Author: Tariq Ali
Publication: The Guardian, UK
Date: November 30, 2001
A German dispatch from 1940 shows
Zahir Shah's true colours
The Pandora's box of the American
empire is still open, releasing its monsters and fears on a world still
not fully under its control. The Northern Alliance is a confederation of
monsters. Attaching dissidents to the chains of a tank and crushing them,
executing defenceless prisoners, raping men and women, these are all in
a day's work for the guardians of the heroin trade. Blemishes of yesteryear?
No such luck. We've been spared pictures of many of these atrocities, but
Arab TV viewers knew what was going on long before the massacre of Mazar-i-Sharif.
The Geneva convention is being violated every single day.
The facts are these: the situation
in Afghanistan is inherently unstable. Turf wars have already begun in
"liberated" Kabul, though open clashes have been avoided: the west is watching
and money has been promised. But the dam will burst sooner rather than
later. Once the marines depart, with or without the head of Bin Laden,
the alliance will discover that there is no money for anything except waging
war. Schools and hospitals and homes are not going to be sprouting next
spring or the one after in Afghanistan or Kosovo. And if the 87-year-old
King Zahir Shah is wheeled over from Rome, what then?
Nothing much, thinks the west, except
to convince the Pashtuns that their interests are being safeguarded. But
judging from past form, Zahir Shah might not be satisfied with the status
quo.
A document from the German Foreign
Office, dated October 3 1940, makes fascinating reading. It is from State
Secretary Weizsacker to the German legation in Kabul and is worth quoting
in some detail: "The Afghan minister called on me on September 30 and conveyed
greetings from his minister president, as well as their good wishes for
a favourable outcome of the war. He inquired whether German aims in Asia
coincided with Afghan hopes; he alluded to the oppression of Arab countries
and referred to the 15m Afghans [Pashtuns, mainly in the North West Frontier
province] who were forced to suffer on Indian territory.
"My statement that Germany's goal
was the liberation of the peoples of the region referred to, who were under
the British yoke... was received with satisfaction by the Afghan minister.
He stated that justice for Afghanistan would be created only when the country's
frontier had been extended to the Indus; this would also apply if India
should secede from Britain... The Afghan remarked that Afghanistan had
given proof of her loyal attitude by vigorously resisting English pressure
to break off relations with Germany."
The king who had dispatched the
minister to Berlin was the 26-year-old Zahir Shah. The minister-president
was his uncle Sardar Muhammad Hashim Khan.
What is interesting in the German
dispatch is not so much the evidence of the Afghan king's sympathy for
the Nazi regime. It is the desire for a Greater Afghanistan via the incorporation
of what is now Pakistan's North West Frontier province and its capital
Peshawar. Zahir Shah's return is being strongly resisted by Pakistan. They
know that the king never accepted the Durand Line, dividing Afghanistan
and Pakistan, not even as a temporary border. They are concerned that he
might encourage Pashtun nationalism.
Islamabad's decision to hurl the
Taliban into battle and take Kabul in 1996 was partially designed to solve
the Pashtun question. Religion might transcend ethnic nationalism. Instead
the two combined. A proto-Taliban group, Tehrik-e-Nifaz-i-Shariah-e-Mohammed
(TNSM) seized a large chunk of the Pakistan tourist resort of Swat during
Benazir Bhutto's government and imposed "Islamic punishments", including
amputations. She was helpless to act, but last week Musharraf imprisoned
the TNSM leader, Soofi Mohammed Saeed.
Not all the repercussions of this
crude war of revenge are yet to the fore, but the surface calm in Pakistan
is deceptive. With armed fundamentalists of the Lashkar-e-Taiba threatening
to take on the government if attempts are made to disarm them, the question
of how much support they enjoy within the military establishment becomes
critical. The inflow of US aid and the lifting of sanctions has persuaded
Musharraf's opponents within the army to leave him in place, but for how
long?
Add to that the appalling situation
in Kashmir with a monthly casualty rate higher than Palestine, where Indian
soldiers and Pakistani-infiltrated jihadis confront each other over the
corpses of Kashmiri innocents. If Delhi were to use the "war against terrorism"
as a precedent, the subcontinent could implode.
(Tariq Ali's book, The Clash of
Fundamentalisms, will be published by Verso in March)