Abstract
The killing of Osama bin Laden by the US elite force SEAL on 1 May 2011 in Pakistan’s garrison town Abottabad, brings to a close one of the most dreaded and sordid chapters of world terrorism as well as in the history of Afghanistan and what has been described as Af-Pak theatre. President George W. Bush’s declaration of war on terrorism soon after the 9/11 (2001) attack on New York’s World Trade Centre, Pentagon and reportedly failed attempt at the White House (the flight that crashed near Pennsylvania due to resistance by the passengers) unleashed US forces on Afghanistan’s Taliban regime that was allegedly sheltering Osama, adding further to the misery of the Afghan people caught between a schism-ridden society and undemocratic governments for years on the one hand and a play of world powers. The unseating of the Taliban regime and installing of a new ‘progressive’ regime headed by Hamid Karzai with the sanction of the UN and coalition forces led by the USA did neither lead to hunting down of Osama, nor did it eliminate the Taliban, or the terror network of Al Qaeda. Not only Afghanistan, but also the Af-Pak border continued to blaze with violence and gruesome killing of innocents. A decade later, when Osama bin Laden has finally been eliminated, a question mark on a peaceful Afghanistan continues. For, despite the fact that massive international energies are at work in the resurrection of Afghan nation, state and society from competitive ethnic divisions within to geopolitical considerations of the big powers and competing regional interests continue to lurk in the background. Will this ‘frontier’ be ‘recovered’?
Rasul Bakhsh Rais engages with this question in the book under review with painstaking research and provides a rare insight into the enigma that is Afghanistan. Rais puts Afghanistan in the contexts of socio-political structure of what he calls a ‘frontier’ state situated at the critical geopolitical location of South Asia, Central Asia and West Asia, as well as historical legacies of emerging colonial priorities of the British empire, followed immediately by the Cold War dynamics of the big two—immediate northern neighbour the USSR and the USA—that affected its politics and society almost till the closing decade of the twentieth century. The use and adaptation of the concept of ‘frontier’ state, a concept that has been used by US historians for the westward march in the shaping of the USA, in the context of Afghanistan, emerges useful as Rais identifies it with ‘remoteness, existing on the margins of regional and global systems, weak authority structure, internal fragmentation and conflict among competing groups, transnational ethnicities, legitimacy of internal conquest, and pre-emptive and reactive intervention by neighbors’. Interestingly, countering the Russian influence in Afghanistan guided the policies of the British Indian government too. The Soviet invasion of 1979 and its nine-year engagement with Afghanistan left the country and its society badly bruised. This period also brought in the US engagement in the country. However, the vacuum this period brought was filled in by the Taliban, which on the one hand brought in militant Islam as the guiding principle in society, politics and the government and, on the other, sharpened ethnic schism within the country, leaving Afghanistan as a fractured polity and a society even further divided. The processes since the ouster of the Taliban from power have been complex, in which modern democratic processes such as elections have strengthened and sharpened primordial tribal and religious bonds as well as (Pashtun) majoritarian politics in the beleaguered country, and yet they alone offer hope for a modern Afghanistan. In the ultimate analysis, society (ethnicity et al.), religion, state and international system (with big power rivalry as a major factor) contributed to a weak state and a fragmented society in Afghanistan.
In six substantive chapters, apart from Introduction and Conclusion, Rais discusses a wide range of issues—Afghanistan’s ethnicity conundrum, rise of the Taliban, the US war on terrorism, the effort to restructure Afghanistan, the soft underbelly ‘drugs and warlordism’, and the shadow of the neighbouring states—each one of these are concerned with its past, present and future. Rais brings in all the possible critical issues and concepts that are significant for ‘recovering’ Afghanistan in his discussion, such as state and nation formation, ethnicity management, multiculturalism, arranging and sustaining a layered identity, majority versus minority, religion versus society, polity and nation, Islam and Jihad. He also puts under critical lens the hypocrisy of the USA (p. 58) and myopic role of neighbouring Pakistan (p. 59); the former was governed by its policy of neutralising the Soviet influence and latter was guided by an aim to denying India a vantage point in the country.
The central premise of this book is that primordial ethnic identity and Islam emerged as powerful tools of social and political mobilization at the end of the long years of war. Islam and ethnicity, however produced two different types of resistance movements against the state that has had equally disastrous effects on the capacity of the Afghan state.
The premise as well as the arguments based on facts and data that Rais builds for the understanding of the Afghan situation also underlines a paradox of the politics of developing societies—while these remain ‘powerful tools’ of mobilisation, they also have retrogressive impact on processes of democracy as well as institutions that sustain democracy. The result evident in Afghanistan offers lessons for other societies and nations too, particularly to those societies where nation building is an ongoing exercise and project.
The most notable aspect of this book is the focus on reconstruction. The significance of reconstruction in Afghanistan emerges strongly as the author traverses through the complex history of the country, highlighting social, political, regional and international fault lines with lucid analytical narrative. The most significant socio-political factor emerging from the analysis is that somewhere consolidation of the Afghan nationhood got weakened due to lack of inclusiveness in the policies pursued by the Afghan kings of the twentieth century, King Amanullah Khan in particular, since the declaration of independence in 1919 after the Treaty of Rawalpindi with the British Indian government. The policies were not based on the ‘Afghan/Pashtun national ethos’. Not surprisingly, disregarding ethnic and social diversity made other smaller ethnic communities Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and many other smaller ethnic communities wary of this overbearing, if not coercive, inclusiveness and led to exclusion and fragmentation. Obviously, the kings failed to construct and consolidate national identity. The efforts made by the Soviet-backed Barbarak Karmal regime to pursue more broad-based ethnic policies by giving more space to minority ethnic identities did generate some effect in the north of the country, but emerging fissures in the Communist Party of Afghanistan created divisions on ethnic lines and became self-defeating. The Pashtun resistance to the Soviet-backed regime and the Soviet incursions in 1983 in the Panjsher valley with the backing of Pakistan too could not bring in reconciliation amongst the ethnic groups, in fact it caused further fragmentation and continues to remain a bane of the post-Taliban polity.
While these developments came in the way of constitutional development in Afghanistan, interests and interventions by the Soviet Union, Pakistan and Iran both created and divided the resistance movement; obviously, most of the time on ethnic lines. The creation of the Mujahideen government under the Peshawar accord in 1992 also generated false optimism. The multiple confrontations among the Mujahideen parties turned the entire country into a war zone. The journey from the Mujahideen government headed by Tajik President Burhanuddin Rabbani to Taliban was a tale of further accentuation of ethnic fissures, which complicated matters by Islamisation of society and polity. The rise of the Northern Front at the centre of power in Afghanistan following 9/11 with the support of the US too did not end power divisions on ethnic lines; it was the turn of the Pashtuns to feel deprived, which they thought was due to their support to Taliban. Though the bringing in of Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun, to head the interim administration following the Berlin conference in December 2001 helped in confidence-building amongst the Pashtuns. Karzai too attempted pragmatic alliances, and post-2004 elections feelings emerged that he is a front for the US. Obviously, neither internal efforts (and the initiation of a constitutional political process) nor the intervention of the international community has eased ethnic tension, making ethnic management difficult in Afghanistan.
Even though the Pashtun majoritarianism has weakened over the years, restructuring a new Afghan state based on constitutionalism of liberal democratic variety has a long way to go. As Rais rightly says, it is a challenge of reconstructing a failed state, where all the vital institutions will have to be created afresh; more importantly they will have to be sustained over a period of time for them to take roots. While the emerging Afghan state has to deal cautiously with the issue of social (ethnic) inclusion at social, political and constitutional levels, it will need tremendous international support to end warlordism and the political economy of drugs. The effort this time must not fail and at international and regional levels efforts will have to be made to sustain the process beyond narrow interests.
The volume is a rare study that not only offers an informed, candid, non-partisan analysis but also attempts to provide solutions too.