New York Times Sunday Edition October 7, 2001
Afghanistan After the Taliban
By OLIVIER ROY
D REUX, 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.''
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company