Bin Laden and the Taliban … Pakistan and America

Second in a series

The key to current problems in Afghanistan – Osama bin Laden, terrorist camps and the Taliban themselves – lies in Pakistan. Stop Pakistani aid to the Taliban, and that regime will quickly crumble. With the Taliban collapse will come the end of protection for Osama, his (mostly non-Afghan) associates, and the terrorist training camps. It is very likely that Afghan opposition groups, once free of the Taliban, can and will put an end to Osama and other unwanted visitors.

First, however, all Pakistan aid to the Taliban must be stopped. And make no mistake: Despite Pakistani denials – flat lies for the past six years – that support has been massive in terms of men, oil, arms, and money. Without it the Taliban could never have extended control beyond their small ethnic base (the southern provinces of Uruzgan, Kandahar and Helmand). Why have the Pakistanis done so much to create and sustain this regime? What have they been trying to accomplish?

Pakistan has four concerns vis a vis Afghanistan:

1. The addition of “strategic depth” (Pakistan military phrase) to counter the sheer geographical immensity of archenemy India. Pakistani military strategists remark on how the vastness of the USSR enabled the Soviets to retreat, find their feet, and finally rally to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II. For these Islamabad strategists, Afghanistan is Pakistan’s Siberia.

2. Control over future trade routes between newly independent Central Asia and the rest of the world. Pakistan wants to be the main beneficiary of this trade which, if Karachi is to be its seaport, must run overland via Afghanistan. Hence its cooperation with the Taliban in plans several years ago to build an oil pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and onwards into Pakistan and the Karachi docks.

3. Enhanced control over the Tribal Areas of Pakistan. This vestige of British rule leaves Islamabad without firm authority in a series of quasi-autonomous “agencies” along its border with Afghanistan. (Hence, for instance, the need to be guarded by the Khyber Rifles when going by land from Peshawar to the Afghan border.) An uncooperative Afghan government, such as existed during the Prime Ministry of Mohammed Daoud (1953-1963), estranges these Pakistan border areas even further by encouraging tribal independence or even union with Afghanistan.

4. Age-old fear of invasion from the Northwest. This dynamic dates back millennia. Time and again, conquerors have descended from Central Asia onto the Indian sub-continent. Always they have come way of Afghanistan and what now is Pakistan.

These are the relevant “national interests” to which Gen. Musharraf has alluded, albeit elliptically, in several interviews this past week.

Pakistan has pursued these interests with special vigor and opportunism ever since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. It did so during the 1980s with American money meant for the Afghan Resistance. Much of that money got to the Resistance, but the distribution by Pakistan was extremely selective. Pakistan chose as its Afghan champion a ruthless Islamist named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who became, because the Pakistanis said so, the darling of our CIA as well.

Without American/Pakistani support, Hekmatyar (a Pushtun from Kunduz province without any Pushtun homeland base of support or credibility) would have counted for little. As it was, however, he and his Pakistani mentors/supporters eliminated, frequently by assassination, much of the moderate Afghan Resistance leadership. We stood by and told the Pakistanis what fine chaps they were for helping us hit the Russians where it hurt. Pakistan did, of course, play an essential and constructive role in that war, BUT it also made provisions for its own future national interests. These interests, we know realize all too well, are frequently in conflict with our own. At the time, however, we either didn’t know or didn’t care.

Hekmatyar self-destructed soon after the Resistance took Kabul (1992). Suddenly – gasp! – Pakistan was left without an Afghan champion. Its main intelligence agency, the Inter Services Institute (ISI) which had handled Pakistan (and American) support in the anti-Soviet war and which had backed Hekmatyar, was already much influenced by Pakistani Islamist parties. As such, ISI moved quickly to shift its focus and assistance to a newly emergent vigilante group that called itself “religious students” – the Taliban. This new force, many of whose leaders had been trained in Islamist “colleges” (madrassas) located in Pakistan, soon became Pakistan’s new Afghan champion. Its success since the mid-1990s has been increasingly a result of concrete Pakistani support.

Without that support from Pakistan, the Taliban will shrink, shrivel, and finally cease to exist. And without the Taliban, there’ll be no home for Osama and the terrorists.

Gen. Musharraf is now said to be “on board” the anti-terrorist coalition. Nine of 10 Afghans don’t believe him. Their distrust – and the skepticism of this writer – is based not only on Musharraf’s long-standing adherence to above-stated Pakistani “national interests.” It is also based on the fact, hard for Americans to appreciate, that the Pakistani intelligence services (most notably ISI) have become fiefdoms largely beyond the control of central authority. Translation: Even if Musharraf sincerely agrees to end aid to the Taliban, can he impose his will on ISI?

As such, U.S. policy toward Pakistan must do two things at once: 1) Make sure that Musharraf really means to end Taliban aid; 2) Empower him to do so in the face of likely defiance from ISI. Removal of sanctions has clearly helped with his empowerment. But how far has he actually gone in cutting aid to the Taliban?

And how fully can he prove it – not only to American officials with long, cozy ties to the Pakistan government, but also to skeptics who, while admiring 1980s Pakistani support of the Afghan Resistance against the Soviets, know first-hand how Pakistan has helped wreck Afghanistan afterward?

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has been involved with Afghanistan for 30 years.