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Comprehending the Afghan Quagmire
by Rina Amiri
November 1, 2001
Reprinted from the Sojourner Magazine
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“Has Afghanistan always been this way?”
“Is the violence in your country due to the feudal, tribalistic culture?”
“Are violence and war in the Afghan genes?”
“Why should we go clean up the Afghan mess? Why are we contributing food and aid to our enemies—the people who harbor terrorists in Afghanistan?”
Many questions and comments have been directed at me these last weeks by those who have struggled to grasp the situation in Afghanistan today—the decades of war, the radicalism, and the tragic situation of the people. I have taken on the role of responding and trying to put a human face on the conflict. Time is the only factor that distinguishes me from the Afghans you see on TV, those desperately fleeing Afghanistan with their few belongings and children strapped to a mule, or trudging on foot through the rugged terrain, tugging at the arms of their exhausted and hungry children. More than twenty years ago, I was one of those confused children, clutching the hands of my parents, bewildered by why we were leaving our country all of a sudden.
My family was among the first waves of refugees who traversed the well-trodden Khyber Pass in the 1970s after the Afghan King, Zahir Shah, was overthrown by his cousin, Sardar Daoud. Like the refugees of today in Afghanistan and throughout the world, overnight we were branded as the enemy of the state and became countryless and homeless as a result of other people’s wars and other people’s politics.
Prior to the coup d’etat in 1973, Afghanistan was a normal place, with ordinary people living routine lives under modest conditions. In Kabul, women made up 60 percent of the educational force and were employed as professionals; secular law and the Islamic Sharia law co-existed as legal mechanisms to address violations; and Afghanistan had not been involved in a war since fighting against British invaders in the 1880s.
What happened, and how has Afghanistan become a victim of an endless cycle of violence and war? There are a multitude of answers capturing the kaleidoscope of truths about Afghanistan. The common elements in all of these explanations are two factors: foreign intervention and the internal and external struggle to control Afghanistan.
While Afghanistan has consistently been one of the most underdeveloped and poorest nations in the world, it has also been considered geopolitically one of the most strategic countries to control. It is the boundary between land power and sea power, the meeting point between Central Asia, Iran, India, and the Persian Gulf. Controlling Afghanistan is the key to maintaining influence over these trade routes.
Foreign great powers have always been keenly aware of this. In the nineteenth century, Afghanistan’s history was shaped by the British and Russian empires’ struggle for domination in what Kipling coined “The Great Games.” The twentieth century only continued this trend, with the Soviet Union, the United States, and regional neighbors imposing their respective interests on Afghanistan.
Many Afghans would agree that the beginning of the twentieth-century Great Game can be traced back to the overthrow of the Afghan king in 1973. Seeking revenues to modernize Afghanistan, President Daoud turned to the United States and the Soviet Union for financial support. The United States turned Afghanistan down largely because of the U.S. alliance with Pakistan. Pakistan and Afghanistan had always had contentious relations because of a territorial dispute.
Aid Equals Intervention
The Soviet Union had been looking for this opportunity and immediately agreed to provide financial and infrastructure support. Foreign aid soon became foreign intervention. Once Daoud realized the gamble that he had made, it was too late. The Soviets became entrenched in Afghanistan, initially in the unsuccessful propping up of the minority Afghan communist parties, and finally with the official invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
For the next ten years, the Soviets pummeled Afghanistan, mining the country, and terrorizing and slaughtering its people. America responded by throwing $2 to $3 billion into the Afghan war against the Soviets, relying on Pakistan to help shape the U.S. strategy. Because of its territorial disputes with Afghanistan, Pakistan has never been a proponent of Afghan nationalism. Instead, Pakistan encouraged an Islamic fundamentalist approach to mobilizing against the Soviets. Harnessing the anger of the Muslim world over the invasion, the United States and Pakistan supported an Islamic war against the Soviet Union. It worked. Fundamentalists from throughout the Muslim world, including Osama bin Laden, poured into Pakistan and Afghanistan. The “Afghan” freedom fighters, “the Mujaheddin,” were fierce, driven by anger, moral zeal, and Western arms. Ten years later, in 1989, the Soviets withdrew and the Cold War was won.
For Afghans, the results of this war were devastating: 1.5 million dead, 5 million refugees, the exodus or death of its intellectual community, more than a million landmines, 500,000 widows, hundreds of thousands of orphans, and extremist Islamic groups in Afghanistan armed with some of the deadliest American weapons. The ground was ripe for disaster, but the world looked away from the impending crisis. Buoyed over the collapse of communism, and suddenly disinterested in the messy Afghan aftermath, the West allowed a political vacuum to develop in Afghanistan between 1989 and 1992.
Geopolitics of Oil Interests
The internal “Great Games” in Afghanistan emerged within the context of this void. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the stakes for controlling Afghanistan had become increasingly higher. Afghanistan was positioned to become an important potential opening to the sea for the landlocked new states of Central Asia. The presence of large oil and gas deposits in the area soon attracted countries like Russia and China, not to mention Pakistan and India, and multinational oil conglomerates like Unocal and Bridas.
Between 1992 and 1996, the “heroic” Mujaheddin turned against each other and their people, playing the ethnic card and engaging in a bloodbath to control Afghanistan. The enemy was now within, with warlords raping, pillaging, looting, and killing their own people indiscriminately. The results were dramatic: another mass exodus of Afghan refugees and an opening for the extremist nominally Islamic group—the Taliban—to take over.
The Taliban, largely comprising war orphans raised in strictly male societies and educated in Pakistani madrassas (Islamic religious schools), were able to take over 95 percent of Afghanistan because they promised law and order. They delivered law and order, of the severest kind, and killed the last of what Afghanistan had—our culture and our heritage. They forbade music, dancing, and every form of Afghan cultural display. They created an international outcry when they destroyed one of our most magnificent historical monuments, the 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddhas, this year.
Among other things, the Taliban forced men into the armed forces against the Northern Alliance. While the women did not face the risk of being combatants, they faced harsh repressive measures and the loss of their future and livelihood. Girls and women of all ages were thrown out of school and deprived of the right to work. These measures impacted the 500,000 war widows, who had an average of five children each, the hardest. Many of these women resorted to begging and some resorted to prostitution to feed their children.
Consequences of Extremism
For the last several years, Afghans have tried to alert the international community to the role of the Taliban in supporting the use of Afghan territory as a breeding ground for an international network of terrorists. The international community knew of this situation, but left it unattended, perhaps because it did not seem to be an imminent danger to the West’s interests. The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Africa, and last year’s attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen showed that this was an illusion. Sanctions were applied against the Taliban, but the one-pronged approach proved to be disastrous.
On September 11, the world was brutally shown the devastating consequences of the extremism bred in Afghan terrorist camps and the deadly threat it posed to the international community.
And now we—we the global community—stand facing a situation filled with contradictions and complexities. There are no simple answers. Terrorists have used Afghanistan as one of their bases, but none of the suspects in the World Trade Center attack are Afghans. The United States is at war with Afghanistan, allied with the Northern Alliance faction against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. But the people of Afghanistan have been the brutalized victims of the Taliban, the Northern Alliance, and the bin Laden terrorist network. Afghanistan is being bombed, but the Afghan people are receiving U.S. and Western humanitarian aid.
The world gazes from the CNN precipice, getting a bird’s eye view of the collapse of Afghanistan, marveling at the destruction, stunned by the human devastation that has gone on in Afghanistan over twenty years. Pity for the refugees is intertwined with anger that the phantoms of the Soviet-Afghan war have come back to haunt us all in the shape of bin Laden, terrorist networks, and a violent brand of extremism that has spread to every layer of our society in the international community. Like the Afghan refugees who stand desperately at closed borders, we have nowhere to run. The threat of terrorism is everywhere.
I have tried to respond to the questions posed to me and now I will end by asking questions of my own:
Will we look for easy answers, dividing the world into neat compartments of Islamic terrorists and Western victims, or will we see that terrorism is a minority extremist group, spreading from the Al Qaeda network in the Middle East to the Timothy McVeighs in the United States, and that these people threaten Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike?
Will we once again pick the winners in an Afghan war and walk away, without thinking about the long-term implications of what they will breed in Afghanistan and the international community?
Will we finally recognize that the political and humanitarian conditions of such oil- and resource-poor countries as Afghanistan matter geopolitically, strategically, and morally to the type of future we envision for our world?
Rina Amiri specializes in Southwest Asian affairs and Afghan politics as a graduate student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. She is also a senior associate at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. The views expressed in this article are Ms. Amiri’s and do not reflect the views of her institutional affiliations.
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