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Rebuilding Afghanistan

Contemporary Review, April, 2001 by Hafizullah Emadi

Editor's Note: Afghanistan has been much in the news in recent weeks because the Taliban government ordered the destruction of ancient statues of the Buddha on the ground that they offended Islam. In spite of protests from numerous other countries and the UN, the Taliban proceeded to blow up the massive carvings. In the following article an Afghanistani scholar reflects on ways that his native land could recover from its long civil war and bad governments.

AFGHANISTAN'S political landscape had long been dominated by periodic tribal conflict and domination of the country's politics by authoritarian and despotic rulers who held no regard for public welfare nor for public participation in the country's politics. Citizens bore their suffering and anxiously awaited the rebirth of the revolutionary movement to transform Afghanistan's primitive social and political system.

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The revolutionary movement, rooted in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, had been derailed with the seizure of power by pro-Soviet social forces in 1978, Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (December 1979--February 1989), and the emergence of an Islamic state headed by Sebghatullah Mojaddadi in April 1992.

The Islamists had no agenda of rehabilitating the country's economic, social, cultural and political institutions; only their political agenda of Islamicization of an already Muslim society. This included, among other aims, a policy of prohibiting women from employment outside the home. Mojaddadi's short reign ended in August 1992 and was succeeded by Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of Jamiat-e-Islami ('Islamic Society' which is also the name of a political party). Rabbani's unwillingness to cede power after his term ended compelled various Islamic groups to fight for domination of Kabul. Armed confrontation among the Islamists had destroyed state and civic institutions, displaced hundreds of thousands of people and claimed the lives of more than 25,000 men, women and children in Kabul alone. In September 1996 the Pushtun dominated Taliban militias seized Kabul, forcing the Tajik rulers of Kabul, Rabbani and his defence minister Ahmad Shah Masoud to retreat to the Northeastern province of Badakhshan. After consoli dating their rule in Kabul the Taliban embarked upon a war of conquest, seizing more territories from their opponents in the Eastern, Western, Central and Northern regions of the country. (The word Taliban means students of religious studies. The Taliban emerged as a political force in Afghanistan's politics when they seized Qandahar province in 1994 and Kabul in 1996.)

The combatants so far proved incapable of ending the civil war, working toward rebuilding the civic and state institutions and orchestrating a comprehensive plan for rehabilitation. Instead they have further divided civil society by resorting to ethnic politics and relying on their lethal firepower as the only means to transcend their rival factions. Regional countries that long aspired to establish their influence on Afghanistan supported their respective clients and the international community remained indifferent to events in post-Soviet Afghanistan. The Taliban's rise to power could not be comprehended without the support of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the US. Once in power the Taliban abandoned their earlier rhetoric and pursued policies which ran counter to the interests of the US, forcing the latter to persuade the UN to impose sanctions on the Taliban. In January 2001 the United Nations imposed sanctions, freezing their overseas assets, prohibiting the country's commercial airlines from flying oversea s and prohibiting countries from selling and delivering arms to the Taliban. These measures were taken not only in retaliation for Taliban's providing sanctuary for Osama Bin Laden, who is blamed for bombing US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the attack on the USS Cole in the port of Yemen. The sanctions which exclude the warlords of the Northern Alliances battling to regain their fiefdom further intensify the fratricidal war and the destruction of an already ruined country.

At present a number of technocratic elites concentrated around former King Mohammad Zahir praise his efforts to convene a Loya Jirga or grand traditional tribal assembly as the only possible mechanism of conflict resolution to end the fratricidal war and build a united Afghanistan which translates to establishing a tribal aristocracy. The group feverishly tries to gamer international support for their political agenda masquerading it as the only viable political solution to the ongoing civil war. They offer a primitive solution to a modem conflict of greater social, political and cultural magnitude whose underlying objective is the deconstruction of the past political facade based on tribalism and ethnoreligious bigotry. Several Loya Jirga had been convened in the past but they did not address critical issues related to equality of ethnic communities. These Loya Jirga were used as an instrument to rubber stamp the policies of the Pushtun dominated political class who exploited the state coercive and ideologi cal apparatuses to cultivate Pushtun national identity by suppressing the identity of other ethnic groups.

Rebuilding Afghanistan

Contemporary Review, April, 2001 by Hafizullah Emadi

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