AFGHANISTAN: IN PERSPECTIVE

In its keenness to assert the primacy of its national interests and strategic objectives
through any means, the US has over the years, through the covert operations of its
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), made heroes out of surrogates, whose only
qualification was that they were prepared to do its bidding. Ultimately, it ended up
with the mortification of seeing these heroes of yesterday becoming the Frankensteins
of today, endangering the very US national interests to protect which they were
initially created.
Afghanistan provides a good case study of this. The dramatis personae in the two-
decade-old Afghan tragedy --whether Osama bin Laden and his terrorists' mafia,
Mullah Mohammed Omar Akhund and his Taliban Shoora or the innumerable
"Mujahideen" commanders playing havoc in different parts of the country in the name
of Islam--- were all the original creations of the CIA, ably assisted by Pakistan's Inter-
Services Intelligence (ISI).

Through their depredations, they have made Afghanistan perhaps the only country in
the world to register a decline in population with that of Kabul reduced by half and
with the largest proportion, anywhere in the world, of widows with no male relatives.

They have turned Afghanistan into a breeding ground of medieval obscurantist forces
which have been spreading their tentacles to Dagestan and Chechnya in Russia, the
Central Asian Republics (CARs), Xinjiang in China, Pakistan itself, Kashmir in India,
Bangladesh, Myanmar and Southern Philippines.

They have made Iran, hitherto the bete noir of the US, appear, in comparison, like a
model, moderate Islamic state, and sought to frustrate the US strategic objectives and
business interests in the Central Asian region.

And they have created for the US State Department a situation where the choice is not
among various policy options, but policy nightmares.

The way the Taliban, which was backed by the US from its creation in July,1994, to
its capture of Kabul in September,1996, has heaped indignities on the women of
Afghanistan and reduced them to less than human beings in the name of Islam, is
without parallel anywhere else in the world.
While justifying the attitude of the Taliban towards women's role in society, the
Taliban Ambassador in Islamabad, Maulvi Saeedur Rahman Haqqani, said at a
seminar at Islamabad on May 2: "In Muslim societies, we respect and cherish our
women. We treat them like precious jewels and keep them in an ornamental box."

What is the ground reality?

Under the pre-1992 Najibullah Government, 70 per cent of the academics--members

of the teaching faculties of schools and colleges--- 60 per cent of the medical
personnel and 30 per cent of the Government servants in Afghanistan were women.
They played an active role in politics and diplomacy too.

This high percentage was due to the spread of higher education amongst women and
also due to the shortage of men to occupy civilian jobs because of the enlistment of a
large number of men in the army to fight the "mujahideen".

After its capture of Kabul in 1996, the Taliban removed all girls from educational
institutions, banned any fresh induction and sacked all women from jobs where they
might have to interact with men. They are now allowed only in those jobs in which
their interaction would be only with other women. Wearing of burqa was made
obligatory.

The Taliban has promised to at least partially restore the educational rights of women
after the war ends and after the economic situation improves. One doesn't know when
that would be.

The result:

* Increase in instances of suicide by war widows unable to support their children.

* Before 1992, Kabul did not have a single woman beggar. Today, it has an
estimated 35,000, most of them children and widows--former academics, doctors,
nurses and government servants--with no other means of feeding their children.
Visitors to Kabul have remarked on their shock and indignation at the Taliban when
they discovered that behind many a burqa of beggars approaching them for alms stood
an English or French or Russian-speaking woman, highly educated with a
sophisticated and cultured mind. They have been heartlessly sacked for no other
reason than that they are women. The Mullahs' anger is particularly directed at women
who had their higher education in Hindu India, Communist USSR or the "decadent"
West, where, according to the Mullahs, women are allowed to "run around like wild
animals."

* Some Western non-Government Organisations (NGOs) started a vocational

training centre where the children of these widows could be trained in some craft so
that they could support themselves and their mothers. The Taliban has banned the
enrollment of girls in this centre. As a Pakistani columnist has remarked: " It would
seem that for the Taliban, training boys and girls together would be unislamic, but
letting them beg together in the streets is not so."

* Women are banned from witnessing any sports meet. The only public gathering
at which their presence is allowed and even encouraged is to witness the stoning to
death of convicts for adultery.

The anti-woman attitude of the Taliban was evident even from October,1994, onwards
when it started curtailing the rights of women in town after town captured by it, but
the outside world reacted against it only after the Mullahs started enforcing their
orders not only against Afghan women in the entire territory under their control, but
also against foreign women working in the offices of international organisations and
NGOs after the capture of Kabul.

Next to women, the Shias have been a major target of the brutalities and indignities of
the Wahabi-Sunni-dominated Taliban Shoora and its militia called Lashkar
Mohammadi. Public observance of Moharrum has been banned. So too the Shia
tradition of their women joining the men in prayers during Moharrum and visits to
graves of their relatives.

The "News" of Pakistan (April 26) has quoted Mr.Ghulam Mohiuddin, a Shia leader
of Afghanistan, as stating as follows: " Even the Hindus in India allow the Shias to
practise their religion, but the Taliban are denying us this basic right."

After the Taliban captured Herat on the Iran border and, subsequently, the Bamiyan
province, both areas, where the Shias were in a majority with a large sprinkling of
Ismailis, there were reportedly large-scale massacres of the Shias and forcible re-
settlement of the Shias in the Sunni-majority villages in the rest of Afghanistan and
their replacement by Sunnis brought to Herat and Bamiyan from other provinces. This
is being done to reduce the Shias to a minority in their traditional homelands.
The Taliban has only three achievements to its credit---improvement of law and order,
restoration of electricity supply in towns and resumption of farming in 70 per cent of
the cultivable land in the country.

Better law and order has been through rigorous enforcement of Islamic punishments
such as amputation of arms and stoning and crushing to death. Such punishments have
been at tremendous cost to human dignity. Some Pakistani analysts have pointed out
that such punishments have been more frequent against non-Pakhtuns and Shias than
against Pakhtuns and Sunnis.

The Taliban's agricultural policy has benefitted poppy cultivation more through
priority in fertiliser distribution to poppy farmers than cultivators of other agricultural
products.

While offences such as theft, housebreaking, murder, rape, adultery, sodomy etc are
immediately punished after a sham of a trial, there is no Islamic punishment for heroin
production and smuggling.

In response to outside pressure, the Taliban has destroyed about 35 heroin refineries in
its territory, but there are many more left untouched. It has refused to reduce the area
under poppy cultivation on the ground that the 10 per cent agricultural tax is its major
source of revenue.

Another well-known--but not admitted-- source of revenue is heroin smuggling. There

is a strongly suspected nexus involving the poppy farmers, all of them Afghan
citizens, the heroin producers, all of them Pakistani drug barons resident in the North-
West Frontier Province (NWFP) and in the Federally-Administered Tribal areas
(FATA) of Pakistan and 30 Mullahs constituting the Kandahar-based Taliban Shoora
with Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Amir, at the top.

The only effective arm of the Taliban administration has been the militia, which has
brought 90 per cent of the country under its control within five years, and the Ministry
for the Promotion of Islamic Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. A new intelligence
agency has been created and placed under the direct control of the Amir.

The militia is a hotchpotch of students from the madrasas in the NWFP, Balochistan
and Sindh, former Pakhtun officers and soldiers of the late Najibullah's Soviet-trained
armed forces and Pakistani ex-servicemen and serving military personnel, given leave
of absence by the Pakistani military, to enable them assist the Taliban.
During important battles, the militia is also assisted by Pakistani militant organisations
such as the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the virulently anti-Shia Sipah Sahaba Pakistan and
the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Arab volunteers of bin Laden's Al Quaida.

Despite its hotchpotch character, the discipline and religious motivation of the militia
have remained surprisingly strong and it has fought extremely well against the forces
of the Northern Alliance led by Gen. Ahmed Shah Masood.

The large casualties suffered by the militia during the battles for Mazar-e-Sharif in
1997 and 1998 and the battles in Bamiyan in 1998 and 1999 do not appear to have
affected its morale. However, there have been reports of difficulties being faced by the
Taliban in making fresh recruitment to make up for the losses--particularly from the
Durrani sub-tribe of the Pakhtuns, which has been the main recruiting ground till now.

The rest of the administration is in a chaotic state. There is no functioning central

bank; nor are there any gold reserves and officially accounted for foreign reserves.
The tax collection machinery is ineffective.

There is no public scrutiny of Government policies, decisions and actions, no open

discussion of the state budget, no policy and decision making infrastructure. Policy
and decision options are not examined for their likely impact on Afghanistan's future
and on its relations with the rest of the world before being adopted.

The Amir and his associates in the Shoora look upon themselves as on a divine
mission and there is a touching, but disturbing faith in divine intervention to help
them out of problems. Since they have convinced themselves that they have been the
beneficiaries of divine guidance, they do not feel the need for human guidance and
advice.

The non-clerical, civilian bureaucracy has consequently been reduced to merely an

instrument for carrying out the decisions of the clerics, without any voice in policy
and decision making.

This delusion of a divine mission has also made the Amir insensitive to public opinion
not only inside the country, but also in the rest of the world. The Amir is strongly
motivated by the Pakhtun concept of "izzat" (self-respect) and tends to look upon any
suggestion of concessions to international opinion as an affront to his "izzat".
This should explain his obstinate refusal to respond to outside pressures for
controlling the spread of terrorism, to expel bin Laden and to control heroin
production and smuggling.

Afghanistan, under the Taliban, has two capitals --the administrative capital at Kabul,
which is the seat of the Government which interacts with foreign interlocutors, and the
spiritual capital at Kandahar, where the Amir, his Shoora and the intelligence agency
headquarters are located. The Amir hopes that Kandahar would one day become the
spiritual capital of triumphant Wahabi-Sunni forces in Dagestan, Chechnya, Xinjiang,
Pakistan, Kashmir, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Southern Philippines.

The Amir hails from village Nodeh and grew up in village Singesar in the Mewand
District near Kandahar. Mewand is as holy and historic a place for the Pakhtuns of
Afghanistan as Kosovo is for the Serbs. According to Afghan historians, it was at
Mewand, that the Pakhtuns trounced the advancing British troops.

Malalai, a Pakhtoon woman of Mewand, earned a heroic reputation by fighting

shoulder to shoulder with her male brethren and rallying them against the British
troops. What an irony of fate that the descendants of this heroic woman should find
themselves chained inside a burqa by the descendants of her male brethren!

It was as a protector of women's honour that the Amir won the admiration of the
Pakhtuns of Kandahar in July, 1994, when he gathered a group of boys from the local
madrasas, raided the house of a local "Mujahideen" commander, who had become
notorious as a rapist, and killed him. From a protector, he has since degenerated into
an oppressor of women's rights.

The fact that the 35-year-old Amir, who is affectionately known as the one-eyed Amir
because of his having practically lost an eye in the war against the Soviets, hailed
from the legendary Mewand District gave him a halo in the eyes of the simple, God-
fearing, proud Pakhtuns and they followed his commands implicitly.

Instead of leading them into the new millennium to make Afghanistan once again a
tolerant, progressive Islamic state with equal rights for women and men, for Muslims
and non-Muslims, for Pakhtuns and non-Pakhtuns, for Sunnis and Shias, he has
chosen to lead them back to the middle ages in the name of God.

The Amir is a man with little exposure to the world outside Kandahar and its environs.
It is said he has never travelled to the non-Pakhtun areas. He has never been to Kabul
since it was captured by the Taliban in September,1996. He hardly knows Pakistan
outside Peshawar.

He lets the Mullahs of the Government in Kabul interact with domestic as well as
foreign interlocutors for finding a solution to the tragic war and for ending the
isolation of Afghanistan in the international community. Since they do not know the
Amir's mind while negotiating, one has the strange spectacle of the interlocutors from
Kabul reaching agreements in principle to subsequently find these agreements rejected
by the Amir. This has been happening repeatedly.

Pakistan's influence in Afghanistan is restricted to the administration in Kabul, which

has many Pakistani advisers. Its influence over the Amir is uncertain.

The Prime Minister, Mr.Nawaz Sharif, is intelligent and rational enough to realise that
the obstinacy of the Amir and his Kandahar-based Shoora in dealing with issues such
as the deportation of bin Laden, women's rights etc is creating serious difficulties for
Pakistan in its relations with the US, that the anti-Shia and anti-Iran policies have
caused a set-back to Pakistan's relations with Iran and that the Taliban's obscurantism
has frustrated Pakistani aspirations of emerging as the gateway of Central Asia.

However, he is unable to assert himself because there are too many Pakistani cooks
spoiling the Afghan broth. On the one side are the religious fundamentalist parties
with Maulana Fazlur Rahman of the Jamiat Ulema Islam (JUI) in the forefront egging
on the Amir and his Shoora to stick to their hard line. On the other side are the
Intelligence Bureau (IB), the ISI, the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI), the
present army chief, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and his Chief of the General Staff (CGS),
Lt.Gen. Mohammad Aziz.

During her second tenure as Prime Minister, Mrs. Benazir Bhutto, who distrusted the
ISI, let the IB working under the supervision of her Interior Minister, Maj.Gen. (retd)
Nasirullah Babar, handle the Amir and his Taliban. Maj.Gen. Babar, a trusted officer
of her father, the late Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, was the head of the Afghan desk of the ISI
under her father and claims that he could make the Afghan Pakhtuns dance to
Pakistan's tune.

Mr.Sharif transferred the responsibility to the ISI. The then Maj.Gen. Mohammad
Aziz, who was the No. 2 in the ISI, also directly supervised the Afghan desk.

When Mr.Sharif appointed Lt.Gen. Khwaja Ziauddin, who comes from a family of
Pakistan Muslim League loyalists, as the DG of the ISI in October last, Gen.
Musharraf, who distrusts Ziauddin, had Maj.Gen.Aziz promoted as Lt.Gen. and
posted as the CGS instead of posting an already serving Lt.Gen. to this important post.
Simultaneously, he had the responsibility for handling the Taliban transferred to the
DMI and reportedly ordered that Lt.Gen. Aziz would continue to supervise this work.

Addressing the English-speaking Union of Pakistan at Karachi on April 13, the army
chief said that the collapse of the Taliban would lead to a disintegration of
Afghanistan, which would not be in Pakistan's interest. He is of the view that Pakistan
should continue to back the Taliban unmindful of US pressures and let time moderate
the policies of the Mullahs.

Since the middle of last year, there have been indications of unhappiness amongst the
Mullahs of the administration in Kabul, who have to bear the brunt of the international
criticism regarding the Taliban's policies on bin Laden and women's rights, over the
unbending obstinacy of the Amir and his Mullahs of Kandahar.The Shoora was even
reported to have foiled a coup attempt and made a number of arrests.

Mullah Mohammad Rabbani, the head of the interim ruling council in Kabul, who
occupied the No 2 position in the Shoora and who was projected as the most trusted
man of the Amir, was reported to have developed differences with the Amir when the
latter rebuked him for not taking a strong line during the visit of Mr.Bill Richardson,
the then US Permanent Representative to the UN and now the Energy Secretary, to
Kabul in April, 1998.

It is said that since then, Mullah Rabbani no longer enjoys the same trust of the Amir
as before and spends more time in Dubai for medical treatment than for doing his job
in Kabul. There were also unconfirmed reports of his having been replaced by Mullah
Abdul Kabir, Governor of Nangarhar. In this connection, our earlier note titled
"Osama bin Laden: Rumblings in Afghanistan" of Dec.22,1998, may kindly be seen.

The Shias of not only Afghanistan, but also Pakistan have been seething with anger
against the Amir for the massacres of the Shias of Herat and Bamiyan. The Shias have
a long memory for atrocities perpetrated on them as one saw in the death of Zia-ul-
Haq in the plane crash of August,1988.

The NWFP has many Hazaras, the same tribe to which the Shias of Bamiyan belong,
and the Hazaras are known to bide their time, even if it meant years, before avenging
atrocities committed on them.