AFGHANISTAN TRIBAL AND RACIAL WARFARE
Inside Track OnWorld News
By International Syndicated Columnist & Broadcaster Eric Margolis
<emargolis@lglobal.com>
VENGENCE OF TALIBAN by Eric Margolis October 6, 1996
STRASBOURG, FRANCE -When fighters of the Taliban movement stormed Kabullast week, the first thing they did was to force their way into the UN compoundwhere the former Afghan communist dictator, Najibullah, his brother, andthree henchmen had been sheltered since 1992.
Najibullah and the other communists were beaten, shot, and then hanged indowntown Kabul. The delicate sensibilities of western observers and theworld media were deeply offended.
Mine were not. Having covered the war in Afghanistan, I vividly recall howNajibullah and his KhAD secret police, and their KGB masters, murdered tensof thousands of political opponents and mujihadin by having them slowlyfrozen in special refrigerators, burned with gasoline, electrocuted, eyesgouged out, flayed, thrown into tubs of acid, or buried alive.
When the Afghan mujihadin drove the Soviet Red Army out of Afghanistan in1989 after a decade of war, Moscow's former satrap, Najibullah was leftbehind to defend Kabul. He managed to hold on, with secret help from Russiaand India, until a coalition of mujihadin groups finally took Kabul in April,1992. Since then, the original seven mujihadin groups who had defeated theSoviet invaders, turned on each other in a bloody civil war costing 30,000lives.
I watched in dismay as mujihadin leaders, whom I had known, respected andadmired, turned their guns on one another, destroying what little of Afghanistanwas left after Soviet ferocity. The war, and a special KGB strategy of stirringup internal tensions, furiously inflamed Afghanistan's chronic ethnic, religious,tribal and regional disputes. The egos and mutual hatred of the mujihadinleaders ran unchecked.
Two years ago, a mysterious movement called Taliban arose in Afghan refugeescamps inside Pakistan,in the ancient city Peshawar, and around the KhyberPass. Students at Islamic seminaries (`Taliban' means seminarians) suddenlytook up arms, that someone included tanks and a few jet fighters, marchednorth, and seized five Afghan provinces, including the major cities of Heratand Kandahar. The pious seminarians advanced into battle, waving Koransin one hand, and firing AK-47's with the other.
Taliban was merely the latest manifestation of a long Northwest Frontiertradition of armies of wild Pathan tribesmen, inflamed by religious zeal,suddenly appearing from nowhere. In the past hundred years, Peshawar wasalmost twice overrun, first by a dervish army led by that notorious scourgeof Victorian England, the `Mad Mullah,and later, by one of my favorite frontiermessiahs, `the Fakir of Ipi.'
While the Holy Koranguided Taliban,the `boys' from ISI- agents of Pakistan'scrack intelligence service- seem to have provided more secular assistanceby supplying the studentswith arms and advisors. Seminarians don't usuallykeep tanks and warplanes in their cells. Islamabad denies such involvement,but it's clear, at least to me, that Pakistan became rightly fed up withits former mujihadin protegees, and unleashed Taliban to end the civil warthat was destroying Afghanistan and allowing its hostile neighbors - India,Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Iran, and Russia - to increasingly meddle in thecivil war.
On 26 September,Taliban took Kabul. The regime of Tajik leader, Prof. Rabbani,fled north to the Panshir Valley. The other main mujihadin leader, GulbadinHekmatyar, also fled. Taliban immediately imposed medieval Islamic law onKabul, and consolidated its rule over the 70% of Afghanistan it currentlycontrols.
Taliban are extreme Islamic fundamentalists. Their bellicosity and narrow-mindedpiety shocks educated Afghans and Pakistanis. But anything seems betterthan the bloody civil war - even a Taliban peace. . .
Most Taliban are ethnic Pathans, fierce warrior tribesmen from south ofthe Hindu Kush, who comprise half of Afghanistan's population. In the northeastare Tajiks, led by the fleeing Rabbani. In the northwest, the Uzbeks ofwarlord Rashid Dustam. Both Rabbani and Dustam are being armed and supportedby Russia, India, and the communist regimes of neighboring Uzbekistan, Tajikistan(where Russia has 25,000 troops) and Turkmenistan. Moscow, WashingtonandNew Delhifear the advance of political Islam will thwart their designs todominate resource-rich Central Asia. So the civil war promises to drag on.
Kabul's fall is also a reverse for Iran, which is trying to expand influencein Central Asia by funnelling its mineral and agricultural exports westwardto the Gulf. By backing the Rabbani regime, and stirring the Afghan pot,Iran kept the shorter,north-south route from the Uzbek capital, Tashkent,via Termez-Salang-Kabul-to the Arabian Sea port of Karachi, closed.
This blocked Iran's rival, Pakistan, from expanding its influence northto Central Asia. But last week,Taliban took the highly strategic SalangTunnel, opening the route south from Tashkent to Karachi.
Taliban has temporarily thwarted a joint Russian-Indian plan to subvertAfghanistan, using it as a base to first destabilize, then dismember Pakistan.Ten years ago, Pakistan' late President, Zia ul-Haq, predicted to me thatwhile the Russians might temporarily retreat from Afghanistan, they wouldsurely return, and keep pushing south to the Arabian Sea- even if it tookanother century.
The Russians have come back. But their latest schemes have just been stymiedby a bunch of gun-toting religious students and, once again,by the `boys'from ISI.
Copywrite Eric Margolis, October 1996
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