Our northwestern neighbour

Author: Salman Tarik Kureshi

“Good fences,” wrote the poet Robert Frost, “Make good neighbours,” meaning thereby that it is wise to stay off your neighbours’ property and out of their affairs. Alas, this has seldom been true of the dealings between Pakistan and our northwestern neighbour Afghanistan.
Right back in 1947, Pakistan’s appearance on the world map was first recognised by the countries of the world — beginning with Britain and India and then the Soviet Union, which, it may by the way interest readers to know, had earlier supported the Pakistan Movement as the ‘national self-determination’ movement of Indian Muslims.
However, Afghanistan was the significant holdout that initially refused to recognise Pakistan. The Durrani monarchy went to the extent of opposing Pakistan’s admission to the United Nations and raised irredentist claims to the Pashto speaking areas of NWFP and Balochistan provinces of Pakistan. A ‘Pakhtunistan’ flag was raised in Kabul, alongside the Afghan national flag, as early as September 2, 1947.
The particularly backward stretch of earth ruled by the Durrani kings — one of the two or three most backward countries in the world — was for a long time relatively unknown to the world outside the narcotic haze of the so-called ‘hippie trail’. Harry Truman’s notorious “Afghanistan — Bananistan!” comment exemplified the foreign affairs perceptiveness of many Americans at the time. The point is that our national neighbour seems no less an area of darkness in the minds of many of our countrymen today as in that of President Truman all those decades ago.
It is first necessary to appreciate that there are two quite distinct natural regions within Afghanistan, divided from one another by the great mountains of the Hindu Kush (“Indian Killer”) range and its spurs.
The Northern Plain, east of Iran and south of the Central Asian republics, is continuous with the Central Asian steppes; it has historically been known variously as Aryana (homeland of the ‘Aryans’ so important to Brahmin priests and European racists), Bactria to the Greeks and, as a province of Persia, Khorasan.
The Southern Plateau, mostly bordering Pakistan, is a semi-arid region of high plateaus, linked from the days of ancient Gandhara down to the end of the Moghul Empire with the history of what is now Pakistan.
The two regions of Afghanistan are ethnically differentiable, the south being predominantly Pashtun and the north having a Tajik majority; numerous smaller ethnic entities also exist in each region. The city of Kabul sits at a strategic location a little south of the passes that penetrate the Hindu Kush.
Contrary to popular belief, Afghanistan has been not exclusively been some kind of wild frontier territory. It was a centre for the creative, artistic splendours of ancient Gandhara and of the more recent Persian, Ghaznavid, Ghaurid, Timurid and Moghul empires. It has gifted the Muslim world such outstanding intellectual figures as Jalaluddin Rumi, Firdowsi and Jamaluddin Afghani, among many others.
It has always been a politically unstable zone. Contrary to the myth of Afghan unconquerability, it was divided or conquered by first one empire, then the other, until the rise of Ahmed Shah Abdali, whose descendants are known as Durranis. Ahmed Shah was elected in 1747, by a Loya Jirga at Kandahar, to succeed the Turcoman conqueror Nadir Shah, who had pillaged the Moghul Empire and conquered Iran and what is now Afghanistan.
Under Abdali’s less able successors, this kingdom lost its southwestern provinces to the Kajar Shahs of Iran and portions of its northern regions to Czarist Russia, leaving approximately the Afghanistan of today. Through the nineteenth century’s Great Games, there was continual external meddling in Afghanistan, successfully by the Punjab of Ranjit Singh, less successfully by the Russian Czars and the British Raj. Despite external meddling, the state entity of Afghanistan remained remarkably intact. This is in sharp contrast to each and every one of its neighbouring states.
The state of Afghanistan, as it took shape under the Durrani kings, did not possess any of the features of a nation-state. Geographically and culturally divided, it was — right up until the overthrow of Zahir Shah in 1973 — a monarchic state, centring at Kabul.
It was, and remains, ethnically multiple and socially atomised into sub-ethnic tribal groups. Amir Abdur Rahman, who mounted the throne of Kabul in 1880, writes of his countrymen, “Every mullah and chief of every tribe and village considers himself an independent ruler…The tyranny and cruelty of these men were unbearable. One of their jokes was to cut off…heads and put them on red hot sheets of iron to see them jump about…So you can easily understand what a desperate struggle I had with these people…(It) took me fifteen long years and very harsh measures before they finally submitted to my rule.”
The nineteenth-century Great Game kept Afghanistan as a buffer status between the Raj and the Czarist Empire. Not permitted to evolve naturally towards two or more nation-states, Afghanistan survived as a land-locked, closed basin. In grand isolation for nearly two centuries, the kingdom became confirmed in its backward status. Attempts at modernisation in the 1920s by Amanullah Shah were considered radical and were resisted by the mullahs and the local chieftains. The call for Jihad raised by Mullah Shor Bazar, materially and militarily supported by the British Raj, resulted in the overthrow of the king by the bandit Habibullah Khan (more popularly called Bacha Saka) in 1929.
The Pakhtunistan issue, a massive interference in the affairs of Afghanistan’s southeastern neighbour Pakistan, was given state support by King Zahir Shah, Amanullah’s grandson. In 1953, the King’s cousin Sardar Daud Khan became Prime Minister and a serious Pakhtunistan activist. But this very issue was to precipitate Daud’s downfall.
Running out of patience with Afghan agitation, Pakistan closed the border in August 1961. Afghanistan was thereby obliged to depend more heavily on the Soviet Union for trade and transit facilities. After Daud Khan resigned as prime minister in March 1963, the border was reopened by Pakistan in May.
Pakistan’s repayment of Afghanistan’s bad neighbourly policies began ten years later, after Sardar Daud overthrew King Zahir Shah and ended the Durrani monarchy. One of the beneficiaries of an amnesty declared by President Daud was Gulbadin Hekmatyar. Previously a student of engineering at Kabul University who was believed to have sprayed sulphuric acid on the faces of unveiled girl students, Hekmatyar had been implicated in the murder of a leftist student. After his release, he moved to Pakistan, where in time he was to become the most controversial of the Mujahideen leaders, accused of spending “more time fighting other Mujahideen than killing Soviets” and wantonly killing civilians.
In 1973, Hekmatyar was welcomed as an ‘asset’ by the intelligence service of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was uneasy because of Daud’s closeness with the USSR. Other Islamist figures, including Ahmad Shah Massoud, Burhanuddin Rabbani and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, were also taken up as Pakistani intelligence ‘assets’ at about this time. Periodic Mujahideen raids into Afghanistan commenced.
President Daud was overthrown by the ‘Parcham’ faction of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, a cover-name for the Communist Party, in 1978. The Parchamis were later overthrown by the more extreme ‘Khalq’ faction, whose extreme leftist policies alienated the tribals and others. These now began to support the Mujahideen. The Soviet Union invaded in 1979, ostensibly on the invitation and in support of the PDPA government.
Afghanistan has now been at war for nearly thirty years. The Mujahideen, with American and Pakistani assistance drove out the USSR. As different factions of the Mujahideen battled over the spoils, the Taliban, nurtured in Pakistani madrassas from among Afghan refugee youth, took the country over with the help of Pakistani forces, the latter seeking a bizarre ‘strategic depth’ outside the sovereign territory of Pakistan. The international terrorist organisation called Al Qaeda exploited the Taliban’s hospitality and mounted spectacular attacks against the US, drawing the superpower now directly into the Afghan fray.
Today, the pseudo-democratic government of Hamid Karzai wields no authority beyond the city of Kabul and very little within. It had been the authority of the Durrani monarch, ruling through local chieftains, which had held the heterogeneous Afghan entity. Remove this authority — as Daud Khan did in 1973 and the Communists Tarakai, Amin, Karmal and Najibullah further confirmed after 1978 — and the raison d’etre for the state had also been removed.
Today, the king is no more the ruler; the centre at Kabul has failed to hold together. In place of the former backward-but-stable condition, there is anarchy, despite the illusion of control at Kabul. The country is a kind of political black hole, distorting those within and sucking in those outside. Even if order is ultimately restored without pulling much more of the larger political world into its chaotic entropy, Afghanistan could split into its geographically predetermined northern and southern portions.
To speak here of a ‘broad-based’ government is meaningless. The wily Emir Abdur Rahman took all of fifteen years to consolidate his authority. And that was more than 120 years ago, before the CIA intervention, the Soviet invasion, the ISI meddling, the murderous blood-letting between the Mujahideen warlords, the exploits of Al Qaeda and the whole dreadful legacy of the past three decades.
And what should a neighbour like Pakistan do? Well, we have been ruinously harmed, first by Afghanistan’s meddling in our affairs and then by the multi-dimensional backlash of our own intervention in Afghanistan. The best policy would be to sort out our own problems — including the war we are in denial about being ‘our’ war — and follow Robert Frost regarding ‘good fences’. Leave Afghanistan to its own destiny. Seal the border, physically fencing it if need be, and studiously avoid the possibly fatal mistake of once again involving Pakistan in Afghanistan’s affairs.