Taleban victory worries the world

By Brahma Chellaney

NEW DELHI (JP): As Afghanistan's gun-toting Taleban extremists attempt to consolidate their tenuous hold over Kabul, carrying out summary executions, banishing women from the work force and herding men into mosques for prayers while they battle the ousted government's forces not far from the Afghan capital, some powers have watched with concealed glee and complaisance the rise of the new Islamic militant force in Asia's most strategically located country. The ascension of the Taleban, with its mix of tribal medievalist and revolutionary Maoist style dogma, opens a new chapter in the 16-year-old Afghan civil, war rooted in foreign intervention.

Afghanistan, which suffered more than any other country during the Cold War, was the scene of a vicious proxy war between the East and the West. The victorious East's surrogates, who eventually took control of Kabul under Burhanuddin Rabbani's leadership in April 1992, only prolonged the bloodletting by fighting among themselves over the power booty.

Kabul's takeover in late September by a force made up of gun- worshiping religious ideologues, pillaging mercenaries and country bumpkins thriving on funding from the heroin trade has sparked a fresh renewal of the civil war.

The Taleban's two-year rule, which involved extortion, drug trafficking and tribal "justice" in Kandahar, southeastern Afghanistan, bodes ill for Kabul, a city teeming with widows, amputees and orphaned children. The Taleban, led by the one-eyed Mullah Mohammed Omar, is seen by some analysts as a religious version of the nihilistic Khmer Rouge.

The Taleban's political brand of Sunni Islam, rooted in the Deobandi religious school of India, can never succeed in multi- ethnic Afghanistan. A society which took the lead during the 1920s in casting off the women's veil finds itself under assault from ultra-orthodox Pashtun yokels determined to cleanse it of its "evils".

With the key Afghan warlords Ahmad Shah Masood, the "Lion of Panjshir Valley", the Uzbekistan-backed Abdul Rashid Dostum and Shiite Karim Khalilli now unitedly confronting the new Kabul rulers, the Taleban's ability to impose its authority on all of Afghanistan appears questionable, even with increased Pakistani military assistance.

As the Soviets discovered during their decade-long military intervention in Afghanistan, a Kabul rule without effective control over the vital supply routes means a lot of trouble. The challenge for the Taleban is not only to stave off Masood's offensive on Kabul, but capture areas like the Panjshir Valley, which the Red Army failed to seize.

The reaction of some countries indicates that they view the Taleban regime as a better alternative to the Rabbani government. This view apparently springs from a sense of betrayal and the United States' cold war with Iran.

Within months of taking power, the Rabbani regime began asserting its independence. Seeking to protect Afghan interests, it distanced itself from Pakistan (which had served as the guerrilla base for many of its leaders), befriended Iran and cooperated with its ex-enemy, Russia. It also built such close ties with Pakistan's archrival, India, that Islamabad suspected it was receiving Indian military aid.

Although a Tajik Islamist himself, Rabbani sanctioned joint border operations with Russian forces to contain Tajikistan's Islamic insurgents and deny them sanctuary on Afghan territory. Stung by the Rabbani team's perfidy, Washington took interest in the Taleban.

Central Asia's complex oil-pipeline politics -- including NATO's interest in reducing the newly independent region's dependence on Russia for its oil exports and Pakistan's own ambitions to serve as a trade route -- also spawned an interest in a strong alternative to Rabbani's faction-ridden government.

The lead players in the latest "great game", with their shortsighted preference for the Taleban, are rearing new forces of terrorism that will come back to haunt them. They are also stoking the global forces of political Islam with statements such as one made by Washington recently that it "has never said that secularism is something that we feel must continue for us to have a relationship with Turkey." Turkey, the bastion of secularism in the Moslem world, is increasingly being pressured by its Islamists, led by Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, to change.

The "great game" actors have obviously not learned the lessons of the unintended consequences of their past covert actions in Afghanistan, where the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) alone funneled more than US$5 billion worth of arms into the region. The conduit for such supplies, the Pakistan military's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), merrily diverted huge quantities of the arms to the black market and to Indian militants in Punjab, Kashmir and the northeast, according to international evidence.

The underground trade in arms flourished so widely that tiny Qatar bought Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, according to the United States, "without authorization". These were the missiles that turned the tide against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The terrorism value of the Stingers -- evident from the two commercial Afghan airliners brought down in the mid-1980s -- prompted the CIA to launch a "buy-back" operation after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The foreign players are already paying a price for their past interventionist roles in Afghanistan. The ambush-killing of two CIA officials outside Washington in 1993, the subsequent World Trade Center bombing in New York and the more recent two truck bombings of American facilities in Saudi Arabia have been linked to Afghan war veterans. They include Pakistanis, Saudis, Egyptians, Yemenis, Algerians, Palestinians, Jordanians, Sudanese and Filipinos.

Many of these extremists, trained and armed by Western taxpayers, have returned to their homelands to wage terror campaigns against governments they see as tainted by western influence. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was assassinated by such elements.

The Taleban, fattened by the soaring profits from the heroin trade, has contributed to this pool of international terrorists. In alliance with the ISI, it has fostered narco-terrorism, jointly shipping heroin to Western destinations and splitting profits, according to diplomatic observers.

The Taleban's religious face cannot mask the way it turned Kandahar Airport into a heroin-for-arms center after its 1994 military triumphs in southern Afghanistan brought some of the world's best poppy fields under its control.

Some of the very countries whose citizens have fallen prey to this heroin trafficking seem pleased that the Taleban has dislodged from Kabul those that these nations had earlier hailed as the "mujahideen", or holy warriors. If the Taleban succeeds in retaining its hold on Kabul or even Kandahar, it will not take long for this anti-modern cult to turn overtly anti-west.

The ramifications of the Taleban's ascension for Asian security will depend on the organization's ability to consolidate its power base, its readiness to export terrorism and the impact it might have on the five ex-Soviet Moslem republics in Central Asia. Currently, the northern Afghans are controlled by Dostum and Masood serves as a security buffer between the Taleban and Central Asia.

Whatever its political future, the Taleban is likely to swell the ranks of Afghan war alumni waging international terrorism.

The writer is Professor of Security Studies at the Center for Policy Research, an independent think tank in New Delhi.

Window: If the Taleban succeeds in retaining its hold on Kabul or even Kandahar, it will not take long for this anti-modern cult to turn overtly anti-West.