A CHANCE FOR PEACE IN AFGHANISTAN, by  Peter Tomsen

Foreign Affairs January/February 2000 (Volume 79, Number 1),  http://www.foreignaffairs.org

Summary:  Ahmed Rashid has it wrong. The Taliban's days are, mercifully, numbered.

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(A Professor of International Studies and Programs at the University of
Nebraska at Omaha, Mr. Tomsen served as Special Envoy to the Afghan
Mujahideen, with the rank of ambassador, in 1989-92.)

The Taliban movement, depicted by Ahmed Rashid ("The Taliban: Exporting
Extremism," November/December 1999), has passed its high-water mark. It is
now disintegrating, echoing the rapid rise and fall of similar religious
movements in Afghan history. With the Taliban's demise, Afghanistan faces a
new challenge: who will fill their place?

As Rashid notes, the Taliban emerged in the mid-1990s, when their radical
leader Muhammad Omar succeeded in melding religious fervor with the tribal
patriotism of Afghanistan's largest group, the Pashtuns. Omar and the other
militant mullahs from rural southern Afghanistan in the Taliban leadership
were assisted by the powerful Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency
(ISI), the extremist Pakistani religious party Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam
(JUI), and radical Arab Muslims, including members of Osama bin Ladin's
terrorist network. Together, these forces unleashed a powerful coalition
that sallied northward from the Pashtun belt that borders Pakistan,
ultimately gaining control of 90 percent of the country. The Taliban were
initially welcomed by an Afghan population tired of war and disgusted by
Kabul's inept, corrupt mujahideen government, led by Burhanuddin Rabbani.

Things fall apart

Since their seizure of Kabul in 1996, the semiliterate Taliban mullahs have
proven singularly incapable of governing the areas they control. Their rigid
Islam, blending aspects of anti-Sufi and anti-Shia fundamentalism from
India, Pakistan, and the Persian Gulf states, is alien to the moderate Islam
practiced by most Afghans. Early on, the Taliban's authoritarianism and
intolerance alienated non-Pashtun Afghans, who make up more than half the
population. More recently, the Taliban have begun to alienate Pashtuns as
well. The flow of thousands of extremist Pakistani and Arab Taliban
supporters into Afghanistan has fueled the resentment of the local populace.

The Taliban's failed offensive in the fall of 1999 exposed the movement's
declining military punch. A mostly non-Pashtun coalition in northern
Afghanistan turned back the Taliban's attacks and has since pushed the front
lines toward Kabul, capturing Taliban-controlled areas in northern, eastern,
and western Afghanistan. The popular enthusiasm that greeted earlier Taliban
offensives have faded: Pashtun youth are no longer volunteering to join the
Taliban, and Pashtun fighters are leaving the Taliban's ranks, gravitating
back to their southern tribal areas.

Signs of the Taliban's disintegration abound. Afghans are growing suspicious
of how heavily the ISI controls the Taliban; ISI officers and Pakistani
religious-party firebrands have become ubiquitous in Taliban-controlled
cities, including Kabul. Taliban adversaries are profiting from these
suspicions. Moreover, corruption, inspired by the lucrative opium business,
has now started to infect Taliban leaders; this has raised questions among
their followers about whether they have abandoned their professed
spirituality in order to gain personal wealth and power.

A grand assembly

Afghan supporters of a broad-based political reconciliation must now
consider who will fill the vacuum left when the Taliban are forced from
Kabul, perhaps as early as this summer. If the past seven years are any
indication, Kabul will fall yet against to another foreign-supported,
well-armed Afghan faction. But it, too, is doomed to be a transitory force,
driven out by the overwhelming military strength of other groups that will
eventually coalesce against it. Death and destruction could continually
wrack the country.

Most Afghans agree that to escape this cycle of violence, the country's
major religious and ethnic groups must cooperate to choose their own
leadership, rather than have one imposed on them from the outside. They
could do so through a mechanism such as the proposed Grand [National]
Assembly, for which models can be found in other times of trouble over the
last 300 years of Afghan history. If successful, this type of large Afghan
gathering could produce the first leader considered legitimate by the people
since 1973. In November 1999, Afghan ex-monarch Zahir Shah presided over the
second Afghan consultative conference in Rome to facilitate a Grand Assembly
in 2000. Many Afghans consider Zahir Shah a suitable - but not the only -
vehicle to achieve consensus within Afghanistan on how to restore peace.
Worried about their own poor prospects, however, Taliban leaders and their
radical foreign backers are already maneuvering to derail the Grand Assembly
initiative.

The Grand Assembly could also consider reform more fundamental than merely
changing the country's leadership. It could decide, for instance, what form
of Islamic government is best for Afghanistan. Should the Afghan state be
structured in a federal pattern, and how much power should rest at the state
and at the national levels? What are the country's reconstruction
priorities? What kind of constitution and legal system would best serve
Afghanistan?

All non-Taliban Afghan groups, including Pashtun tribal leaders and the
powerful Tajik northern commander Ahmad Shah Masood, are advocating such a
consensus-building process. Even mid- and lower-level Pashtuns in the
Taliban's ranks have notified prominent Pashtun leaders that they, too,
support a broad-based intra-Afghan dialogue. Without exception, all Afghan
groups have publicly declared their preference for a united, unpartitioned
Afghanistan.

If the post-Taliban leadership is wise, it will steer Afghanistan away from
the Islamist crusade of Pakistani, Arab, and other foreign extremists
attempting to export militant Islam to Central Asia and other parts of the
Muslim world. Afghanistan has more than enough problems of its own. Internal
stability and reconstruction will take years of domestic cooperation and
hard work to achieve. The Taliban's replacements should realize that the
international community will not be willing to assist them if foreign
Islamists continue to divert Afghanistan toward violent campaigns abroad
while its problems fester at home.

The most acute threat to a stable, peaceful and neutral Afghanistan will
continue to come from Pakistan, even though nearly all of Afghanistan's
other neighbors also support their own Afghan proxies. Just as the Soviets
tried saving their communist asset in Kabul by invading Afghanistan,
Islamabad has been funneling more troops and military resources to save its
own asset, the Taliban. More than 10,000 Pakistanis (and one "brigade" of
radical Muslims from Arab states) now fight alongside Taliban forces in what
many Afghans describe as a "creeping" Pakistani invasion of Afghanistan. The
ISI, the JUI, Arab extremists such as Osama bin Ladin, and the Taliban
leadership all cooperate closely. The ISI has long orchestrated this
Islamist coalition; its continuing support for the Taliban is the biggest
obstacle to a political settlement in Afghanistan.

Putting it together

American policy today is inadequate to deliver on U.S. interests in
Afghanistan. U.S. foreign-policy makers must craft a more forceful,
creative, and effective approach to address America's geostrategic concerns,
the soaring Afghan opium trade, massive Taliban violations of human rights,
and the return of the largest refugee population in the world. The current
U.S. emphasis on bin Ladin's arrest is a necessary objective. It should,
however, be part of a larger regional policy framework geared toward
achieving U.S. goals.

The chief danger to U.S. interests is the rising tide of Islamist militancy
and international terrorism emanating from bases in Afghanistan. The Afghan
springboard for Islamist militancy endangers other pro-Western governments
in the Muslim world, including Saudi Arabia, where a turn toward extremism
would severely set back U.S. interests. Afghanistan is the documented
training and inspirational base for worldwide militant Islamists operations
ranging from American soil to the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, and
the Philippines. Muslim extremists are menacing Russia's southern periphery,
providing ammunition for Moscow's antidemocratic, ultra-nationalist
advocates of regimentation at home to defend against enemies from abroad.
The greater the influence of radical Muslims in the Central Asian republics,
the more tempted the governments of those republics will be to seek Russian
military assistance. This has already occurred in Tajikistan, which is now
virtually a Russian protectorate.

A more energetic American policy should discreetly encourage the Afghan
consensus process now underway. It should also advocate a fresh beginning
for the lagging international negotiations on Afghanistan by replacing the
nonproductive "Six-Plus-Two" U.N. forum that even Secretary-General Kofi
Annan has criticized as ineffective. U.S. diplomacy must focus on removing
Afghanistan as an arena of competition among Pakistan, Iran, Russia and
Saudi Arabia. The 1955 State Treaty on Austrian Neutrality can serve as a
useful precedent; it led to the withdrawal of Western and Soviet forces from
Austrian territory and produced the first major "thaw" in the Cold War, when
the contending outside powers agreed not to extend their spheres of
influence to Austria.

The United States should continue to demand that Islamabad change its course
on Afghanistan. It can appeal to the military leadership's own
self-interest, pointing to the strategic, political, and economic benefits
Pakistan stands to gain in an Afghan settlement: Pakistan's desperate search
for overland trade routes to Central Asian, European, and Chinese markets
will not be realized until the Afghan population recognizes its leadership
as legitimate, not imposed. A formal international treaty respecting
Afghanistan's neutrality and sovereignty would permit Islamabad's military
leaders to discontinue - with honor - their blatant and extensive
interference in Afghanistan.

Ahmed Rashid correctly observes that "until the United States demonstrates
that it has the determination to mobilize an international effort for ending
outside interference, Afghanistan's chaos will only spread." Recent
political developments, such as the failed Taliban offensive in the north,
international sanctions on the Taliban, doubts in Pakistan about its
Islamist-centered Afghan policy, the military coup in Pakistan, intra-Afghan
initiatives toward a Grand Assembly meeting, and other regional powers'
concerns about the Taliban have opened the door for America to make an
informed, diplomatic push on Afghanistan. But real progress toward ending
the Afghan nightmare will be possible only if the United States creates a
policy more congruent with American interests in Afghanistan and the
surrounding region. A promising opportunity for a peaceful settlement of the
Afghan conflict is emerging out of the Taliban's decline. The United States
should seize it.