Prospects for a post-Taliban Afghanistan

By Paul Burton, South Asian editor, Jane's Sentinel

Well-intentioned calls for a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan are certainly not without their merits, but failure to establish an administration reflective of the country's diverse ethnic groupings could merely fragment Afghanistan beyond repair and stymie reconstruction efforts. There is a danger of simply replicating the conditions that allowed the Taliban to sweep the country.

It will constitute a supreme incongruity if the coalition of states that launch military action against the Taliban do not invest as much effort in providing Afghanistan's embattled population with a future free from the threat of war, hunger and premature death.

Although long-term reconstruction is of pivotal importance in eradicating future generations of terrorists, simply pumping Afghanistan full of dollars will be an exercise in futility if the mechanisms for its effective dispersal are not established.

The farcical results of the West's clamour to stimulate the Russian Federation's economy in the early 1990s demonstrated that the provision of investment monies is not an end in itself. Vast amounts of misdirected aid actually exacerbated existing problems in Russia by establishing a self-interested oligarchy keen to preserve assets for itself.

It now appears certain that any effort to regenerate Afghanistan is predicated upon the removal of the Taliban, and the terrorist attacks upon New York and Washington have given the US a perfect opportunity to legitimise its plan to do just that (which existed well before 11 September).

However, in forming a strategy for an Afghanistan devoid of the Taliban, President Bush et al must not disregard the roots of the struggle between the movement and the United Front (UF). Failure to do so would merely see the clock turn back to 1989 and create the conditions for a Taliban Mark II.

This bitter five-year struggle has served to awaken and exploit ethnic tension between the majority, Sunni practising Pashtuns – from which the Taliban draw most of their support – and the minority Tajik, Uzbek, Turkmen and Shi'a Hazara groupings that are littered around the northern and western provinces.

Take the sectarian persecution of the Shi'a Hazaras. Unprecedented in Afghan history, this development can be attributed to the Taliban's fantastic interpretation of Islam that presupposes the universal superiority of their version over all others – Mullah Omar's version of being "with us or against us". Such is the brutality with which this suppression has been undertaken (particularly in areas such as Bamiyan) that it instigated a cycle of equally violent revenge attacks by Shi'a forces against Sunni communities.

The potential for the creation of a Northern Ireland-style scenario in areas of Shi'a/Sunni equity is now a very real one, as the next generation are brought up amid a climate of hatred and mutual mistrust. An ill-conceived dispersal of US aid dollars in this region is merely likely to facilitate a deeper level of carnage prompted by the purchase of more sophisticated weaponry.

And this is just one region of about four million people (20 per cent of Afghanistan's total population). The ethnic patchwork at play in Afghanistan comfortably dwarfs that of Northern Ireland, and is also represented by the myriad of regional commands lumped together under the banner of the UF, with whom the US should be wary of forming a long-term alliance.

While the UF is united by a desire to annihilate the Taliban, it is otherwise inappropriately named – particularly in the aftermath of the assassination of its talismanic leader, Ahmadshah Massoud. Northeastern ethnic Tajiks led by Massoud's successor, Mukhammed Fakhim, fight in Badakhshan, while western Tajiks from Herat rally around Ismail Khan. Meanwhile, Uzbek followers of the mercurial Abdul Rashid Dostam are engaged in a struggle for Mazar-i-Sharif, and Hazaras rally around Karim Khalili in central areas. United the movement most certainly is not.

Should this fragmented group of battle-hardened fighters contribute to the overthrow of the Taliban they are going to want recompense. This could be in terms of representation within a new political administration and any unified armed force. The simple inclusion of erstwhile leader Burhanuddin Rabbani within a UN-sponsored coalition will not satisfy the power-thirsty UF leaders, each of whom can be expected to claim that his role was pivotal.

The isolation of just one component of the UF in the post-Taliban landscape could herald a gradual reintroduction of the bloody aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. This period was characterised by a five-year struggle for supremacy by a multitude of warlords originating from the dissolved mujahideen that saw off the Soviet Union.

Presuming that a coalition reflective of the ethnic diversity of the UF is formed, what of the majority Pashtuns? Given that marginalising 40 per cent of the country is not an option, there has to be a contingency for giving this group representation at a national level. Failure to do so will herald even closer ties with their Pakistani neighbours, isolation from the north of the country and susceptibility to another wave of Talibanesque mobilisation.

Deepening ethnic animosities complicate the already Herculean task of cobbling together any durable national government in Kabul, be it the ‘broad-based’ coalition that both the UN and major interested powers have defined as the preferred outcome or some form of looser quasi-federal arrangement. The bleak alternative may be a de facto partition of the country between a southern ‘Pashtunistan' and a northern minority confederation punctuated by continuing low-level war.

If Afghanistan is to stand even the slightest chance of being anything other than a failed state, the leaders of those states keen to remove the Taliban will be required to demonstrate a level of prescience thus far absent from their strategy.