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The guns of August

What many analysts had been predicting for over a decade has finally come true, having forced the ouster of the Soviets and their surrogates the Afghan guerilla alliance has now disintegrated along ethnic lines, the former allies are engaged in a total war against each other. The decade-old war in Afghanistan, which had swirled around Kabul with an occasional rocket barrage and an intermittent raid, has finally arrived in the city with a vengeance. Bitter street fighting has resulted in thousands of casualties, devastated complete residential blocks and has created a new wave of refugees. In a bizarre scene, the refugees fleeing from the battle for Kabul crossed a batch of refugees incoming from Pakistan, so predominant is the confusion.

The Peshawar Accord was a complex but workable document provided the signatories were sincere about implementing it in letter and spirit. A clause that would have forbidden any of the parties from using Pakistani territory as a base for any activity against the central government in Kabul was excluded by our Foreign Office experts despite the advice of the ISI, that exclusion is now a potential for future mayhem. The parties concerned want justice for themselves to the exclusion of others, a rather imperfect basis for any lasting Accord. Added to this is the basic lack of toleration of each other, held together previously by the glue of hatred for the Soviets and their surrogates. To quote Walter Lippman, “Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other man is a matter of toleration.”!

On one side is the government in power with the Jamaat-i-Islami nominees, Uzbek Burhanuddin Rabbani as President and Tajik Ahmad Shah Masoud as Defence Minister. Quite apart from Pakistan’s Jamaat-i-Islami, which is a mentor and a supporter of their bitter Pushtoon rival Gulbaddin Hekmatyar of the Hizb-i-Islami, the present Afghan government is in power because of the backing of a feudal warlord called Rashid Dostum, commander of the Uzbek militia which is centred in the North around Mazar-i-Sharif and has under its command most of what is left of the Afghan Air Force, over 200 fixed wing aircraft and helicopters. In fact Rashid Dostum and his Uzbek militia (known as the Jim Gulam) is, other than pure ambition, the bone of contention between Ahmad Shah Masoud and Gulbaddin Hekmatyar. The Hizb-i-Islami leader wants them out of Kabul, he refuses to accept their allegiance to the Mujahideen cause since they had fought the Afghan guerrillas for over a decade as mercenaries supporting the Soviet installed government, switching sides from former KHAD chief Najibullah as late as this January. Among the three most powerful factions, Ahmad Shah Masoud, despite the media aura surrounding him, is the weakest. Whereas Rashid Dostum and Gulbaddin Hekmatyar can survive on their own, Ahmad Shah Masoud needs the prop of Rashid Dostum to stay in contention for power. To that end he has forged a disparate coalition which includes some of the die-hards of the Najibullah Government, most of whom are of Uzbek and Tajik origin. This is not acceptable to Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, who, even as he objects to the presence of former Najibullah supporters in the present government, has happily absorbed Pushtoon elements of the former government who have joined his forces.

News reports indicate that an all party delegation of Afghan guerrillas is on its way to Kabul to arrange for an immediate ceasefire. Pakistan most certainly must have played a solitary role in the prompting for such a peace overture, indeed may have to pay a more visible part in the future to ensure that any agreement reached is honoured. While the first priority is to get all parties to withdraw their warring elements from the streets of Kabul, the risk of having Afghanistan partitioned into two or even three regions on a semi-permanent basis is so great that Pakistan will have to get involved in the implementation of any Accord, maybe even as one of the guarantors along with the Saudis and Iranians. Despite fulminations of ISI-leaning towards Gulbaddin Hekmatyar articulated by Tehran Radio, Pakistan is taken by all the factions of the Afghan Guerrillas as an honest broker. There are inherent risks in getting involved but Pakistan will have to flex its moral and material muscle to keep the Afghans engaged in a political dialogue rather than proceed to kill each other in an internecine civil war.

Concrete steps will have to be taken by Pakistan to restrain our own Jamaat-i-Islami, the whole future of Afghanistan has been put into severe jeopardy by their vocal advocacy of Gulbaddin Hekmatyar. At the same time effective contacts have to be established with Rashid Dostum and Ahmad Shah Masoud, both to restrain their hand and to avoid alienating them. In the circumstances, the Pakistan Government must give a clear mandate to the ISI, in preference to the non-combatants of the Foreign Office, to achieve the stated objectives. The Government has done well by sealing its borders so as not to allow Pakistan to be used as a base for any warring faction, this must become a part and parcel of any future agreement. The field operatives of ISI who actually took part in the guerilla campaign in the past decade will have to be brought out of mothballs in the greater national interest and given a fresh mandate to exercise their influence with the battle veterans of the various factions. Georges Clemenceau may have said, “War is too important to be left to generals,” but field commanders have an inherent dislike for non-combatants and in a volatile environment that is presently endemic in Afghanistan, peace will have to be all-pervasive before traditional diplomacy can be effective. The stakes are extremely high, the future of not only Pakistan but the whole region, Central Asia included, will be determined by our success vis-a-vis the field commanders among the Afghan guerilla leadership. Having won this war, our brave young men of the invisible kind will have to risk their lives again in a thankless task to win the peace!

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