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Egypt Today
11/19/2007
By Gwynne Dyer
Fighting with the Taliban will not cease until Afghanistan's largest
minority, the Pashtun, are welcomed into the leadership fold
LAST MONTH WAS the sixth anniversary of the start of US airstrikes
against Al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. It was a very
clever politico-military operation, and by December of 2001 all of
Afghanistan was under the control of the United States and its local
allies for a total cost of twelve American dead. Then, for no good
reason, it fell apart, and now the war is lost.
In the days just after 9/11, George Tenet, the Central Intelligence
Agency's chief, came up with a bold proposal. Why invade Afghanistan
with a large American army, deploying massive firepower that kills
large numbers of locals and alienates the population? Why give Osama
bin Laden the long anti-American guerrilla war that he was
undoubtedly counting on?
Instead, Tenet proposed sending teams of CIA agents and Special
Forces into the country to win the support of the various militias,
loosely linked as the Northern Alliance, who still dominated the
northern regions of the country at the time. Although the Taliban had
controlled most of the country since 1996, they never decisively won
the civil war. So why not intervene in that war, shower their
opponents with money and weapons and tip the balance against the
Taliban?
It worked like a charm. Pakistan, whose intelligence services had
originally created the Taliban, withdrew its support, the regime fled
Kabul and most of the Taliban troops melted back into their villages.
The government of a nation counting 27 million people was taken down
for a death toll that probably did not exceed 4,000 on all sides.
By mid-December 2001, the United States effectively controlled
Afghanistan through its local allies, all drawn from the northern
minority groups: Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara. There had not been the
mass killing of innocent bystanders that would inevitably have
accompanied a conventional US invasion, so there was no guerrilla
war. The traditional ruling group and biggest minority, the Pashtun,
who had put their money on the Taliban and lost, would have to be
brought back into the game somehow, but the usual Afghan deal-making
would suffice.
Washington had the wit to make Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun from a clan
that never had much to do with the Taliban, its puppet president in
Kabul, but this didn't carry through. Instead they froze out the
prominent Pashtun political and religious leaders who had had
dealings with the Taliban which was, of course, almost all of them.
The Taliban had been the government of Afghanistan for almost five
years, and at the time they were the political vehicle of the Pashtun
ascendancy in the country. If you were a traditional Pashtun leader,
how could you not have had dealings with them? An amnesty that turned
a blind eye to the past, plus pressure by the United States on its
recent allies to grant the Pashtuns a fair share of the national pie,
would have created a regime in Kabul to which Pashtuns could give
their loyalty, even if they were less dominant at the center than
usual. But that never happened.
The United States had so closely identified the Taliban with Al-Qaeda
(even though bin Laden probably never told the Taliban leadership
what he was planning) that it would not talk to Pashtun leaders who
had been linked to the Taliban. Six years after the `invasion that
wasn't,' the Pashtuns are still largely frozen out. That is why the
Taliban are coming back.
Afghanistan has usually been run by regional and tribal warlords with
little central control; nothing new there. But now it is also a
country where the biggest minority has been largely excluded from
power by foreign invaders who sided with the smaller minorities and
then blocked the process of accommodation by which the various Afghan
ethnic groups normally make power-sharing deals.
The Taliban are still the main political vehicle of the Pashtuns
because there has been no time to build another. It doesn't mean that
all Pashtuns are fanatics or terrorists. Indeed, not all the Taliban
are fanatics (though many of them are), and hardly any of them nurse
the desire to carry out terrorist acts in other countries. That was
the specialty of their (rather ungrateful) Arab guests, who fled
across the border into the tribal areas of Pakistan almost six years
ago.
The current fighting in the south, the Pashtun heartland which is
causing a steady dribble of American, British and Canadian
casualties will continue until the Western countries pull out. Most
other NATO members sent their troops to various parts of northern
Afghanistan, where non-Pashtun warlords rule non-Pashtun populations
and nobody dares attack the foreigners. Then, after the foreigners
are gone, the Afghans will make the traditional inter-ethnic deals
and something like peace will return.
Will Karzai still be the president after that? Yes, if he can
convince the Pashtuns that he is open to such a deal once the
foreigners leave.
Will the Taliban come back to power? No, only to a share of power,
and only to the extent that they can still command the loyalty of the
Pashtuns once it is no longer a question of resistance to foreigners.
Will Osama bin Laden return and recreate a "nest of terrorists" in
Afghanistan? Very unlikely. The Afghans paid too high a price for
their hospitality the first time around.
Gwynne Dyer, an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker
based in London, is a regular Egypt Today columnist. |
