Afghan's 'great game' goes on as Teleban set to move again

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The snows are melting in the passes of Afghanistan, and the fundamentalist Taleban militia who seized Kabul last September will soon be moving north to complete their conquest of the country. Another chapter of the Great Game is closing -- which means that the next is beginning.

The struggle to control the strategic crossroads of Afghanistan was first called the Great Game in the 19th century, when the British in India played it against Russians encroaching from the north. Now the British are gone, but the same patterns of intervention and alliances continue.

The next round of the game involves a realignment of the alliances that came together after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979: the U.S., Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia on one side, India, Russia and Iran on the other. But this time, the fragile new countries of Central Asia may be dragged into the chaos as well.

All this is far beyond the ken of the ragged soldiers of the Taleban, a force of only ten thousand mostly illiterate young men who have captured three-quarters of Afghanistan since late 1994.

All they know is that they obey Mohammed Omar Akhund (now known as 'King of the Believers'), a senior mullah from Kandahar, now in his late thirties, who lost an eye fighting the Russians. And all the rest of the world notices is that they are religious fanatics of the most radically conservative kind.

In areas captured by the Taleban, trees are festooned with smashed TV sets strung together with miles of magnetic tape torn from audio and video cassettes. Men are compelled to grow beards, and music, films, and even kite-flying are banned as un-Islamic. Women are not allowed to work, or even to appear in the street without wearing a tent-like garment called a burqa. All schools for girls have been closed down.

The blind extremism of the Taleban has provoked strong criticism in Iran, where Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati accused them last year of "defaming Islam" because of their "fossilized policies". But they know no better: what they are actually doing is re-creating the harsh life they knew in the refugee camps of north-west Pakistan, which is where most of them grew up.

In the camps there was no entertainment, and no education even for boys except the rote learning of large parts of the Koran in Arabic, a language none of them understand. So it now makes perfect sense to them even to ban the use of paper bags. After all, the recycled paper might once had Arabic writing on it, in which case throwing it away would be an insult to the Holy Koran.

In the same way, the Taleban attitude towards women is driven not so much by Islam as by the traditions of the villages and small towns of southern, Pashto-speaking Afghanistan, where women are little more than house-slaves. The only thing that can be said in the Taleban's favor is that they do bring a kind of order to the areas they have conquered.

So why are they so generously supported by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States? Between the money the Taleban get from their foreign supporters and the money they earn from exporting heroin (the Afghan opium crop has tripled in the past four years, and now accounts for half of global production), they hardly ever have to fight as they advance. They just bribe the opposition commanders into quitting.

For Pakistan, the reason to back the Taleban is strategic. The powerful Inter-Service Intelligence agency (ISI) wants to install a friendly and subservient government in Kabul, and for that purpose it regards the Pashto tribes of the south as more amenable than the Tajiks and Uzbeks of the north, who have strong ties with the republics of former Soviet Central Asia.

For Washington and Riyadh, the logic in backing the Taleban is even simpler: anything that is bad for Iran, they reason, is good for the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. The Taleban follow the Sunni path of Islam, not the Shia, so they are virulently hostile to Shia Iran.

The line-up on the other side is even simpler to explain. Iran fears the victimization of Afghanistan's Shia minority and the extension of Pakistan's power to its own frontier. Russia fears the destabilization of Central Asia. India fears that bored Taleban, after victory in Afghanistan, will find a new cause to fight for in the predominantly Muslim Indian state of Kashmir.

There is virtually no chance that the Taleban can be stopped from rolling over the nine northern provinces of Afghanistan that they do not already control in the next month or so. The alliance between Uzbek general Abdul Rashid Dostum and Tajik militia leader Ahmad Shah Masood has almost entirely broken down, and the morale of their forces verges on hopeless.

That's why Dostum's forces did the unthinkable in January and blew the bridges south of the Salang tunnel, for 30 years the only link between Kabul and the northern provinces in wintertime. But as soon as spring re-opens the old royal road over the Hindu Kush, the Taleban will be on him again, and he doesn't have a prayer.

The question is what happens next. The ethnic groups are the same on both sides of the frontier: Masood's fighter and transport planes are already operating out of Tajikstan, and both Russia and Iran are helping Dostam with money and arms.

There is little likelihood that the fighting will stop when the Taleban close up to the northern frontier with Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Even if they do not try to push any further, their brand of Islam and their language make them unwelcome interlopers in the north, and their intolerance will soon stimulate local resistance.

In these circumstances, the best that can be expected is a continuing low-level conflict across Afghanistan's northern border. The worst is a great deal worse: the toppling of all Central Asia into the kind of chaos that has swept both the Caucasus and the Balkans in the past five years. It's hard to see how that can benefit either the U.S. or Pakistan.