The Taliban's rise

Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid; Yale University Press, London, 2000; pages 274, $27.50.

THE Taliban phenomenon should be a matter of riveting interest to people in India. However as a matter of fact, Indians barely notice it, except in exceptional circumstances such as at the time of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. Even then we fail to draw the right conclusions.

At a dinner party during those harrowing days, when it was still unclear whether or not the threatened destruction of the Buddha statues had been carried out, I remarked with deliberate loudness on the parallels it had with the destruction of the Babri Masjid. The angry, bitter reaction of the assembled guests, disconcerting at the time, suggested that the apparent lack of interest in the Taliban was indicative of a neurotic avoidance, an active repression of something that causes deep anxiety.

And so it should. The Taliban are not only at our doorstep, they are, in important respects, us. They are not only the enemy that we must confront but also our destiny, that which we may become - unless we are very, very careful. Every day brings news from the Kashmir valley about some militant outfit or the other, some violent spin-off from the Afghan conflict, tormenting the floundering, guilty giant that is India. Every day brings news also of the fulminations and worse of the Hindu Taliban and their mullahs, Ashok Singhal and Bal Thackeray, who thereby confer credibility and legitimacy on their Islamic counterparts. But, for all the neuroses, the paranoia and the avoidance that characterise the media representation of the Taliban, hard facts about them have been rather scarce. Few journalists venture into the bitter civil war that is contemporary Afghanistan, and even those that do are far from welcome, particularly in the eyes of a regime that is deeply suspicious and secretive.

Ahmed Rashid has been covering Afghanistan for the Far Eastern Economic Review for the last 16 years. In fact, that trouble-torn part of the world has been his journalistic beat for the past 21 years. He has written other books in the interim - on the break-up of the Soviet Union, and so on - but all this while he has been accumulating material for the biggest story of them all, the Taliban.

The book under review, Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia, is the fruit of that hard-earned mastery. He was in Kandahar in 1979 when the first Soviet tanks rolled in; he saw the tanks burst into the presidential palace in Kabul in 1992; he witnessed, and wrote a memorable account of, one of the first public executions - in a football stadium, to packed stands...

Rashid is quick to disavow any valour, confessing that he mostly ducked when the bullets were flying, but without his dogged courage this book would not have been possible. And yet, the story he has to tell - of the rise and rise of the Taliban, first with the connivance and approval of the United States, and then despite some displeasure because of the Taliban's unwillingness to hand over Osama bin Laden to the mercies of the U.S. justice system; the continued support of the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) to the Taliban, despite international disapproval, and despite the desperate pleas of the Pakistani state itself - is even more remarkable than the story of how he comes to be telling the story.

Of course, if the bulk of the media are to be believed, there is no story to tell. The Taliban are merely the most extreme confirmation of the "clash of civilisations" thesis, wherein the essence of Islam is identified with its most fanatical fringes. The mysterious emergence of the Taliban in 1994 is thereby removed from the realm of history and human doing. Rashid's book goes a long way towards clearing that "mystery" and revealing the entirely human motives, the callous and myopic greed on the part of various players - not merely the Afghan warlords but also the great powers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, to say nothing of Pakistan - that has produced the monster that now seems to have grown beyond the control of its makers. For obvious reasons, the "essence of Islam" explanation has a ready constituency in India, particularly among those who angrily reject the parallels between the Bamiyan Buddhas and the Babri Masjid.

The period in Afghanistan between the deposition of King Zahir Shah in 1973 and the Soviet installation of Babrak Karmal in 1979 is one in which there was considerable jockeying for influence on the part of the indigenous and international warlords. However, after the Soviet Army moved in, thereby changing the nature of the game, the U.S. promptly rallied the tribal chieftains. It bankrolled them, supplied them with arms and munitions worth billions of dollars, and the fighting moved into a new dimension altogether. These were the Mujahideen, the fractious chieftains who were based in refugee camps in Rawalpindi and who, deploying their guerilla fighters over a period of something over a decade, brought the Soviet Army to its knees. The Russians had no option but to leave, and there is reason to believe that the unlikely tribal chieftains might have been the proximate cause for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

However, the departure of the Soviets had several effects. One of these was that the U.S. promptly lost interest in the Mujahideen, those "valiant soldiers" of the U.S.' proxy war. The various tribal warlords were left to fight it out over their devastated country, with all the high-tech weaponry that the U.S. had so thoughtfully provided. The fighting moved all over the country, up and down, north and south, east and west. The various tribal groups - the Pashtuns, the Tajiks, the Hazaras and so on - fought each other indecisively in a civil war that looked as if it would never end. First Burhanuddin Rabbani was in control of Kabul, then Gulbuddin Hekmatyar shelled it into rubble, and entered in triumph into the ruined city. After that came the turn of other people to start shelling whatever little remained. This is an intricate, sordid story, and Rashid tells it in considerable detail, so that one can actually sense the violent confusion in which the Taliban first appeared - appeared like saviours, storming across the country, scattering all opposition, seemingly invincible, until they too seemed to get bogged down in an unending civil war.

So, where did they come from? During the long years of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, several hundred thousand Afghan refugees had fled into Pakistan, into refugee camps. The only education available to the generation that was born and came to maturity in these camps was in the madrassas that had been set up by various fundamentalist groups. Here a displaced generation imbibed some basic Islamic instruction - but most of what it imbibed was a sense of injury, of abandonment: "These boys were what the war had thrown up like the sea's surrender on the beach of history... They had no memories of the past, no plans for the future... They were literally the orphans of the war, the rootless and the restless... They admired war because it was the only occupation they could possibly adapt to. Their simple belief in a messianic, puritan Islam which had been drummed into them by simple village mullahs was the only prop they could hold on to and which gave their lives some meaning. Untrained for anything... they were... Afghanistan's lumpen proletariat... these boys had lived rough, tough lives. They had simply never known the company of women." Tragic byproducts of a futile war, these were savage louts, possessed only of their simple-minded dogmatic certainties, trained to deal with demurral, doubt and dissent in only one brutal fashion. Sounds familiar?

IT would be fair to say that the U.S. is not now the major backer of the Taliban, though its huge and undiscriminating, even immoral, support for the Mujahideen might be said to have, in one way or another, "produced" the Taliban. For the record, the U.S. initially welcomed the Taliban, and while official support has now dried up, they might still be the beneficiaries of some murky Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funding. Rashid cites Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. National Security Adviser, on the U.S. view of the trade-off: "What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" Just as half a million dead Iraqi children was a price that Madeleine Albright was willing to pay for assuaging the U.S.' hurt pride, so was the destruction of Afghanistan an acceptable bargain for the U.S. But the Taliban's chief backers today are Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The U.S. has been content to try and use the Taliban, and has been more than willing to look the other way in respect of their barbaric practices, particularly in respect of women. And when the pressure from U.S. feminist lobbies became too strong, the U.S. have even expressed disapproval.

But the thing that really drives the Afghan conflict is the struggle over the oil in Central Asia. The concern with "freedom", "human rights" and so on is, as always, cosmetic. Rashid tells the cynical underlying story in meticulous, undeniable detail. It is the corporate lust for profit that drives the contest regarding who will lay and control the pipelines that will bring the Central Asian oil and gas reserves within the reach of the energy-hungry markets of the world. The two biggest players are the U.S. company Unocal and, somewhat oddly, the Argentinian Bridas. Although it has swirled up and down, and across and within, the volatile states of Central Asia, now drawing in one country, now another, now threatening to bypass one altogether by proposing an alternative pipeline route, then getting bogged down in another diplomatic quagmire, "the new Great Game", as Rashid has aptly called it, can be expected to run and run. Meanwhile the Afghans, hungry and homeless, freezing in the winter, scorched in the summer, have no option but to resign themselves to endless war, and pray to the All-Merciful that one of these days peace too becomes profitable.

There are of course many minor players with limited agendas - reports are that even India's Reliance has pipeline ambitions - but there is one other major player with an independent, powerful agenda that it is very important for us to understand: Pakistan's ISI. The ISI grew enormously in the 1980s, handling the billions of dollars that the U.S. poured into the jehad against the Evil Empire of that time. Now, while official U.S. support for the Mujahedin and their Taliban successors has dried up, the ISI has accumulated the resources and the apparatus to operate independently - independently even of the Pakistani state, it would appear. Rashid gives a detailed description of the so-called Afghan Transit Trade: this is the facility that land-locked Afghanistan is afforded by Pakistan, just as India affords it to Nepal. However, this "transit trade" has become a huge smuggling operation that provides the ISI and its Taliban clients with a virtually inexhaustible supply of money. It also, incidentally, puts into perspective the idealistic, Islamic pretensions of the Taliban ideologues. The ISI support for the Taliban is also in pursuit of its long-term objective of harassing and bleeding India - one in which it seems to be succeeding.

However, the growing symbiosis between the ISI and the Taliban is also doing terrible things to Pakistan. The influence of the Islamic fundamentalist factions is growing exponentially. The spread of the heroin-and-Kalashnikov culture, as it is called, threatens to smother Pakistani civil society. And the ability of the state to deal with it is seriously compromised because the state itself has been heavily infiltrated by fundamentalist elements. There is also the ability of the mafia actually to use their enormous revenues to buy out any opposition. The underground economy of Pakistan was estimated to have grown to 51 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 1996 - the situation could only have got worse since then. Rashid is unambiguous when he says that the greatest victim of the ISI's Taliban policy is Pakistan itself. The greed of the Pakistani elites, who are unable to see beyond their short-term ideological and monetary interests, is already wreaking havoc in the lives of ordinary Pakistani citizens, to say nothing of the Afghans, or even the hapless citizens of the Kashmir Valley. But, minus the possible hope of democracy, it is difficult for sober observers of the scene to visualise any future other than one in which Pakistan sinks into a morass of desperate violence which while it is, at one level, of its own making, will inevitably engulf its neighbours. Ahmed Rashid's invaluable book on the Taliban is also, ironically, a guide to that bleak future.