The Use and Abuse of a Buffer State Part II
by CParenti
A Soviet soldier in Afghanistan in 1988.
In Part One of Christian Parenti’s in-depth examination of Afghanistan (The Advocate, December 2008), the author argues that the country was used as a trampoline for the George W. Bush administration to jump into Iraq. In the process, Parenti asserts, Afghanistan was made to serve as an ideological “buffer state,” or the “seemingly ‘legitimate’ defensive war that politically buffers the illegitimate, clearly illegal one in Iraq.”
In Part Two of Parenti’s analysis, which follows below, he traces the contours of Afghanistan’s tortured modern history, and asks where the country may be headed as the first decade of a new century comes to a close.
If there is a rural-urban cleavage in Afghan society (Dupree’s “mud curtain”), there is also an ethnic divide, the main axis of which separates the north from the south. In the north, the dominant groups are the Persian-speaking Tajiks and Hazaras and the Turkic-speaking Uzbeks. Afghanistan’s “majority minority” are the Pashtun, who constitute 40% of the population and speak Pashto, or Pashtun. They dominate the south of the country and form the social base of the Taliban. The Taliban are as much an ethnic movement as a religious movement, pitting the Pashtun against the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and others.
In Afghanistan, Pashtuns have always been the largest ethnic group and they have ruled the country ever since its creation in 1749. President Karzai is but the latest in a long unbroken line of ruling Pashtuns, though most Pashtun see his government as Tajik-dominated.
There are also about 26 million Pashtun people living in Pakistan, and this Pakistani link fuels the ethnic conflicts in Afghanistan. The Pashtun nation is essentially divided between the two states. The groundwork for trouble was laid in 1893, when Afghanistan was separated from British India by the Durand Line, drawn up by Mortimer Durand and forced upon Abdur Rahman Khan, the otherwise “Iron Emir” of Afghanistan. The Durand Line’s main political impact was to divide “Pashtunistan” and thus give it an imaginary life in the minds of the Pashtun nationalists.
While the Afghan Pashtun have always been the ruling ethnicity, in Pakistan they are a large, poor, restive minority, making up about 16% of the population. Herein lies the problem: the last thing Pakistan wants is for the Pashtun minority within its borders to link up with, or become the tool of, a strong neighboring Afghanistan ruled by Pashtuns.
Pakistan also wants Afghanistan to remain weak so as to provide “strategic depth,” or fall-back room, in case of a major land war with India. Pakistan also dominates Afghan consumer markets; it receives water from the undammed Kabul and Kunar rivers; and Pakistan wants a compliant Afghanistan so that Pakistani business interests can use it as a transit corridor into Central Asia.
Since the early 1970s Pakistan has funded Pashtun insurgents in Afghanistan, including Hekmatyar, head of Hezb-i-Islami, which has recently been allied with the resurgent Taliban. With the Afghan communist coup of 1978 and the Soviet invasion of 1979, Pakistan’s Pashtun problem became Kabul’s jihad problem. When the Taliban eventually evicted the warring mujahideen factions from Kabul in 1996, Pakistan backed the Taliban.
With the attacks of 9/11, many observers assumed that General Pervez Musharraf would be forced to turn against the Taliban and support the United States against them. And that’s just what Musharraf has pretended to do. The benefits Musharraf has received as a close US ally include: an end to the sanctions that had been imposed by President Clinton after Islamabad’s 1998 nuclear tests; relief from some of Pakistan’s $38 billion international debt; more loans from international financial agencies; a legitimation of his putsch-ist government; and a closer relationship with Washington to balance against.
But why give up the traditional agenda of destabilizing and controlling Afghanistan just to cozy up to Washington? Why not do both at once? That’s just what Musharraf has done: he plays both roles. Pakistan is America’s indispensable ally, the local broker, while at the same time continuing to fund proxy forces to destroy Afghanistan. This two-horse strategy has caused President Karzai to complain openly about Musharraf’s lackluster anti-terror efforts.
When I met Taliban fighters in a canyon in Zabul province in February 2006, they made no pretense about the support they receive from Pakistan. Likewise, Sebastian Junger interviewed a former Taliban commander who had switched sides and who had available the cell phone and address of his ISI handler, a major, based in Quetta.
Pakistan cloaks its continued support for the Taliban by occasionally turning over low-level Talib commanders to US forces. This serves two purposes at once: it is a way to dispose of problematic, reprobate local leaders who the ISI dislikes and it pleases the unwitting foreign master, who can now busy itself with abusing these politically meaningless battlefield trophies. The fact is, for many Guantanamo-based interrogators, locked away as they are in the compartmentalized bowels of America’s huge war bureaucracy, one bearded Pashtun gunman is a good as the next. Thus Pakistan tries to have it both ways: full US support, while keeping Afghanistan weak by means of Pashtun proxy forces.
VI
Now let us move back again and look at some increasingly forgotten history. How and why did the Soviets go into Afghanistan? Here again, one finds similarities to the current moment. And also because that history is almost totally ignored in books like Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars or the other various histories of al Qaeda or even in Ahmed Rashid’s very fine book Taliban.
From the 1920s through the 1950s, the Soviet Union and Afghanistan (then a constitutional monarchy) shared increasingly close relations. Starting in the 1950s, Afghanistan became one of the top four recipients of Soviet aid and stayed that way through the 1980s. During the 1950s and 1960s, under King Zahir Shah and his prime minister, Daud Khan, Afghanistan managed to play the West and the East off against each other in a battle that used aid flows rather than bullets.
For example, the Kabul airport was built by the Russians, but all the communications equipment was supplied by Americans. Afghanistan’s highways were jointly produced by the rival superpowers. Military officers would go study in Russia; engineers and agronomists would go study in the United States. Both superpowers used their economic might to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan, but the Soviet Union spent vastly more than the United States.
The Soviet Union’s primary concern was to create a stable neighbor, so as to ensure calm within its own heavily Muslim Central Asian republics — terrain sometimes referred to as the Soviet Union’s “soft underbelly.” Remember that throughout the 1930s the USSR was actually fighting Muslim guerillas in these areas. These were the anti-communist, traditionalist Basmachi. An unfriendly or unstable government in Afghanistan could easily mean a return of instability to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. (And, in fact, when Afghanistan did fall apart in the late 1990s there was war in these republics.)
So, the USSR poured enormous amounts of money into the project of modernizing Afghanistan; it wasn’t altruism so much as a rational security strategy. The Soviet goal in Afghanistan was not to build socialism right away; Soviet advisors frequently chided Afghan communists who wished to rush in that direction. Soviet social scientists considered Afghan society to be too rural, religious, underdeveloped, and backward for socialism to work. Russian communists encouraged their Afghan comrades to cooperate with nationalist and developmentalist political leaders in the style of an Afghan popular front.
In 1973, the king’s long-time prime minister, Daud Khan, staged a coup against his relative Zahir Shah. Daud ended the monarchy and created a republic with himself as the president. He relied for part of his support on the more moderate wing of the Afghan Communist Party, the Parcham. The party was in reality two parties: the Kalq (the masses) and the Parcham (the flag). The two factions were held together by Soviet aid and insistence on unity.
But in 1978, Daud started cracking down on the Parcham. In response, the Kalq — which was excluded from Daud’s government altogether — staged a bloody coup d’état, in which Daud and his family were massacred. The Soviets did not support the coup but backed the Kalq government anyway. The PDPA (People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan) rule was marked by zealous overreaction and internecine repression. Worst of all they rode roughshod over the countryside. (That “mud curtain,” the rural – urban split, rears its head again.) The new state failed to use the jirga system, the tradition of meetings for decision-making at the local level (these gatherings, though sexist in their exclusion of women, also have some quite democratic features, typically all men have equal say regardless of their property qualifications). Land reform was rushed through without proper preparations — like creation of an alternative credit system or proper supplies of inputs for farmers — so the earliest effects of the reform were actually to hurt the economic well-being of poor farmers. Soon tenant farmers were ready to side with the landlord class, with whom they already shared many clan and tribal connections. The rush to educate women and abolish the dowry system also infuriated the mullahs, landlords, and patriarchs of the countryside.
But it was Kalq moves to purge suspect officers from the Afghan military — or rumors that they were about to do so — that triggered the first full-scale revolt within the army. In March 1979, the main Afghan city on the Iranian border, Herat, rose in rebellion, led by an Islamist officer, Ishmael Kahn. Kahn became a famous mujahideen leader, was governor of Herat, and was said to run the province well. He is now in Kabul as Karzai’s minister of energy and mining.
The rebellion was also inspired by the Islamic revolution in Iran. The Shah had fallen just next door only a month earlier. Herat was home to a huge Soviet-supported airbase, and the rebels killed hundreds of Soviet advisors and their families. The Afghan government, with Soviet advisors, bombed the city in retaliation. At news of the uprising, President Carter — prodded by National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski — decided to send support to the rebels. That support did not cause the uprising but did prolong and intensify it. From Herat, the rebellion spread all over the country.
By the autumn of 1979 the Afghan army — which was largely the product of five decades of Soviet training and subsidies — had essentially fallen apart. Whole garrisons were in revolt against the Communists in Kabul. It was in the face of this total meltdown of a long-cultivated client state that the USSR — aware of all the risks and rather reluctantly — invaded. It was a gamble they felt compelled to take. Nothing about Afghanistan’s mountains, tribes, religiosity, xenophobia, long history of warfare, and deep cultural pride was particularly inviting.
The forebodingly bleak and obligatory nature of the Soviet invasion makes it in many ways similar to the US intervention. After all, who really thought that the United States or anyone else could remake Afghanistan?
Once in Kabul, the first thing the Soviets did was kill the Kalq president, the thuggish Amin, and replaced him with Babrak Karmal and then eventually with Dr. Najibullah. The government became Parcham-dominated.
Once engaged in the Afghan civil war, the Soviets tried to dress up their disastrous war with high-flying rhetoric about socialist revolution and solidarity. But for most of the war, they knew they were losing. Today, the United States papers-over the growing chaos in Afghanistan with talk of nation-building and human rights. But let’s face it: we all know it’s lost.
VII
Where is Afghanistan headed? Perhaps a defeat in Iraq will cause the United States to tack back around the Afghan buoy and, in the face of gathering crisis there, attempt to make the reconstruction work, pour in more money and more troops.
But I doubt it. More likely, Afghanistan will be kept on life support until the Western political classes tire of the effort. Then it will be cut loose to sink once more into chaos.
Only this time, when it’s “abandoned” it will be part of a much broader geography of social breakdown that stretches across North and Central Africa, up in the Horn, over to Iraq, then jumps to Afghanistan and into Pakistan. The Pentagon theorists call this the “non integrated gap” — that belt of failed states that stretches across much of the global South.
In thinking about the possible outcome of these two Bush era wars, let us consider the political evolution of the man who was Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
In 1998, in an interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, Brzezinski dismissed the risks of “blow back” and defended his support of the mujahideen in the following terms: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” These days, Brzezinski appears to take “stirred-up Moslems” more seriously.
In February 2007, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that President Bush’s description of a “decisive ideological struggle” against radical Islam was “simplistic and demagogic.” He called it a “mythical historical narrative” employed to justify a “protracted and potentially expanding war.” “To argue that America is already at war in the region with a wider Islamic threat, of which Iran is the epicenter, is to promote a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
More disturbing was Brzezinski’s description of “a plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran.” After all, Iran is now sandwiched between two US military occupations. The United States has been building its bases in Afghanistan; one of the largest is the Shindand Airfield, situated in the western province of Herat (where the anti-Communist uprising began in 1979), a mere 100 kilometers from the border with Iran. There are reports that Shindand is being fitted into an anti-missile defense system that would be used to shoot down any outgoing missiles from Iran. This emerging system serves to shore up Israeli security, but it would also be of great assistance during an air war against Iran.
Brzezinski described the worst-case scenario as follows:
“Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a “defensive” US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
This is the worst-case scenario. A ground war in Iran seems impossible; the United States doesn’t have the troops. An air war is more likely. But even without deeper direct US involvement, the region is in the grips of spreading social breakdown fueled by massive refugee flows, cheap plentiful weaponry, drug money, and illicit oil lucre, all of which is intellectually tied together with desperate millenarian religious politics. The future looks bad.
VIII
But an alternative scenario is not impossible: the United States could use its power to launch a new diplomacy aimed at de-escalating all these interconnected crises. This would require a concatenate series of regional peace conferences involving all the great powers as well as each set of regional powers. The central task of such collaborative diplomacy would have to be staving off social breakdown, which is already taking hold like a cancer and threatens to spread.
In the imaginations of the Muslim people of the region, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the minds of the Pakistani agents who support the Taliban, the war in Afghanistan is linked to the stand-off between Pakistan and India. A peace process attempting regional de-escalation would have to include China, Russia, and India.
As regards Afghanistan, one central issue would be Pakistan’s security, thus the question of Kashmir. Settle the security issue between India and Pakistan, and then Pakistan can be credibly pressured to stop subverting Afghanistan.
Such a process would have to take years; it would have to be on the scale of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference in which the allies redrew the map of the world. But the new diplomacy would have to follow a progressive logic — not the 1919 post-war imperial logic of winners dividing spoils. It would have to accept the limits of US power; it would have to recognize that the United States has neither the right nor the ability to run the world.
And such an approach would have to address the economic transformations that are imperative due to climate change. For example, Afghanistan has just emerged from an eight-year drought, but it needs five years worth of regular snowfall just to replenish its aquifers. As snow packs in the Himalayan and Hindu Kush ranges continue to recede, the rivers flowing from them will diminish and the economic situation in all of Central Asia will deteriorate badly.
Unfortunately, the American political class has not come to terms with the two great threats of this century: climate change and social breakdown. Nor is it in the immediate interest of US economic elites to think and act in such ways. Thus, a radical transformation of American foreign policy seems utopian. But at a technical level, such a transformation is not impossible.
