Afghanistan: Land of Valor, Land of Sorrow - Part 5
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
CA
History is witness that a civilization must seek its renewal from within. Reforms that are imposed from without are resisted and are ultimately thrown out. The Marxist movement in Muslim Asia failed time and again because it was perceived as a foreign element imposing its methods, its processes and its philosophy on the local populations.
The history of Indonesia and Afghanistan bears witness to this observation. During the twentieth century, the communists built up considerable influence in both Indonesia and Afghanistan. In both cases, they failed because their methods of disruption and sabotage were unacceptable to the people. Karmal was a communist and a man in a hurry to transform his country. When he was in the Afghan parliament he encouraged disruption so that the legitimate government would be unsuccessful. When he seized power he imposed changes on a traditional culture that was not ready for change. Resistance was inevitable.
The resistance of the Afghan people to communist rule invited brutal repression. The Karmal junta engaged in mass killings and torture to force the population into submission. The result was the opposite. Resistance escalated and a coalition of Mujahedeen was born. The Soviet Union, sensing a historic opportunity to enlarge its sphere of influence around its borders, at first provided material assistance to contain the resistance movement, and when that did not work, invaded outright with tanks and troops in 1979 to prop up the communist regime.
The forward advance of the Red Army alarmed Washington which was hitherto preoccupied with the Khomeini Revolution in Iran (1978) and the overthrow of the Shah. President Carter made a decision to send military assistance to the Mujahedeen through Pakistan. Financial help flowed in from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries. The struggle attracted a large number of volunteers from the neighboring countries as well as from the Arab world who felt it was their religious obligation to free their Afghan brothers from the godless communist Soviets. Among those who made his way to Afghanistan was Osama bin Laden.
Osama was the scion of a Saudi billionaire family. His first stated objective was the expulsion of American troops from Saudi soil. As time went on, he expanded his objective to include reform of the Saudi political system. Expelled from Saudi Arabia, he first sought refuge in the Sudan. The Sudanese government buckled under American pressure and asked him to leave. Osama found refuge in the mountains of Afghanistan. There he married the daughter of Mullah Omar, one of the firebrand mullahs who rose to notoriety in later years. This marriage of convenience was to prove fateful for Afghanistan in the aftermath of the tragic events of 9/11.
The Soviets tried trading their satraps. In 1986 Karmal was replaced by Najibullah. The arrival of stinger missiles neutralized any advantage that the Soviets enjoyed in the air. After losing tens of thousands of men and spending billions, the invaders realized they could not hold Afghanistan and they withdrew in 1989 leaving the communists to their fate.
Fighting continued between the Mujahedeen and the forces of Najibullah culminating in the victory of the Mujahedeen in 1993. However, victory did not bring peace to the hapless Afghans. The warlords who had temporarily buried their differences under the umbrella of the Mujahedeen were soon at each other’s throat, fighting for turf and terrain. Rabbani took over the northwest. Dostum controlled Mazar e Sharif. Hikmatyar was the chieftain in Herat. Yunus Khalis held sway over Jalalabad and Pashtun areas. Much of the country was destroyed. Thousands perished. Children died and women were abused. Agriculture suffered. Schools were closed. The infrastructure was in ruins. The flood of refugees into Pakistan and Iran which had started during the occupation by the Soviets increased. Afghanistan became a macabre theater of war in which a suffering, hapless population was held hostage.
The instability was a matter of concern to the ruling circles in neighboring Pakistan who were host to over three million Afghan refugees. As successive waves of refugees poured in across the Durand Line to escape the violence in their native land, they were cared for by a host of Islamic organizations in the NW Frontier Province of Pakistan. Since there were no schools for children, the Jamaat e Islam and other Islamic organizations set up madrasas to provide a modicum of education to the refugee children. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries provided much of the funding for this education. These madrasas became the focus of official Pakistan attention. Without the benefit of a modern syllabus, the madrasas produced graduates imbued with rigid doctrines that viewed all non-Islamic influences as alien that had to be fought and expelled.
Pakistan saw an opportunity to use the graduates of the madrasas for a jihad in Afghanistan. Besides the obvious benefits of a stable backyard, Islamic Afghanistan would also provide strategic depth to Pakistan in its military confrontations with India. The students and some of the faculty of the refugee madrasas provided the backbone of the Taliban (literally, student) movement that considered it a religious duty to wage a jihad to liberate Afghanistan from all alien influences and bring in stability in accordance with a rigid and unbending interpretation of Islam. In this endeavor they received covert and overt assistance from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and a tolerant nod from Washington. (To be continued)
