| A new beginning in Kabul Daily Times, Pakistan
12/23/2005
By Tanvir Ahmad Khan
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In recent years, Pakistan’s support for the Taliban was more than matched by the help India provided to the Northern Alliance. The emergence of a parliament in Kabul, however flawed the election for it, is an occasion to lay aside the competition of yesteryear and bring an entirely new sub-continental vision to bear on relations with Afghanistan As members of Afghanistan’s newly elected parliament took their oath on December 19 they revived this representative institution after more than three decades. President Hamid Karzai thanked God for providing the country with a chance to once again take control of its destiny. King Zahir Shah, whose ouster in 1973 led to a chain of consequences that included the Soviet invasion, a protracted civil war and eventually an American military onslaught, expressed confidence that the people of Afghanistan would succeed. These are, perhaps, brave words in a land still under foreign occupation. But it would be unduly pessimistic not to see some light at the end of the tunnel. This is a milestone in the painful journey to the reconstitution of the Afghan state and society. Karzai’s reclamation of national destiny, though somewhat premature, is the appropriate point of reference because in the last three decades, outsiders have tried to determine it for the Afghans. In the 1970s, their internal politics got polarised as modernity burst upon them in the form of ideologies that they did not quite comprehend. I once said to Hafizullah Amin that his publicly avowed faith in the ‘withering of the state’ ran counter to the fact that all communist regimes had spawned highly centralised bureaucratic states. Without blinking an eyelid, he retorted that Afghan communists would restore the purity of this fundamental Marxist doctrine and the state would, indeed, wither away under the guidance of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Afghans paid a huge price for this political innocence and his prophecy became true only in the form of total anarchy, which the Soviet Union tried to overcome in the name of Brezhnev’s doctrine of the irreversibility of revolutions. Ironically, the Soviet stabilisation programme began with their murder of Hafizullah Amin. On the other side of the divide, a coalition of US-led Western powers and Pakistan-led Muslim states decided that it would be the Afghan destiny to live under a medieval Islamist dispensation that none of the coalition partners quite fancied for their own people. In due course, Afghanistan was left with the lonely hope that the blood-soaked gift of freedom and democracy bestowed upon it by the United States would succeed where everything else had failed. There is considerable concern among the Afghans and their well-wishers all over the globe that up to 60 percent of the Wolesi Jirga, which symbolises the new freedom, comprises former Mujahideen leaders, their communist adversaries, war lords, drug barons and slightly reconstructed Taliban. The other 40 percent, who include most of the 67 women, are said to reflect new liberal tendencies. The party-less election permitted by the occupying powers turns its 249 members into free-floating individuals and the future process of bloc formation remains highly unpredictable. The unease of the Afghan liberals came to surface in a recently held conference in Kabul on the question of war crimes of the last 20 years or so. Karzai’s foreign minister warned that any adaptation of the South African model of truth and reconciliation to Afghanistan will have to consider the ground realities. A woman member who returned to this theme in the first working session of parliament was almost shouted down. The US-led forces are still battling the Taliban in a number of Afghan provinces and Karzai cannot possibly antagonise the warlords and the drug barons beyond a certain point. When he exercised his prerogative to nominate 34 members to the 102-strong upper house, the Mesharano Jirga, which has the widely respected Sibghatullah Mojaddadi as its chairman, Karzai, quite prudently, included General Fahim in the list. In the high noon of imperialism, the British Empire and the Czars of Russia decided against using the Afghan soil for a tectonic collision. Being a buffer meant paying a price in the form of being left behind in a pre-feudal time warp. But the Afghans were free to choose and in time they built up a limited infrastructure of a modern state. The treaties they signed with the two powerful empires, including Lenin’s successor Soviet state, showed their innate diplomatic skills. Afghanistan still needs a solemn international commitment of non-interference. In fact, in his inaugural address Karzai pointedly urged the neighbours to give this assurance. First and foremost, the ‘liberators’ will have to leave Afghanistan out of the chess board of military bases now being set for the power play of the first half of this century. Like the neighbouring Central Asian states, Kabul should freely determine the nature and extent of its military cooperation with other states. The foreign forces fighting the dispossessed Taliban are perceived as a threat by Iran. In Afghanistan, conflicts end with traditional mechanisms for dialogue and accommodation. The kind of victory that President Bush talks about in US war colleges does not belong to the fastnesses of Hindukush and sooner, rather than later, the Afghan way of achieving peace has to be extended to the Taliban-dominated areas. Afghanistan will have to find its way back to a regional posture of positive neutrality. The last SAARC summit created a new opening by accepting Afghanistan as part of a South Asian family of nations. Rivalry between India and Pakistan was one of the relatively more notable causes of instability in the 1940s and 1950s in that country. In recent years, Pakistan’s support for the Taliban was more than matched by the help that India provided to the Northern Alliance. The emergence of a parliament in Kabul, however flawed the election for it, is an occasion to lay aside the competition of yesteryears and bring an entirely new sub-continental vision to bear on relations with Afghanistan. It has the potential of playing a vital role in shaping a new era of economic cooperation in a vast area stretching into western, central and southern Asia. It would be in the interest of all the regional states to assist Afghanistan to assume that role. The writer is a former foreign secretary
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