by the
Mujahideen. Although Anwar's father and uncle stayed back to fight and
look after the animals and fields, there was no choice for many of the
women and children but to leave.
Anwar, who was seven years old at the time, couldn't recall too many
details of the long walk that brought him and his mother and young
brother to Pakistan. He did remember that it was very cold. There was
snow on the ground and on the hills, and Anwar and his family walked
all day and rested at night in roadside mosques. The 350-mile-long road
to Pakistan swarmed with thousands of refugees, but they had to avoid
moving in large groups, which the Russian helicopters buzzing ominously
overhead liked to fire upon. They also had to stay as close as possible
to the main road, for there were mines in the fields and on the dirt
tracks-these were the tiny "butterfly mines" that floated down from the
helicopters and then lay in wait for unmindful children and animals.
I still heard about the mines when I traveled this past spring on the
road that links Kabul to Pakistan, through Ningrahar province.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fn2 [2] Dust-spattered refugee
families from northern Afghanistan stood hopefully by the side of the
eroded tarmac, where the Toyota pickups of the Taliban-young turbaned
men and guns crammed in the back-were the new sources of fear. The land
seemed vacant, the high surrounding mountains concealed behind a haze,
and the stubborn bareness of rock and desert was relieved only
occasionally by a green field and a black-tented encampment of nomads.
There is emptiness now, but in the days of Zahir Shah this land was
reclaimed, with Soviet assistance, for cultivation; and orchards and
fields, watered by broad canals, sprang up. In a half-abandoned
village, rusty padlocks hanging from the doors of bleached wood set
into long mud walls, an old Afghan was startled when I mentioned that
time. Rasool had been in his late teens then; had known some of the
prosperity that came to the region; and could even, with some prompting
by me, remember the white men-Russian experts-traveling through the
fields.
Unlike Anwar's father and uncle, Rasool wasn't a Mujahideen: he hadn't
revolted against the Russians or the Communists; he had been content to
tend his land. The jihad had almost bypassed him; and he had known hard
times only when, sometime in the mid-1980s, Russian planes bombed the
canals that brought water to his land. There had been another recovery
after the Russian army withdrew in 1989, when white men, this time from
the UN, came and supervised the repair of the canals. By then, the
local Mujahideen commanders were in charge. They taxed all the traffic
on the roads; they took over the land which once belonged to the Afghan
state and made the farmers grow high-yield poppy.
There was no point for Rasool to defy the commanders; he wouldn't have
got any cash credit from the traders in the town for anything other
than opium. Not that the poppy-growing had improved his circumstances.
It was the Mujahideen commanders who had grown very rich from
converting the poppy into heroin and then smuggling it across the
border into Iran and Pakistan.
And then, suddenly, before he had even heard of them, the young
soldiers of the Taliban arrived from the southern provinces, chased out
the Mujahideen commanders, and took over the checkpoints. They
supervised, and profited from, the drug business until 1999, when they
abruptly banned the cultivation of poppy, leaving most farmers with no
sources of livelihood, and the option only of migrating to Pakistan.
Rasool lived in the vast, now arid land, after being taken, in just
three decades, through a whole fruitless cycle of Afghan history. The
long reign of Zahir Shah was no more than a faint memory. All the slow,
steady work of previous generations was canceled out; Afghanistan was
even further back from its tryst with the modern world.
2.
But then, like many Muslim countries suddenly confronted in the
nineteenth century with the rising power of the West, Afghanistan's
route to modern development could only have been tortuous. The Afghan
empire of the eighteenth century had reached as far as Kashmir in the
east and up to the Iranian city of Mashhad in the west. Like
present-day Afghanistan, it contained many different ethnic groups, the
dominant Pashtun tribes in the east and south, Tajiks and Uzbeks in the
north and west, and the Shia Hazaras in the central provinces. Almost
all of them were Sunni or Shia Muslims. Fiercely autonomous and proud,
they had successfully resisted the British attempt to extend their
Indian empire up to Kabul; but after two Anglo-Afghan wars, 1838-1842
and 1878-1880, the Afghans had been subdued enough to serve as a buffer
state between the expanding empires of Britain and Russia.
The British were content to exercise influence from afar without
troubling themselves with direct rule. It was under their supervision
that the present-day boundaries of Afghanistan were drawn, leaving a
lot of Pashtun tribes in what is now Pakistan. The British also
subsidized the Afghan army. Until 1919, when the Afghans won complete
independence from the British, the ruler in Kabul reported to Delhi in
matters of foreign policy, which essentially involved keeping the
Russians out of Afghanistan.
The British-backed rulers of Afghanistan in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries were insecure and ruthless, obsessed with
protecting their regime from any local challenges as well:
Afghanistan's continued isolation was in their best interests. During
the twenty-one-year rule of Amir Abdur Rahman (1880-1901), one of
Afghanistan's more pro-British rulers, only one school was built in
Kabul, and that was a madrasa (theological school). Condemned to
playing a passive part in an imperial Great Game, Afghanistan missed
out on the indirect benefits of colonial rule: the creation of an
educated class such as would supply the basic infrastructure of the
post-colonial states of India, Pakistan, and Egypt.
Afghanistan's resolute backwardness in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries was appealing to Western romantics: Kipling, who
was repelled by the educated Bengali, commended the Pashtun
tribesmen-the traditional rulers of Afghanistan, and also a majority
among Afghans-for their courage, love of freedom, and sense of honor.
These cliches about the Afghans-which were to be amplified in our own
time by American journalists and politicians-also had some effect on
Muslims themselves.
One of them was Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, a polemicist of the nineteenth
century, who sought to alert the Muslim peoples to their growing
subjugation to the imperial powers of the West. The radical Islamists I
spoke to didn't remember that in 1968-while student groups at Kabul
University were organizing large demonstrations against one another,
distributing fiery pamphlets, and fighting one another on the streets-a
huge mausoleum for al-Afghani went up inside the campus, to honor
someone who, although born in Iran and educated in India, adopted the
pen name "al-Afghani" and even began to tell other people that he was
from Afghanistan. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fn3 [3]
The increasing influence of the West, and the related undermining of
Muslim power, was the inescapable event of al-Afghani's lifetime; he
witnessed it more closely than most Muslims during his long stints in
India, Iran, Egypt, France, England, and Turkey. But Afghanistan had
hardly been affected by the lifestyles and new knowledge of Europe, by
the passion and energy of white men from the West that were
transforming old worlds elsewhere in the nineteenth century. This
resistance to Western-style modernization would have impressed
al-Afghani, who, while stressing the need to modernize Muslim
societies, disapproved of the wholesale adoption of European ways of
the kind Kemal Atat FC rk would impose upon Turkey just two decades
after al-Afghani's death in 1897.
Al-Afghani failed to see how even small but strategically placed
countries like Afghanistan were being drawn into the great imperial
games of nineteenth-century Europe, and then sentenced to isolation and
backwardness as buffer states. Behind his romantic attachment to
Afghanistan lay fear and defensiveness-his painful awareness, shared by
many other educated people in once-great Asian societies, that they had
fallen behind, and that they not only had to catch up with the West,
but also had to keep in check its increasing power to alter their
lives, mostly for the worse.
For many educated people in pre-modern societies, communism offered a
way of both catching up with and resisting the West; and the ideology
had a powerful, and often generous, sponsor in the Soviet Union. But
the hasty, ill-adapted borrowings from Soviet communism-the simplistic
notion, for instance, of Afghans as feudal people who had to be turned
into proletarians-more often than not imposed new kinds of pain and
trauma on such a traditional society as Afghanistan; and helped to push
the country even further away from the modern world.
The Soviet Union had supported the Communist coup of 1978 in Kabul, and
so had grown concerned about the clumsy and brutal way in which the
Khalq faction of the Afghan Communist Party, led by the fanatical
ideologue Hafizullah Amin, a one-time student at Columbia University,
had hijacked the coup, and then had tried violently-and, as spontaneous
revolts across the country proved, disastrously-to weld the incoherent
ethnic-tribal worlds of Afghanistan into a Communist society. As the
records of Politburo conversations reveal, the aging leaders of the
Soviet Union at first resisted military intervention in Afghanistan.
But they feared that the United States, unsettled by the fall of the
Shah of Iran, was trying, with the help of the wily Amin, to find an
alternative anti-Soviet base in Afghanistan. They suspected Amin of
being "an ambitious, cruel, treacherous person" who "may change the
political orientation of the regime."
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fn4 [4]
This sounds like cold war paranoia. It wasn't softened by the mutinies
against the Communist regime by Afghan military garrisons, one of
which, in the city of Herat, ended in the killings of several Soviet
and East European advisers. In the last days of 1979, when the
Communist regime looked close to collapse, a contingent of Soviet
soldiers flew into Kabul, stormed Amin's palace, and killed him. A more
moderate leader, Babrak Karmal, who belonged to the urban-based Parcham
faction, took his place and attempted to avert the collapse of the
Afghan state and bring an end to the brutalities.
Karmal was only partly successful in restoring order to Afghanistan. In
1986, the Soviets replaced Karmal with Mohammad Najibullah, the head of
KHAD, the Communist intelligence agency. Najibullah, known so far for
his role in the execution and torture of anti-Communists, tried even
harder to win the Afghans' support. He toned down the Communist
rhetoric, emphasized his faith in Islam, and began reaching out to the
refugees and Mujahideen, speaking all the time of compromise and
national reconciliation. But his government couldn't possibly acquire
legitimacy among Afghans while being beholden to a foreign power. And
in any case, things were out of his control: Afghanistan had already
begun fighting in a new proxy war that would kill a million or more
Afghans over the next decade, many of them from Soviet bombing of
civilians, including fleeing refugees.
3.
By the late Seventies, proxy wars between the United States and the
Soviet Union were already being fought in Angola, Somalia, and
Ethiopia. That is why the revelation made three years ago-by Zbigniew
Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter-that
small-scale American aid to the Afghan Islamists based in Pakistan had
begun some months before the Soviet army arrived in Afghanistan is not
surprising. In July 1979, President Carter signed the first of the
directives for the clandestine aid that Brzezinski later said had the
effect of drawing the Russians into "the Afghan trap." "We didn't push
the Russians to intervene," Brzezinski said, "but we knowingly
increased the probability that they would." This secret operation
explains his exultant tone in the letter he claims to have sent to
President Carter on December 27, 1979, the day the Soviet army entered
Afghanistan. "Now," he said, "we can give the USSR its Vietnam War."
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fn5 [5]
Brzezinski's enthusiasm was shared by William Casey, a veteran of the
OSS and the director of the CIA under President Reagan. In the
mid-1980s, Casey committed CIA funds to the even grander plan of
organizing the Muslims of the world into a global jihad against Soviet
communism. By the mid-1980s, the CIA office in Islamabad, Pakistan, had
become second in size only to the headquarters in Langley, Virginia;
and American assistance to the Afghan Islamists, channeled through the
CIA and the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, was running into
billions of dollars. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fn6 [6]
The military dictator of Pakistan, General Zia ul-Haq, was more than
eager to place his country in the avant garde of the jihad. Since April
1979, two years after his coup and after he had hanged his former prime
minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, he had been urgently seeking both money
and respectability from the United States. By promoting radical
Islamists in Pakistan and Afghanistan he also hoped to suppress
Bhutto's party, the Pakistan People's Party, and the intellectuals,
journalists, and human rights activists agitating for the restoration
of democracy. Somewhat similar local reasons prompted President Sadat
of Egypt to offer cheap arms to the CIA for use in Afghanistan. The
most generous support of the jihad among other pro-American governments
came from the ruling family of Saudi Arabia, which was concerned about
the growing influence of its traditional Shia rival, Iran, since its
Islamic revolution. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fn7 [7]
The Saudis saw the jihad in Afghanistan as a way of exporting Wahabism
-an especially austere Saudi version of Sunni Islam, whose founders in
the early nineteenth century attacked Mecca and Medina and purged them
of the Sufi-style venerations which involved idolatry as well as
dancing and music. They matched the American assistance to the Afghan
Islamists dollar for dollar. Prince Turki, the head of the Saudi
intelligence agency, worked closely with the CIA and the Pakistani ISI,
and sent a rich Saudi businessman, Osama bin Laden, to organize the
thousands of poor Arabs from the Middle East and North Africa who,
attracted by promises of food and money, had traveled to Pakistan to
enlist in the CIA-backed jihad against communism.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fn8 [8]
Thus many separate ambitions and strategies powered the Afghan struggle
against communism. The diverse agenda of its sponsors and prime agents
meant that little attention was paid to organizing the highly fractious
Afghans into a cohesive resistance movement that in time could replace
the unpopular and discredited Communist government in Kabul-which by
Najibullah's own admission had lost control over 80 percent of the
Afghan countryside.
One of the few things that united the five million Afghans in Pakistan
and Iran and millions more in Afghanistan itself was their resentment
of the Afghan Communists and their Russian backers. Seven Afghan
resistance "parties" came forward to receive the millions of dollars'
worth of arms and humanitarian aid that started flowing into Pakistan
in the early 1980s. The parties represented the ethnic, linguistic, and
tribal divisions within the Afghans; but many of their members had
little or no connection with the Mujahideen commanders and soldiers in
Afghanistan who were fighting a sporadically intense guerrilla war
against the Soviets.
The CIA avoided direct contact with the Afghans in order to maintain
the fiction of American noninvolvement; it used Pakistani intelligence
(the ISI) for the important logistical tasks: the distribution of aid,
the military coordination between Mujahideen outfits. But the officers
of the ISI had their own favorites; they wanted to promote the
pro-Pakistan men within Afghanistan's majority ethnic community, the
Pashtuns. As a result, one of the most effective fighters who was
neither led by the CIA nor coordinated by the ISI, the brilliant Tajik
Mujahideen commander in northern Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Masoud,
received hardly any assistance. Masoud fought the Taliban for six
years, until he was assassinated last month, two days before the
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, by two suicide
bombers posing as Arab journalists, who were in all likelihood sent by
Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. The largest beneficiary of foreign aid
was the Pashtun Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who amassed a huge
arsenal in southern Afghanistan and most of the time avoided the
battlefield.
Then there were the obvious instances of corruption produced by a
prolonged war effort, bankrolled covertly with unaudited money, and
controlled through several intermediaries: the proof of unrestrained
plunder is all there in the mansions of ISI officers and Afghan
resistance leaders you see in Pakistan. A large number of sophisticated
weapons ended up in an arms bazaar near Peshawar or traveled elsewhere
in Pakistan, stoking the various ethnic and sectarian conflicts that
ravaged the country in the late 1980s and 1990s. Mujahideen leaders
like Hekmatyar, indulged by the ISI, branched off into opium
cultivation-for years a small-scale business in Afghanistan- and
smuggling, and began a turf war against other Afghans.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fn9 [9]
4.
The Soviet army withdrew from Afghanistan in early 1989, three years
after Mikhail Gorbachev had declared the decade-long losing war there a
"bleeding wound" for his country. In a matter of months, the Soviet
Union began to fall apart; the cold war seemed at an end; and although
the Communists still held Kabul and would hold it until 1992, American
assistance to the Afghans dwindled.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fn10 [10]
On the day the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan, William Webster,
the new director of the CIA, hosted a champagne party in Langley,
Virginia. Aside from the Soviet withdrawal, there wasn't much to
celebrate in Afghanistan itself. The destruction of roads and
agricultural land and the flight of more than five million people (the
largest refugee population in the world) created a political and
economic void which the Mujahideen commanders filled. Long subsidized
by the United States and Saudi Arabia, they now had to be
"self-financing." It was around this time that Afghanistan became the
biggest producer of opium in the world. Farmers forced by local
Mujahideen commanders to cultivate poppy, however, received only a
fraction of the wealth that the cash crop created as it moved along the
supply line.
Smuggling was rampant: Pakistani military trucks that brought supplies
to the Mujahideen during the jihad often went back loaded with drugs or
consumer items. In Ningrahar province, the local Mujahideen commander
operated his own airline: planeloads of TVs and air conditioners
arrived from Dubai and were then trucked by him into Pakistan. Much
money was to be made in controlling key trading routes and checkpoints;
and so little battles kept erupting between different Mujahideen
groups, whose leaders became known as "warlords." In the early 1990s,
many of them were running clashing opium and smuggling empires across
Afghanistan.
An economy built around predation could only lead to a moral breakdown,
especially in the rural areas where the institutions of the Afghan
state had barely existed, and where traditional codes of honor and
justice, enforced by tribal and religious leaders, had so far governed
daily life and conduct. There was at least a semblance of
administration and law in the western and northern provinces controlled
by the Mujahideen commanders Ismail Khan and Ahmed Shah Masoud. But
things were very bad in the southern provinces, where the old tribal
and religious elite had been rendered impotent by many different
warlords who exacted toll taxes from traders and smugglers, fought with
each other, and raped young children and women at will.
One day in early 1994-so the Taliban claims-in a village near the
southern city of Kandahar, a Pashtun man in his thirties called
Mohammad Omar heard about two women who had been abducted and raped by
some local commanders. Like many young Pashtuns from his village, Omar,
the son of landless peasants, had participated in the jihad against
local and foreign Communists. He had been wounded several times and had
lost his right eye. After the Soviet withdrawal he had gone back to
teaching at his village madrasa. He was deeply aggrieved by the
degenerate Mujahideen and the anarchy around him, and often spoke with
his friends in the village about ways to deal with them and establish
the law of the Koran.
The Taliban's version has it that the news of the raped women incited
Omar into action. He went out to the local madrasas and raised a band
of thirty Talibs, or students, for a rescue mission. The students
mustered about sixteen rifles among themselves. They then went and
freed the girls and hanged the commanders from the barrel of a tank. A
few months later, there was another incident in which two commanders
fought a gun battle in the streets of Kandahar over a boy both wished
to rape. Once again, Omar showed up with his students and freed the boy
and executed the commanders.
This is the romantic legend surrounding the rise of the Taliban and
their reclusive, one-eyed supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar. It goes
on to describe how the young, motivated students had in just two years
brought most of Afghanistan under their control (Herat in 1995, Kabul
in 1996), captured the arsenals of the warlords, done away with their
terror, and made secure the life and property of ordinary Afghans.
Such accounts are also meant to make the Taliban seem like the Muslim
armies of early Islamic history pacifying the intransigent tribes of
Arabia. They are part of the careful self-presentation of their
leaders, who have been at pains to distinguish themselves from the
previous generation and to justify the drastic restrictions imposed on
the dress, movements, and education of women. They go with the stylish
new black turbans, the beards with the mandatory length of eight
centimeters, the freshly designed flag, and the grander name-the
Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan-for the country.
The stories almost conceal the fact that the Taliban-consisting mainly
of students, former Mujahideen like Omar, and the rural clergy-have
come from the Pashtun tribes in the east and south of the country. The
secretive leadership consists almost entirely of Mullah Omar's friends
and associates in Kandahar. As such they have been regarded with
suspicion by the ethnic minority groups in the northern, central, and
western provinces, the Persian-speaking Tajiks and the Shia Hazaras-a
distrust that settled into animosity after the repeated massacres of
them by the Taliban in their continuing war against the Hizb-e-Wahdat
(Islamic Unity Party), a Shia Hazara party, in the central highland
region of Afghanistan. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fn11 [11]
Though militarily underequipped, the Shia Hazara party and the forces
of the late Ahmed Shah Masoud, which control the northern
Tajik-majority province of Badakhshan, are, with ethnic Uzbeks, the
main components of the northern alliance against the Taliban, whom they
accuse, not inaccurately, of imposing a backward-minded Pashtun
dictatorship over the ethnic mosaic of Afghanistan. In the last five
years, this civil war has flared up every summer, after the snows in
the high mountain passes melt, but petered out in late autumn, with
little territory gained or lost on either side.
What the legend leaves out is the contribution to the Taliban's early
military success by traders and smugglers in Pakistan and Afghanistan
who were fed up with paying endless toll taxes on Afghan routes
controlled by the Mujahideen warlords and welcomed the Taliban.
Disaffected former Mujahideen and even officials of the former
Communist regime helped the Taliban take on the warlords, and tens of
thousands of Pashtun students in Pakistan joined them as the news of
their victories spread.
Most importantly, the Taliban received a lot of support from Saudi
Arabia and from Benazir Bhutto's government in Pakistan. The Saudi
royal family had fallen out with Osama bin Laden by then; but they gave
money and support to the Taliban independently of the private charities
and donations that went from Saudi Arabia, some through Osama bin
Laden, whose Arab fighters gave strong support to the Taliban. Bhutto
and her ministers expected the student militia to bring stability to
Afghanistan, and open up the possibility-which inspired the early, if
brief, American approval of the Taliban-of trade routes and oil and gas
pipelines to the newly created Central Asian republics. Bhutto and her
colleagues also wanted to diminish the sinister power that the ISI and
its officers had acquired over the Pakistani state during its
collaboration with the CIA. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fn12 [12]
The Taliban's connection with Pakistan went even deeper. Just as Kabul
University had in the 1960s supplied the ideologists and activists of
the next decades, so the theological schools in Pakistan known as
Deobandi madrasas had in the 1990s produced among its refugees many of
the young soldiers and leaders of the Taliban.
The name "Deobandi" came from the original madrasa that had been set up
in 1867 in a small Indian town near Delhi called Deoband. The madrasa
came out of an insular Indian Muslim response to British rule in the
nineteenth century: the work of men who feared that Western-style
education of the kind proposed by the British, and embraced by the
Hindus, was going to uproot and fracture Muslim culture, and who were
convinced that training in the fundamentals of the Koran and the sharia
would shield Indian Muslims from the corruptions of the modern world.
The Deoband madrasa has issued about 250,000 fatwas on various aspects
of personal behavior.
In the early twentieth century, the missionaries of Deoband had begun
to set up madrasas close to what was then the Indian border with
Afghanistan. In the 1980s and 1990s, among the two to three million
Afghan refugees in Pakistan, the poorest had gone to these madrasas.
Some of the most senior leaders of the Taliban had been educated at the
Darul Uloom Haqqania near Peshawar, which still follows the
Koran-oriented curriculum created at Deoband in India a hundred and
fifty years ago.
Although it is the biggest of the Pakistani madrasas near the border
with Afghanistan and quite famous, the madrasa had, when I visited it
in April this year, the somewhat lowering appearance of a poorly
financed college in an Indian small town: peeling paint, dust-clogged
stairs, broken chairs, unfinished buildings bristling with rusting iron
girders, and shabbily clad students. In one corner of the compound was
a separate hostel for boys between the ages of eight and twelve-a
courtyard lined with curious fresh faces under elegant white caps-who
read nothing but the Koran, which they were expected to memorize. In
one tiny room at the hostel for older students, many of whom were from
Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, there was the unexpectedly
moving sight of six young men sleeping on tattered sheets on the floor,
their turbans respectfully arranged in a row next to the door.
The kitchen consisted of two dingy rooms, their walls stained black
from the open wood fires; almost an equal number of flies hovered over
the stagnant yellow curry in exposed drains and the freshly chopped
mutton on a wide wooden table. Things were no better in the smaller
madrasas. But food and lodging were free. And the orphans and sons of
poor Pashtuns in the refugee camps-members of a powerless majority of
rural Afghans -who went to the madrasas in the 1980s and early 1990s
wouldn't have had many options, as opposed to the many CIA-sponsored
Mujahideen leaders, who lived in style in a posh suburb of Peshawar.
Living amid deprivation and squalor, and educated only in a severe
ideology, a new generation of Pashtun men developed fast the fantasies
of the pure Islamic order that they as the Taliban would aggressively
impose upon a war-ravaged country.
-October 17, 2001
This is the first of two articles on Afghanistan.
Notes
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fnr1 [1] Since then Zahir Shah, who is
eighty-six years old, has lived in exile near Rome. The regimes that
followed him now make his forty-year-long reign appear a golden age in
the country's history, and he is much respected by an older generation
of Afghans. He has been talked about recently as a possible alternative
to the present Taliban regime. See "Secret Memo Reveals US Plan to
Overthrow Taliban," The Guardian, September 21, 2001.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fnr2 [2] A recent UNDP report reveals
that although 1.6 million explosives have been cleared, it will take
another seven to ten years to turn Afghanistan into a mine-free place.
See Dawn (Pakistan), July 1, 2001.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fnr3 [3] For an interesting discussion
of al-Afghani, see Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in a Liberal Age,
1798-1939 (Oxford University Press, 1962).
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fnr4 [4] "Abstract, Politburo, Central
Committee, USSR," Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies,
Vol. 17 (Winter 1994), pp. 54-55.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fnr5 [5] All quotes are from an
interview Brzezinski gave to Le Nouvel Observateur, January 15-21,
1998, p. 76. When asked in the same interview if he regretted "having
supported Islamic fundamentalism [integrisme]" and given "arms and
advice to future terrorists," Brzezinski said: "What is most important
to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet
empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and
the end of the cold war?" That some stirred-up Muslims were a minor
price to pay for the collapse of the Soviet empire cannot but seem now
an especially cynical and wrongheaded bit of Realpolitik.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fnr6 [6] Casey's and the CIA's
dabblings in Afghanistan have been described in Bob Woodward, Veil: The
Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-87 (Simon and Schuster, 1987). Lawrence of
Arabia met James Bond in many of the fantasies that bloomed in this
expensive but relatively underreported battle of the cold war. Casey
wanted the ISI to involve the Muslims of the Soviet Union in the jihad;
and he wasn't satisfied with the ISI-arranged smuggling of thousands of
Korans into what is now Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, or with the
distribution of heroin among Soviet troops. Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf,
a senior officer of the ISI, got Afghan Mujahideen to mine and bomb
military installations a few kilometers deep inside Soviet territory;
but plans for more such attacks were hastily dropped after the Soviet
Union threatened to invade Pakistan. The story is told by Yousaf and
Major Mark Adkin in The Bear Trap (London: Leo Cooper, 1992).
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fnr7 [7] Zia did make himself
unassailable through his partnership with the CIA. Many of his
political opponents stayed in prison, and while promising elections and
democratic rule all the time, he remained the dictator of Pakistan
until his death in a plane crash in 1988. The present military ruler,
General Pervez Musharraf, was offered a similar partnership by the US
government, which expects Pakistan to be a "front-line state" again,
this time in a war against terrorism. But Zia's encouragement of the
jihad in Afghanistan produced hundreds of thousands of radical
Islamists who make Pakistan an unstable country; and Musharraf, who
seems to realize well that cooperation with the US could endanger
rather than consolidate his hold on power, has responded cautiously so
far, agreeing to cooperate in intelligence and other ways, but
resisting the presence of US troops there. Unlike Musharraf, the
Communist-era despots of the Central Asian countries of Uzbekistan and
Tajikistan ruthlessly persecute their relatively few radical Islamists,
and have been quick to ally themselves with the United States.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fnr8 [8] These and other details about
Osama bin Laden are to be found in Ahmed Rashid's Taliban: Militant
Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (Yale University
Press/Nota Bene, 2000).
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fnr9 [9] In fact, Hekmatyar, who
inaugurated his career as a radical Islamist by assassinating a
left-wing student at Kabul University in the late 1960s, is held
responsible for the murder of many rival Mujahideen as well as some of
the liberal-minded Afghan intellectuals who had fled Kabul for Pakistan
after the Communist coup in 1978. Hekmatyar's rocket attacks on Kabul
during the civil war in 1994 killed more civilians in the capital city
than had died in ten years of anti-Communist jihad.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fnr10 [10] Britain's Tony Blair was
addressing a distrust and bitterness many Afghans feel towards their
former Western sponsors when he claimed recently in an interview to the
Pashto section of BBC Radio that the West would not repeat the mistake
of walking away from Afghanistan after achieving its immediate aim.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fnr11 [11] See Massacre of Hazaras in
Afghanistan (Human Rights Watch, February 2001) and The Massacre in
Mazar-i-Sharif (Human Rights Watch, November 1998).
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/#fnr12 [12] Bhutto had special reasons
to be wary of the ISI, whose officers had conspired to bring down her
elected government in 1990.