Rescuing Afghanistan: Briefings

178 Pages·2006·1.35 MB·English

by  William Maley

BRIEFINGS
Rescuing
B
Afghanistan is the forgotten theatre of R
operations in the “War on Terrorism.” IE
Although it was rapidly eclipsed by the war F
I Afghanistan
in Iraq,it remains a key location in the N
G
struggle over the future of Muslim political
S
life.Religious moderates,religious

extremists,and nationalists of many kinds R
E
are striving to implement sharply differing S
visions of social and political life,and the C William Maley
U
outcome could send shockwaves to remote
I
N
parts of the globe.
G
A
William Maley,a long-time observer of F
G
Afghanistan,shows just how complex this
H
struggle is.Moving far beyond the clumsy
A
stereotypes that have too often permeated N
I
discussion ofAfghan affairs,he explains S
T
that religious radicalism is a substantially
A
alien force which has thrived only through N
external patronage or parasitic attachment
to victims of large-scale social dislocation.
W
Rescuing Afghanistandemonstrates that IL
L
decades of conflict have created an
I
A
extremely challenging set of problems for
M
the Afghan people and the wider world.It
M
shows that only a determined,credible,
A
long-term commitment from the wider
L
world – of a type that is rarely if ever found E
Y
– offers the prospect of rescuing
Afghanistan from the dangers it faces.
UNSW PRESS
ISBN 0-86840-937-5
BRIEFINGS A series of short,topical books
exploring social,political and cultural issues
in contemporary Australia,published in
association with Australian Policy Online
www.apo.org.au 9 780868 409375
UNSW
PRESS
RESCUING AFGHANISTAN
William Maley is professor and director ofthe Asia-Pacific College of
Diplomacy at the Australian National University.He has served as a visiting
professor at the Russian Diplomatic Academy,a visiting fellow at the Centre
for the Study ofPublic Policy at the University ofStrathclyde,and a visiting
research fellow in the Refugee Studies Programme at Oxford University.
A regular visitor to Afghanistan,he is author ofThe Afghanistan Wars
(2002);edited Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban(1998,
2001);co-authored Regime Change in Afghanistan: Foreign Intervention and
the Politics ofLegitimacy(1991) and Political Order in Post-Communist
Afghanistan(1992);and co-edited The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan
(1989) and From Civil Strife to Civil Society: Civil and Military
Responsibilities in Disrupted States(2003).
BRIEFINGS
A series oftopical books exploring social,political
and cultural issues in contemporary Australia
Series editors: Peter Browne and Julian Thomas
Australian Policy Online (www.apo.org.au)
Institute for Social Research,Swinburne University ofTechnology
Rescuing Afghanistan
WILLIAM MALEY
A UNSW Press book
Published by
University ofNew South Wales Press Ltd
University ofNew South Wales
Sydney NSW 2052
AUSTRALIA
www.unswpress.com.au
© William Maley 2006
This book is copyright.Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of
private study,research,criticism or review,as permitted under the
Copyright Act,no part may be reproduced by any process without written
permission.Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.
National Library ofAustralia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Maley,William,1957– .
Rescuing Afghanistan.
Includes index.
ISBN 0 86840 937 5.
1.Islam and state – Afghanistan. 2.Islam and politics – Afghanistan.
3.Islamic fundamentalism – Afghanistan. 4.Afghanistan – Politics and
government.I.Title.(Series:Briefings (University ofNew South Wales
Press)).
958.1046
Cover photograph:Portrait ofHamid Karzai by Kate Brooks/Corbis SABA
Printed by Hyde Park Press
Contents
Introduction 7
1.The nature ofAfghanistan’s problems 14
2.Reconstituting the political system 30
3.Rebuilding security 56
4.Promoting human development 78
5.Afghanistan and the world 101
6.Whither Afghanistan? 120
Epilogue 135
Acknowledgements 139
References 141
Index 172
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Introduction
T
his is largely a tale of two Septembers, and of the years
between them. In September 2001, the charismatic leader
of Afghanistan’s anti-Taliban forces, Ahmad Shah Mas-
soud, was murdered by Arab assassins, and terrorists killed
thousands of people, of many nationalities, in the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon. Four years later, in September 2005,
Afghanistan witnessed elections for a new parliament,amid hopes
that the country would finally recover from decades ofmisery and
suffering. Over intervening period a remarkable endeavour had
taken place,commencing with the onset of“Operation Enduring
Freedom”on 7 October 2001,in which the international commu-
nity,Afghan leaders,and millions of ordinary Afghans worked to
pull their country from the abyss into which it had been thrust.
How successful this rescue mission will prove to have been only
time will tell, but already important lessons can be learned from
examining its course.
Afghanistan is a landlocked Central Asian state,the population
of which is overwhelmingly Muslim but segmented in complex
ways on ethnic, sectarian, and regional grounds. Its emergence is
typically dated from the commencement of the rule of Ahmad
Shah Durrani in 1747;it began to assume more ofthe trappings of
a modern state during the rule ofAbdul Rahman Khan from 1880
to 1901;and it became fully independent in 1919.1It has a reputa-
tion for turbulence,partly because of the vivid writings of British
poets and storytellers who depicted unhappy encounters with
7
RESCUING AFGHANISTAN
Afghan rulers and tribesmen in the days of the British Raj. This
reputation is not altogether deserved.For nearly 50 years before a
communist coup in April 1978 fatally disrupted the rhythm of
social and political life,Afghanistan was one of the most peaceful
countries in Asia. Its equilibrium, however, was fragile: the over-
throw of the King of Afghanistan,Muhammad Zahir Shah,by his
cousin Muhammad Daoud in July 1973 not only displaced the
monarch from the throne he had occupied for nearly 40 years,but
highlighted fissures that were developing in the political elite,divi-
sions that culminated in a bloody Marxist takeover less than five
years later.2 The tragedy of the 1978 coup was then greatly com-
pounded by the effects over the following years of various
self-interested interventions by Afghanistan’s neighbours. In
December 1979,the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to replace
the brutal dictator Hafizullah Amin with a Marxist more to its
liking, the pliable puppet Babrak Karmal, inaugurating nearly a
decade of sorrow for both sides,which came to an end only with
the withdrawal ofSoviet troops in February 1989.3In its own inter-
est,Pakistan channelled western support to radical elements ofthe
resistance (Mujahideen) movement,and finally,following the dis-
integration of the communist regime in April 1992, intervened
more directly from 1994, using as its tool first the Hezb-e Islami
(Party ofIslam) headed by the ruthless Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,and
then the Taliban movement.
As a result of these external influences, ordinary Afghans fell
victim to extreme and even obscurantist ideological forces whose
orientations were sharply at odds with the dominant strands of
thought within Afghanistan’s kaleidoscope of micro-societies.
Marxism-Leninism held no appeal for most Afghans,who saw it as
a threat to their faith and way of life.Yet while Islam became the
foundational element of resistance to the Soviet presence,4radical
Islamism also surfaced, with Pakistani backing, as a threat to the
pragmatic,society-based Islam ofthe bulk ofthe population.5The
collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 eliminated Marx-
ism as a factor in Afghan political life,although one ofthe four key
figures in the 1978 coup,Sayid Muhammad Gulabzoi,survived to
8
INTRODUCTION
be elected to the parliament in 2005.But radical Islamism,as rep-
resented principally by Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami and ultimately
Osama Bin Laden’s terrorist al-Qaeda organisation,proved a nox-
ious weed, as did the neofundamentalist Taliban with whom Bin
Laden so comfortably aligned himself. Hekmatyar’s rocketing of
Kabul,designed to ensure that no one else could rule ifhe did not,
destroyed much ofthe southern part ofthe city between 1992 and
1995,while the Taliban supplied a totalitarian mindset,albeit with-
out the bureaucratic agencies to give it full effect.Dealing with the
accumulated legacy of this extremism is part of the challenge of
drawing Afghanistan back into the community ofnations.
Afghanistan’s need for assistance can hardly be overstated.Fol-
lowing the 1978 coup,Afghans suffered a series of hammer blows
from which any people would find it difficult to recover.Many hun-
dreds of thousands were killed during the period of communist
rule,and by early 1990,some 6.2 million Afghans were refugees in
Pakistan and Iran, out of a pre-invasion population estimated at
only 13.05 million.6The state largely collapsed,and a range ofnew
forces emerged, some of them profoundly unappetising. Agricul-
ture, from which the bulk of the population had derived its
livelihood,suffered severe damage in many parts ofthe country,and
any semblance ofa “national”market was lost in favour ofsubstan-
tial regional autarky. With the destruction of educational
institutions and the flight of teachers and other educated profes-
sionals from the country,a generation of students was lost.And as
if this were not bad enough,the scattering of antipersonnel mines
in many parts of the country made roads impassable,fields unus-
able,and dwellings uninhabitable.As the writer Gavin Bell put it,it
was as ifsomeone had dropped a bomb in the Garden ofEden.7
On top of all these hardships was the misery brought by the
Taliban.A motley, pathogenic, anti-modernist force, drawn over-
whelmingly from the Pushtun ethnic group and instrumentalised
by irresponsible components of the Pakistani state, the Taliban
offered repression without hope of recovery from Afghanistan’s
travails,and weirdly painted the desert over which they presided as
a model ofIslamic rectitude.8They managed to prevail not because
9