Central Asia/Russia


	June 12, 2002	atimes.com

Central Asia/Russia

COMMENTARY
Afghanistan: Warlordism redux
By Ehsan Ahrari

"Warlords are making a power grab by brazenly manipulating the loya jirga selection process. If they succeed, Afghans will again be denied the ability to choose their own leaders and build civil society. This is a make-or-break time for Afghanistan."
- Human Rights Watch Report

As the loya jirga (grand assembly) activities intensify in Afghanistan, warlordism, one of the oldest pathologies of that country, is reappearing with a vengeance. The New York-based Human Rights Watch is reporting about this pathology with increasing frequency. The involvement of various Afghan factions in its resurgence is expected; however, the United States' "inadvertent" involvement in encouraging it is indeed shocking. In order to uproot warlordism, the George W Bush administration will have to re-examine its current preoccupation with eradicating al-Qaeda at the expense of taking care of other equally precarious problems that require immediate attention.

When the Taliban decided to capture power in Afghanistan in 1996, warlords were mushrooming all over the unhappy land. It was around that time that Pakistan emerged as a kingmaker by supporting the Taliban. But the other two neighboring states, Iran and Russia, were no less guilty of aspiring to play a similar role. It was just that Pakistan probably understood the Afghan muddle of that era and used it to its own advantage better than those other two countries.

Moreover, the fact that the Taliban were "educated" - and one has to use that phrase very charitably - in the Pakistani madrassas (religious schools) gave that country an added advantage. Thus, the Sunni orthodoxy - or the the Pakistani madrassas' version of it, to be sure - became involved in regime building. That reality gave birth to the jihadi culture and its ambitious agenda of spreading Islamic radicalism to neighboring states. Even Russia and China - two of the most powerful countries of that neighborhood - became frightened about the rising power and maneuverability of the nexus of the jihadis and the separatist groups within their borders, Chechens and Uighurs, respectively.

Iran and Russia could not emerge as major players in Afghanistan for different reasons, Iran because the majority of its population adheres to Shi'ite Islam, while Afghanistan is predominantly Sunni. Then, the influence of Pakistan's madrassas - which were steeped in an acutely anti-Shi'ite tradition - added more fuel to the traditional anti-Shi'ite sentiments in Afghanistan. Sadly, such a mindset is a sine qua non of almost all Sunni Islamic societies, even though it does result in frequent incidents of bloodletting, as was the case in Afghanistan during the Taliban rule, and it has still been a recurring phenomenon in Pakistan. The inability of Russia to emerge as a power broker in Afghanistan is directly linked to the disgraceful legacy of the 10 years of the Soviet occupation of the 1970s and 1980s, and it still hangs as an albatross around the Russian neck.

Those impediments notwithstanding, Iran and Russia became major backers of the Northern Alliance - which in reality was just another version of warlordism - that was unsuccessfully trying to snatch power away from the Taliban from 1996. That entity succeeded in achieving that objective only as a result of the US military intervention last October - that is, Operation Enduring Freedom.

But the entry of the United States into the Afghan power game in October was generally perceived to be aimed at, inter alia, also bringing an end to warlordism. However, the US forces are currently so focused on eradicating the last of the Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives from the country that they do not mind working hand in glove with one or more warlords, as long as they help the US achieve that objective. Consequently, the elimination of warlords has taken a low priority with the US, a country on which the interim government of Hamid Karzai heavily relies to assert its own authority and legitimacy on the defiant warlords.

The most worrisome aspect of the resurgence of warlordism in Afghanistan is that there are reports that the Taliban groups are also allying themselves with one or another warlords. There is absolutely no way of knowing whether such an alliance is just another manifestation of the traditional interfactional and intra- and interethnic power games, or whether the theoreticians of al-Qaeda are merely using those power games to bide time while they develop new "blueprints" of striking at their "enemies" at an opportune moment in order at least to destabilize Afghanistan for the foreseeable future, or at best (from their perspectives) bring back the Taliban rule. For those who know the vagaries of Afghan and regional politics, this is not a far-fetched or a wild proposition. Between 1996 and 2001, al-Qaeda demonstrated its mastery of exploiting the idiosyncrasies of Afghan power politics to its distinct advantage.

That opportune moment, from the perspective of al-Qaeda terrorists, might not be too far away, given the continued high military buildup between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan. If the government of Pakistan was not involved in the May terrorist attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir - as President General Pervez Musharraf insists - then it means that the terrorist groups of that region might be taking their orders from al-Qaeda. Worse yet, they might be receiving orders from an ad hoc nexus between al-Qaeda and rogue elements of Pakistan's notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which is really interested in if not overthrowing the Musharraf regime, at least creating a tense enough condition for India to take military action against Pakistan.

An Indian attack on Pakistan, as that nexus envisages, would create conditions for the overthrow of the Musharraf regime and the capturing of power by a hardline faction in Islamabad. Such a potential calculation on the part of that nexus might not be irrational, considering the fact that India remains highly suspicious of Musharraf himself, who was regarded as the chief architect of the Kargil conflict of 1999.

One must also consider the sudden re-emergence of Gulbuddin Hikmatyar on the Afghan political landscape as a boon for an already resurgent warlordism. He is a quintessential warlord, and head of Hizb-e-Islami, a party that espouses radical Islamist and anti-Western ideology. In the past, he received strong political and financial support from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and allied himself with thousands of radical Islamists, including Osama bin Laden. He spent most of his political career competing and attempting to upstage his nemesis, Ahmad Shah Masoud. Masoud was assassinated by a group of suicide bombers, who approached him for an interview, in September. A widely held belief is that those bombers were linked to al-Qaeda.

For the past six months or so, Hikmatyar has virtually disappeared and lain low in Iran during the course of the US and allied interventions. Even his refuge in Iran was surprising, since he had been one of the hardline Sunni Islamists. The Human Rights Watch reports that since May, there has been credible evidence of the re-emergence of figures associated with the Taliban and Hikmatyar in several southern provinces of Afghanistan. It also notes, "These warlords have been able to consolidate power because of the vacuum created when the US-led military coalition and the UN Security Council refused to expand the International Security Assistance Forces [ISAF] beyond Kabul."

Even though Hikmatyar is hostile to the Bonn Agreement that finalized the composition of the present interim government, and he operates outside the authority of Karzai, his forces are reported to be interested in controlling and manipulating the loya jirga process. It is his past association with bin Laden that should be a source of grave concern to those who are working hard to create conditions for Afghanistan to become a moderate Islamic country. In Kabul province, the pro-Hikmatyar forces exercise increasing influence. According to the Human Rights Watch, witnesses in that province state that the local administration has "changed only nominally since the Taliban, retaining, for example, the heavy-handed religious police and the Taliban's school curriculum". Those witnesses also portray "a profoundly repressive administration that offered little or no prospects of participating freely in a political process".

The Taliban correctly understood that warlordism would continue to eat away at the very core of governability of any government in Afghanistan, since it only aims to create divided loyalty among the populace. Thus, through the use of their trademark ruthlessness, they succeeded in considerably weakening - though not completely uprooting - warlordism. The military power of today's Afghanistan, the United States, is assigning a higher priority to eradicating the remnants of the al Qaeda-Taliban nexus. What it does not realize is that the very purpose of this is being undermined because of the re-emergence of warlords in the different regions of Afghanistan. What is needed is a reassessment of the very raison d'etre of US forces in Afghanistan. Such an assessment would enable the US to go after those warlords, whose sole motivation is self-perpetuation. In the process, however, if the interim government of Karzai loses its centrality and significance, the warlords will only welcome it with ebullient enthusiasm.

Amid disconcerting reports of resurgent warlordism, there are also efforts of the Tajiks of the old Northern Alliance to retain more than their fair share of power by keeping two out of three main cabinet positions - the Defense, Interior and Foreign ministries. But at the same time, the current holders of those ministries have publicly supported the candidacy of Karzai, who has won the hearts of the Western donors of aid and is also a close ally of the United States. Former premier Burhanuddin Rabbani, living by the adage that old habits die hard, has expressed strong interest in becoming prime minister again in the name of "what's best for my people". Wali Shah Masoud, younger brother of the late Amhad Shah Masoud, is also cashing in on his name by seeking a post in the next government. Then there are other back-and-forth arguments whether Karzai should be the sole chief executive or whether he should share that authority with former King Zahir Shah, who has returned for the explicit purpose of lending his personal prestige to the loya jirga process.

All the political hagglings are welcome developments, for they underscore the rudiments of political pluralism, which, in turn, is a vital sign for the emergence of a democratic system of government in Afghanistan. Such developments also underscore that the Bush administration should immediately renew its own commitment to fight all manifestations of warlordism, which, if not eradicated, promise to undermine all prospects for the emergence of a strong national government and democracy.

Ehsan Ahrari is a Norfolk, Virginia-based strategic analyst.

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