E-Notes

Afghanistan After the Taliban

by Alvin Z. Rubinstein

October 15, 2001

Alvin Z. Rubinstein, Ph.D., is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

The military campaign to topple the Taliban and root out the al-Qaeda terrorist network continues, and it must go on until both objectives are achieved. But the time has come to introduce an active and essential dimension into the Afghan political scene. A political alternative to the Taliban should not wait for an end to the fighting. The ultimate objective of the United States and the countries who have allied with it is the establishment in Afghanistan of a stable government, a political structure capable of nurturing economic development, and a system of governance which can satisfy the major ethnic groups.

Afghanistan has approximately 20 million people: the last relatively reliable census, held in 1963, put the country’s population at about 16 million. During the past two decades, more than one million people have been killed in conflict or died of starvation, and 3 to 5 million have become refugees in neighboring Pakistan.

To start with, it is essential to emphasize that there are no Afghans in Afghanistan. The country is made up of different ethnic groups. For the past 250 years, the ruling group has been the Pushtuns (known also as Pathans), who constitute about 40 percent of the population; Tajiks, 25 percent; Uzbeks, 10 percent; Hazaras, Baluch, and Turkomans, the remainder. Nationalism is a meaningless notion; loyalty is to tribe or clan — not to a central authority. Opposition to a foreign invader, however, has elicited cooperation, but also disaffections if these are in the clan’s interest. To help understand the country’s politics, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather may be more helpful than any State Department briefing.

The cities that are keys to the defeat of the Taliban are Kandahar, in the western part of the country; Kabul, the capital, in the center; and Jalalabad, to the east, on the road from Kabul to the Khyber Pass and Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province. This is the heartland of the Pushtuns. Taliban strength can be eroded through an unrelenting military pressure and a lavish courtship of key and inconstant tribal and clan elders. From information coming out, the Taliban seem to be losing popular support. The stage for defections is being set.

In the crucial weeks ahead, one political misstep could unwittingly give the Taliban a longer lease on life and prolong the fighting. Central to U.S. policy toward a post-Taliban Afghanistan is Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharraf, who has unrivalled knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses not only of the Taliban, which was created by Pakistan in the first place, but also of the non-Taliban Pushtun tribal leaders. He should be encouraged to reach arrangements with them, the aims being to acquire intelligence on Taliban and al-Qaeda troops dispositions, capture their personnel, and foster tribal defections. Results on these matters should be reciprocated by prompt and handsome financial payoffs from the United States: bribery and bounty-hunting are customary stuff of political loyalty or duplicity in Afghanistan. In addition, tribal leaders ousting the Taliban from their area should immediately start receiving a steady flow of food, medicine, farm implements, and other necessities for reviving the economy of their region. A few such instances could start a ripple effect that would severely weaken the Taliban.

Working together, President Musharraf, non-Taliban Pushtun tribal elders, and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, should quickly decide whether King Mohammad Zahir Shah, who was ousted by his brother-in-law in 1973, and who has been living in exile in Rome, should be invited back as a symbolic figure to help convene a Loya Jirgah (General Assembly of tribal, religious, political, and rural notables), in order to oversee discussions on how to share power among the various ethnic groups. If the King can serve as a bridge, good, but he must commit himself to figurehead status. If at age 87, he is too remote from the challenges facing the country, the “wise men” should seek elsewhere for such a catalyst.

To strengthen Musharraf’s domestic position, especially among Pakistan’s approximately 10 million Pushtuns, among whom many extremists are pro-Taliban, the liberation of Kabul must not bring back to power the Northern Alliance. Its return could undermine Musharraf among his military and the influential Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. The Northern Alliance was responsible for the destruction of Kabul in the 1994–1996 period, when it imploded into a brutal internecine struggle for personal power, which basically pitted the Pushtuns under then-Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hikmatyar against the Tajiks, led by President Burhanuddin Rabbani and Defense Minister Ahmad Shah Masood. Once the Taliban ousted the Northern Alliance in 1996, it was Masood who resisted them from his redoubt in the Panjshir Valley, until his assassination in September by Osama bin Laden’s “Afghan Arabs.” With bitterness as intense as it is in Kabul, particularly among the Pushtuns, another occupation by the Northern Alliance should be avoided. In the interest of any post-Taliban period of reconciliation and reconstruction, Rabbani and Hikmatyar should resign their positions as president and prime minister of the Northern Alliance government that is recognized internationally and by the United Nations as the official government of Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance government should then be transformed as soon as possible into a broader-based provisional leadership, which would find it easier to mobilize international assistance while it hammers out the modalities of power-sharing.

Needless to say, the non-Pushtuns might not like the curtailment of prominence, but some of this unhappiness can be mollified with money, some by institutional arrangements that help ensure their autonomy in a restructured state. One possible answer could be a political system that combines a weak central government and a strong degree of local rule in a loose confederational arrangement, modeled on Switzerland. To this effect, the Tajiks and Uzbeks should be encouraged to concentrate their military forces on weakening and defeating Taliban units, and to strengthen their control in the north, along the borders with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. They squandered their chance to rule the Pushtun heartland. Cooperation in rebuilding Afghanistan, in bringing stability and a measure of improvement for the people of that devastated land, lies in thinking big on a small stage. Recovery lies in helping the provinces, province by province.

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