Author: KPS Gill
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: November 17, 2001
Most ruthless in the suppression
of their own hapless people, and most cowardly in battle. This is how history
will probably judge the Taliban. In under a week, once the real fighting
started, a Force that had been most arrogant and indiscriminate in its
use of violence against its own people was suddenly in full flight, without
even a fig leaf of resistance to conceal its disgrace.
Worse still, from the Taliban perspective,
has been the sheer jubilation that has greeted the Northern Alliance Forces
in city after city that had been forced to forget the colours of life by
the oppressive weight of the Taliban's monochromatic vision. The truth,
for all their claims to representing the will of "Islamic" Afghanistan's
people, is that the Taliban was hated, feared and despised as, perhaps,
no other regime has ever been. The Taliban's inevitable end must be a lesson
to others-not necessarily of the Muslim Faith-who seek to inflict their
own narrow vision, their ignorant bigotry, on people, in the name of exclusionary
religions, of oppressive nationalist and cultural ideologies, or of any
other political absolutism.
Today, as Pashtun groupings revolt
against the Taliban in the South of Afghanistan, the idea that a Taliban
"representation" was necessary in any post-war government in Afghanistan
rings hollow and absurd. But this was only one of the many misinterpretation
of reality, the wrong decisions that Pakistan sought to force on America
and the international community. Another, presently and repeatedly voiced
by the Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, is that only an "Islamic"
peace keeping Force would be acceptable in Afghanistan, and that such a
Force should only be drawn from the OIC countries. Regrettably, the US
and the UN are both apparently falling into the trap of this false reasoning,
and there is now talk of a peace keeping Force drawn from Turkey, Jordan,
Indonesia and Bangladesh.
But it was not these countries,
nor the OIC, who came to the aid of the people of Afghanistan against their
oppressive masters. It was, indeed, the Islamic countries that implicitly
or explicitly supported and kept the Taliban alive for its years of existence
in power. Indeed, the overwhelming and extended presence of foreign "Muslim
troops" in a peace keeping Force may well result in their Talibanisation.
Not having suffered under the rule of the Taliban, they may still look
upon this disgraced menagerie as defenders of Islam. The call to create
a purely Muslim peace-keeping Force, moreover, is all part of the arbitrary
psychological division that is constantly being reinforced between an Islamic
world and a non-Islamic world, and it reflects a characteristic and potentially
disastrous failure of intellect-prompted, perhaps by guilt-on the part
of the US and its allies, and of the UN leadership. A regrettable fact
that must be kept in mind, in this context, is that the UN record of interventions
in conflicts in the past, virtually since the creation of the organisation,
has not been altogether encouraging.
The collapse of the Taliban also
spells the collapse (though not, perhaps, the immediate end) of Pakistan's
strategy and "overriding interest", as Mark Husband expressed it, "to achieve
internal security by provoking instability among its neighbours". The instability
it sought to provoke in its neighbourhood will now return, with redoubled
force, to haunt Pakistan itself, and the coming years will be the gravest
challenge to the survival of the "criminal enterprise" that has been the
Pakistani state since the very moment of its creation. With the imminent
defeat of the Taliban, two dominant Pakistani myths have crashed. The first
of these is that of religion as a great unifying force that can overcome
and neutralise all political divisions and disputes. The second is the
belief that you can indoctrinate a pack of illiterates and poorly-educated
people on the basis of religion, create an ill-trained and undisciplined
rabble-militia, buttress it with leadership and forces from the national
Army in civvies, and transform this motley combination into an army of
conquerors and liberators. This has been the formula of Pakistan's continuous
military misadventures since their first aggression in Kashmir, and it
has produced disaster after disaster. Kashmir, Kargil, Kabul, and perhaps
a few days from now, Kandahar, is each a monument to the progressive disintegration
of Pakistan's untenable delusions of grandeur.
And yet, the war is far from over.
What survives of the Taliban will certainly regroup and launch guerrilla
and terrorist campaigns. Its main Force may defect to the triumphant Northern
Alliance, but the hard core of fanatics will persist, and will pursue a
pattern of warfare that is far more difficult to confront, and that does
not depend on very large numbers. This compressed force will seek to consolidate
itself in the South of Afghanistan-and probably on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan
border, and will fan out to commit acts of terror against any new dispensation
at Kabul, as well as against Pakistan, India and various others whom it
conceives of as the "enemies of Islam". Squeezed out of the larger theatre
of the Afghan landmass, they will disperse across as much of the world
as will allow them temporary shelter or the anonymity that is necessary
to plan their next outrage against humanity. Their sympathisers, sponsors
and supporters, currently overwhelmed by the pace of events and by the
ferocity of the American and international response to the events of September
11, may lie low till the danger is seen to have passed, but will resume
covert support as soon as the risks attached to such conduct are seen to
be acceptable-indeed, Pakistan has not, even for a moment, entirely abandoned
its advocacy of the Taliban's cause, and there is substantial evidence
to suggest a continuous flow of covert assistance and a noticeably mischievous
diplomatic role as well, throughout the course of the war in Afghanistan.
The sudden and near total collapse
of the Taliban is extraordinary, and was certainly not expected in any
strategic circles, least of all by the Americans who had reluctantly prepared
themselves for a "long haul". There is a danger of euphoria here, a danger
of returning to an old indifference, a habitual arrogance that has been
the hallmark of the Western orientation to terrorism that targets non-Western
nations. The belief that America's enemies are soon to be destroyed may
revive the old 'terrorism tolerating systems and attitudes' that have provided
excellent breeding grounds for extremist ideologies not only in the Third
World, but in Western nations as well. Were this to happen, in the near
or distant future, the gains of the Afghan war would simply be wasted.
The succession of events since September 11 have forged dramatic transformations
in the world community; the structure and distribution of power across
the globe has undergone subtle and complex changes; new opportunities of
resolution of old antagonisms have emerged; a powerful voice of the hitherto
silent majority of Muslims is articulating its concept of Islam and openly
opposing the tyranny and violence of extremist Islamist fundamentalism
and terror. These are gains the must not be wasted through future compromises
with terrorism, with the forces and ideologies that have promoted it, and
with the nations that have supported and sponsored it to further their
own political and strategic ends. The present war in Afghanistan should
be recorded in history as the beginning of the world's final assault against
a scourge that had become a threat to the very possibility of civilisation;
and this assault must end not only with a comprehensive defeat of terrorism
in every theatre where it is currently manifested, but with a complete
and irrevocable de-legitimisation of this method as an instrument of sectarian
or state policy.
