Table of Contents

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1. Introduction

The conflict in Afghanistan has matured into a relatively stable social

system that menaces the lives of millions of people. This conflict

forms the core of a regional conflict formation, including the continuing

challenges in Tajikistan, the growing conflict led by the Islamic

Movement of Uzbekistan involving several states, processes of political

decay in Pakistan, challenges to political order in Iran, and the insurgency

in Kashmir. It is linked to long-distance organized crime

through both the drug trade and smuggling originating in Dubai. The

expanding drug trade has led to the rapid transmission of HIV/AIDS

in the region through intravenous drug use.

Given the long-standing and regional character of the conflict, it

would be a mistake to analyze it solely or even primarily in terms of

the political differences between the current protagonists, the Taliban,

led by Mullah Muhammad Umar, and the forces of the United Front,

led by Ahmad Shah Massoud. It is unlikely to be settled by a negotiated

agreement between these forces. The fact that this conflict has

continued for over twenty years, despite repeated changes in the identity

of the antagonists and the issues apparently at stake, indicates that

its causes transcend such transient manifestations. Nor should one

analyze the policy objective simply as “peace” or “ending the war.” A

more desirable policy goal would be reconstructing the country as

part of the interstate and economic structure of an entire region. The

usual notion of a peace process in a civil war within a national framework

includes an end to outside interference; a negotiated cease-fire

perhaps monitored by peacekeepers; an interim government; a process

for establishing long-term governance; and, finally, reconstruction.

Such a process will not work in a case such as Afghanistan. The war is

not a civil war but a transnational one. The transnational links are too

deep to be untangled and will have to be transformed.

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Economic and social issues such as education cannot await a political

settlement. The absence or weakness of institutions is one of the

causes of the conflict and makes any purely political settlement difficult

if not impossible. Hence efforts at reconstruction and institution

building need to precede and act as a catalyst for political agreements,

rather than the reverse. Conditional planning for reconstruction can

function as an incentive for both Afghan and regional actors and is

likely to be more effective than sanctions alone. All of these issues

need to be tackled within a regional framework, integrating areas usually

separated as parts of Central and South Asia, as well as the Middle

East (or West Asia).

The recent UN mission to West Africa, as well as the Security Council

mission relating to the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, represent

the scope of action needed and the necessity of integrating the

political, economic, humanitarian, and human rights components of

international action.

If the situation remains unchanged, this entire region (Afghanistan,

southern Central Asia, Pakistan, Kashmir, maybe parts of Iran) could

become a battleground for decades, like the Great Lakes region of

Central Africa. Millions of people could be uprooted, impoverished,

and killed by war, famine, and epidemics. Central Asia will have even

greater global consequences than Central Africa, since it will be the

home to expanding global terrorist groups. The effect on Pakistan

could lead sympathizers of these terrorist groups to gain access to nuclear

weapons.

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2. Conflict Analysis

2.1 Background

2.1.1 State Formation and Imperial Collapse

The conflict in Afghanistan is the core of a struggle over the reconstitution

of political and economic relations in southwest Asia in the aftermath

of the collapse first of the British and then of the Russian

empire. The partition of the British Empire in South Asia left behind

Pakistan as an existentially insecure state, whose insecurity increased

after the loss of its eastern portion in 1971. Pakistan sees its main security

task as obtaining parity with India, a country almost eight times

larger, which has resulted in the ruination of Pakistan’s economy due

to excessive military spending, the use of “asymmetric strategies” such

as support for insurgencies and extremist groups (techniques learned

from the US during the Afghan war), and the quest for “strategic

depth” – links and alliances with parts of the Muslim world to the

west. The quest for “strategic depth” has defined Pakistan’s policy

toward Afghanistan and then Central Asia for decades.

Afghanistan became a weak buffer state between the US and Sovietled

alliance systems, successors of the British and Russian empires.

The collapse of the Russian empire in its Soviet form led to the dissolution

of the Soviet-supported Afghan army, the core of the state.

Pakistan saw opportunities for further “strategic depth” in a reconstitution

of a now-stateless Afghanistan, bordered to the north by weak,

ill-defined nominally Muslim, nominally sovereign republics.

Afghan political elites and economic actors maneuvered in this context.

First the British and then the Soviets supported the formation of

centralized military power in an Afghan state dominated by the royal

regimes of the Muhammadzai lineage of Durrani Pashtuns. This

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dominant lineage remained more or less neutral in international affairs,

though it came to depend on Soviet aid for the core of its coercive

power, since the army was Soviet-trained and supplied from

1955. The Pashtun ethnic group – with as many or more members in

NW Pakistan as in Afghanistan, in a sense considered Afghanistan

“its” state, as “Afghan” means both “Pashtun” and “citizen of Afghanistan.”

Afghanistan under the Muhammadzais pursued a revanchist

policy toward Pashtun areas in Pakistan (Pashtunistan, or the

Pashtun question). Neutralizing the Pashtun question became part of

Pakistan’s quest for strategic depth.

After the overthrow of the Muhammadzais in 1978, the Soviets supported

a narrow Communist group. The US, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia

responded by arming several previously marginal Islamist extremist

groups, which predominated among the mujahidin organizations

that fought the Soviets and Afghan Communists. The combination of

these approaches led to the final collapse of the Afghan state in 1992.

Both the Soviet-supported communists and the US-supported

Islamists attacked and destroyed the educated elites that had ruled the

country and provided it with some coherence, setting the stage for the

advent of the Taliban.

2.1.2 Struggles in a Stateless Country

After the collapse of the army in April 1992, mujahidin and some

former government militias coalesced into several ethno-regional political-

military coalitions. The dissolution of the Pashtun-dominated

central state, combined with the vast, uncontrolled supplies of weapons

from both sides, provided an opportunity to assert either autonomy

from the center (elites of the Hazara and Uzbek ethnic groups)

or greater control over it (Tajik elites). Though relatively homogeneous

solidarity groups led these coalitions, they did not engage in mass

mobilization around an explicit ethnic discourse or project (Hazaras

excepted to some extent). The origin of the war is not ethnic, and the

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solution will not be ethnic, but the conduct of the war is ethnic, which

has had corrosive effects on the potential for national reconstruction.

Pashtuns were fragmented. Pakistan, which after 1979 increasingly

sought a kind of indirect hegemony over the Pashtun areas, was determined

to prevent reestablishment of a Pashtun nationalist force

that would ally with India or other hostile powers to challenge its control

over Pashtun populations and territories in Pakistan. With the

collapse of the USSR and the Afghan state, however, and the failure

to secure power of its chosen Afghan surrogate, the Hizb-i Islami of

Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, Pakistan saw a new opportunity in the Taliban.

This group appeared in southern Afghanistan in the fall of 1994.

Pakistan ultimately sought to create a corridor to Central Asia by reuniting

Pashtuns under the Taliban, a purely religious (not tribal)

leadership that did not support nationalist demands, would not ally

with non-Muslim powers, and that was dependent on Pakistan

through a variety of networks that had developed over twenty years of

war and dispersion. Pakistani support for a Pashtun group, combined

with that group’s extensive intertwining with networks within Pakistan,

changed the meaning of the Pashtun question for Pakistan and

has led to a violent rebalancing of ethnic power in Afghanistan in favor

of Pashtuns, who had temporarily lost power to the newly armed

non-Pashtun groups.

2.1.3 Formation of a Regional Conflict Complex

The conflict in Afghanistan is now at the core of a region including

conflicts in that country, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan,

and Kashmir. Pakistan’s policy in Afghanistan derives from its quest

for security from India (see below), and its intelligence services use

Afghan territory to train fighters for Kashmir. The war in Afghanistan

introduced massive quantities of small arms into Pakistan and provided

capital for investment in smuggling. Creation of an Afghan and

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Pashtun diaspora reaching into the Persian Gulf (Dubai includes the

third largest urban Pashtun population after Peshawar and Karachi)

facilitated trade and smuggling throughout the region. Illicit trade, not

only by Pashtuns, includes the drug trade, transborder trade in consumer

goods, and commerce in emeralds. The drug and transborder

trades are linked to organized crime groups operating throughout the

Indian Ocean periphery, the former Soviet Union, and Europe. The

transborder trade undermines Pakistan’s fiscal integrity and funds corruption,

thereby contributing to the crisis of legitimacy of Pakistani

institutions, of which the 1999 coup was only a symptom. That crisis

could be intensified by the return of tens of thousands of Pakistani

Taliban from Afghanistan to a country drifting into a combination of

financial and political crisis and increasingly risking international

stigma and isolation.

Afghanistan provided sources of weapons and refuge (facilitated by

cross-border links among Tajiks) that helped intensify the war in Tajikistan,

set off by the Soviet collapse. The drug trade also penetrated

Tajikistan and its neighbors, drawing in the Russian mafia and corrupting

the Russian border guards, as well as all Central Asian governments.

Members of a repressed Islamist group in Uzbekistan’s

Ferghana Valley fled to Afghanistan and Tajikistan in 1992. Some of

the Uzbek fighters, reorganized as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan,

established bases in opposition-controlled areas of Tajikistan as

well as in Afghanistan. Since the implementation of the Tajikistan

peace accord, members of this group have sought to fight their way

back to Uzbekistan directly from Tajikistan and across southern Kyrgyzstan,

taking hostages and setting off international crises. Some of

their fighters received training in the same Pakistani madrasas (religious

schools) that gave birth to the Taliban. They have recently reorganized

as the Islamic Party of Turkistan, making explicit that their

agenda includes the whole region.

Uzbekistan also supported a militia from Tajikistan (led by Mahmud

Khudaiberdiyev, an ethnic Uzbek from that country) that trained in

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Uzbek areas of north Afghanistan and staged an uprising in Northern

Tajikistan in November 1998. Sectarian killings in Pakistan (reflecting

the region-wide politicization of Sunni-Shi’a relations sparked by the

Iranian revolution and Iran-Pakistan competition in Afghanistan) and

the insurgency in Kashmir are also linked to Afghanistan, where

Sunni extremists have bases and have participated in fighting along

with the Taliban, including against Afghanistan’s Shi’a. Drug traders

from Afghanistan threaten order in several Iranian provinces through

which they have established smuggling routes.

Massive displacements caused by both war and drought have placed

all the neighboring countries under pressure once again, but now,

unlike in the 1980s, Afghan refugees are not welcome anywhere. Pakistan,

Tajikistan, and Iran, all in different ways and for different reasons

are rejecting them, refusing to register them or forcing them to

return. A first generation of Afghan refugees with no education but

rudimentary madrasas gave birth to the Taliban. A second generation

of Afghans is now growing up displaced and abandoned, with no education

but a smattering of simplistic religious training for the few, in

an impoverished environment awash in weapons and criminal enterprises.

One can only imagine to what uses these children will be

put in ten to fifteen years.

2.1.4 Role of the Taliban

The Taliban movement initially responded to some needs felt by Afghan

people and received some popular support in Pashtundominated

areas during its initial advances in 1994-95. The collapse of

the state and wide distribution of weapons had fostered anarchy and

criminality, especially in the Pashtun tribal belt. Numerous armed

checkpoints blocked trade and travel, markets could not function, and

continued fighting among various groups destroyed much of Kabul

and other cities. The Taliban presented themselves as an Islamic solution

thority, collecting weapons, and establishing order through enforcing

sharia. Had they stopped when they had brought order to the Pashtun

areas of southern Afghanistan, they might have formed an interlocutor

for negotiating a federated form of Afghan statehood with about

five other ethno-regional coalitions that existed at that time. Besides

the numerous other obstacles, however, such a state did not meet the

needs of Pakistan, which wanted a centralized state that would reliably

control the territory in its interests. At that time interest by several international

corporations in oil and gas pipelines through Afghanistan

also increased incentives for a centralized force to impose order.

Hence Pakistan supported the Taliban’s growing aspirations to reconstruct

a centralized state.

Though the leadership of such a state by ulama (Islamic scholars) is

unprecedented, the underlying structure reproduces a historic pattern:

the state is dominated by an ethnically Pashtun small solidarity group,

in this case Qandahari Deobandi mullahs, dependent on foreign aid

and taxing foreign trade (commercial agriculture, now mostly illegal

drugs, and foreign trade, now mostly smuggling) for its resources. The

increasingly despotic, reactionary, and obscurantist policies of the

Taliban have intensified resistance to this project from other groups

in Afghanistan, who have won increasing support from neighboring

states that felt threatened by Pakistan’s aspirations.

2.1.5 Conflict-Promoting Structural Factors

Pursuit of armed conflict in Afghanistan is greatly facilitated by two

variables: the low cost of recruiting fighters and the availability of

lootable or taxable resources to finance military and other despotic

activity. Though statistics are poor, the country appears to have the

highest infant, child, and maternal mortality rates, the lowest literacy

rate and life expectancy, and one of the two or three lowest levels of

per capita food availability in the world. It also appears to have one of

the highest proportions of disabled people, among the highest rates

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of injury due to land mines and the highest per capita number of personal

weapons. It would be strange indeed if such a country were at

peace. The cost of maintaining a soldier is approximately one meal

per day, more than many could otherwise obtain. Though some

communities in Afghanistan nonetheless resist conscription, the Taliban

can easily find replacements elsewhere, including in Pakistan, a

country with a much larger population of impoverished, undereducated

youth. Similar phenomena facilitate recruitment by the IMU in

Central Asia.

Furthermore, Afghanistan became (at least until this year) the source

of most of the world’s opium, a ready source of cash, mainly for the

Taliban (as well as for peasants, who could make up their food deficit

with the cash incomes from poppy, which paid for imports). Supporters

of the Taliban may also be involved in joint ventures in heroin refining

and, perhaps, marketing. The Taliban’s ban on growing opium

poppy has not extended to trade, and some wholesalers have made

windfall profits on overstocks from last year as supply has dropped.

The security of road transport the Taliban have established has made

possible a flourishing smuggling business in consumer goods from

Dubai (a free port), imported via either Iran or Turkmenistan and

trucked across southern Afghanistan to Pakistan, complementing the

other smuggling route via the port of Karachi. Goods for export to

Afghanistan can transit Pakistan duty-free under the Afghan Transit

Trade Agreement (ATTA). Many of the goods imported under ATTA

are sold illegally in Pakistan, largely by Afghan and Pakistani Pashtun

truckers and traders.

The area of northeast Afghanistan controlled by Ahmad Shah Massoud

also produces opium, and a number of important northbound

export routes traverse it. But his main income seems to derive from

the export of the emeralds of his native Panjsher Valley. Since 1999

he has had a joint venture agreement with a Polish company. Hence

there are plentiful resources available to finance the war, in addition

to direct foreign assistance.

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2.2 Afghan Actors

At present there are two principal fighting forces in Afghanistan: the

Islamic Movement of Taliban, controlled by a group of Qandahari

mullahs, which dominates (without necessarily controlling on a dayto-

day basis) most of the country through its Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan

(IEA), and the United Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan

(UF), which leads the internationally-recognized though administratively

non-existent Islamic State of Afghanistan (ISA). The UF includes

several groups, but in practical terms it mostly consists of the

Tajik forces led by Ahmad Shah Massoud in the far northeast of the

country and some Shi’a forces in the Central region (Hazarajat). Several

leaders of the UF from other regions and ethnic groups have recently

returned to Afghanistan; it remains to be seen if they will be

able to raise significant military forces.

2.2.1 The Taliban

The Islamic Movement of Taliban (Da Afghanistano da Talibano

Islami Tahrik) represents an indigenous Afghan network that has become

integrated with transnational networks through the past 23

years of war and dispersion and is in turn organized, strengthened,

and manipulated to serve the Pakistani military’s concept of national

and regional security. The Taliban developed from the network of

teachers and students from private, rural-based madrasas in southern

Afghanistan and the neighboring Pashtun-populated areas of Pakistan.

Despite their expansion beyond their original home base, the

Taliban leaders remain a group of mainly Qandahari mullahs trained

in madrasas affiliated with the Deobandi movement in both Afghanistan

and Pakistan. This leadership thus has both a regional and ideological

component. They also represent a kind of social revolution:

the sons of poor families from junior tribes and clans (neither Mullah

Umar, the amir, nor Mullah Rabbani, head of the government until

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his recent death, are Durranis) have used their madrasa education and

foreign aid to overthrow the tribal aristocracy that used to dominate

life in southern Afghanistan. They have also displaced the wealthy,

university-educated, largely Persian-speaking elites that dominated

Kabul.

The formal IEA ruling structure is headed by an amir (Mullah Muhammad

Umar), who is assisted by shuras, or consultative bodies. He

apparently has the final say on all matters. Subordinate to him is the

Kabul shura, effectively a cabinet of ministers, as well as a shura of

ulama and a military shura. The IEA has appointed provincial governors

and administrators of districts, cities, towns, and precincts from

the center, following the administrative divisions of former Afghan

governments. As in most such governments, the administrators are

invariably natives of areas other than the ones they govern, and have

been regularly shuffled between areas.

Most of the Taliban’s resources and efforts go to the war effort and

to maintaining security in the areas under their control. They have reduced

checkpoints on the roads to a minimum, and petty crime has

diminished. They have also established a new security service, the

Ministry of Enforcement of Virtue and Suppression of Vice (al-amr bi

al-ma’ruf wa al-nahi ‘an al-munkar). This ministry is responsible for

the enforcement of all Taliban decrees regarding moral behavior, including

the decrees restricting women’s employment and dress, enforcing

men’s beard length and mosque attendance, regulating activities

of UN agencies and NGOs, commanding destruction of “graven

images,” and requiring the labeling of religious minorities.

Mullah Umar and all but one member of the Supreme Shura are Qandahari

and regional origins are known to the authors are Qandahari Pashtuns.

The Kabul shura is also predominantly Qandahari but includes

addition to the modern province of Qandahar.

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more Eastern Pashtuns, a couple of Persian speakers, and at least one

Uzbek. All without a single exception are Sunni mullahs trained in private

madrasas.

The Taliban's political structure and methods of governance have deteriorated

over the past few years. Until 1996-97, Mullah Umar was at

the apex of a consultative process amongst the Pashtuns. The Supreme

Shura in Qandahar would meet often and include the military

and Kabul shuras as well as non-shura members such as military

commanders, mullahs, traders, businessmen, and representatives of

local tribal groups.

Now, however, decision-making has become totally centralized and

secretive. Shura meetings are no longer held, and the Kabul ministers

are rarely consulted about key decisions. Mullah Umar has become

much more isolated. The core group around him includes some Qandahari

ulama and judges of the Supreme Court of Qandahar (who are

all above 70 years old, have never traveled outside Qandahar, and are

extremist and simplistic in their views); a few powerful, hard-line individuals

from the Taliban structure such as Mullah Nuruddin Turabi,

Minister of Justice and head of the Religious Police, Chief of Army

Staff Mullah Mohammed Hasan, and Commander Dadullah; individual

Afghans working in Umar's office who were educated in Pakistani

madrasas and have a strongly expansionist and jihadist view of the

Taliban's role in the Muslim world; Usama Bin Ladin and other Arabs

who advise Umar on foreign policy (some Afghans from Qandahar

even claim that Bin Ladin is consulted on domestic issues such as the

Buddhas); and Pakistani ISI officers. These groups now all use Umar's

position as Amir al-Mu’minin (Commander of the Faithful) to provide

legitimacy for increased centralization. Many of them believe that

all non-Islamist foreigners, including NGOs and journalists, should

be expelled from Afghanistan, as manifested in the expulsion of the

BBC correspondent and the recent attacks on humanitarian agencies.

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At the same time the Taliban's periodic purges of the bureaucracy in

Kabul's ministries, now filled with young, barely-educated Taliban,

have further worsened day-to-day governance. The relatively moderate

Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, whose

appointment the international community welcomed, appears to have

little influence over decision-making. He functions more as an envoy

for Mullah Umar than as a key formulator of foreign policy. Since the

January 2001 imposition of further UN Security Council sanctions the

Kabul ministers have become virtually redundant even in dealing with

day-to-day problems faced by Western NGOs in Kabul. Key decisions

such as the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas are attributed

to what is euphemistically called ''The Council of Ulama,'' which is

supposed to be made up of 400 mullahs from across the country. It

rarely meets in plenary, however, and leaves decision-making and the

issuing of fatwas to the small group of Qandahari ulama around Mullah

Umar. On the Buddha issue, none of the shuras or the Kabul ministers

were consulted. Religious fatwas seem to be replacing government

instructions or orders.

Pakistan, rather than strengthening internal governance and bringing

more practical moderate elements to the forefront, has allowed this

deterioration to take place, because it is easier for Pakistan to influence

decision making with a few key players rather than larger shuras.

Pakistan has spent no effort or money on training an appropriate

Taliban bureaucracy, (in contrast to what it attempted to do, with US

support, for the mujahidin based in Peshawar during the Soviet war).

This deterioration in internal governance and centralization with an

even more obscure process of decision-making makes it virtually impossible

for the international community, UN agencies, and the UN

mediator to interact with the present Taliban leadership. This presents

a major impediment to any peace process, humanitarian aid, or attempts

to moderate the Taliban.

The Taliban are effectively a transnational organization, reflecting the

tween Afghan Pashtuns and many parts of Pakistani society. Their

military advisory structure includes Pakistani officers. Their decisionmaking

process includes routine consultation with Pakistani Deobandi

religious leaders. Their foreign relations depend on Pakistani

advice and logistical assistance. Their military force recruits fighters

from Pakistani madrasas, whose students are estimated to form as

much as 20-30 percent of the total. Extremist Pakistani Deobandi organizations

(Sipah-i Sahaba, Lashkar-i Jhangvi, Harakat-ul-Mujahidin)

have bases in areas under their control. Their economic base depends

on economic networks linked to the Pashtun diaspora in Karachi and

Dubai, as well as the Pakistani administration in the NWFP and Baluchistan.

The Pakistani rupee is so widely used as a currency in areas

under Taliban control that the Pakistan banking authorities have

launched an investigation of its impact on their economy. The

integration of Pakistani elements into the Taliban and IEA at all levels

is not simply a result of a policy of the Pakistani government or

military. Rather, the latter use and respond to pressures from these

transnational links, which reflect deep changes in the social and

political structures of the region.

The Taliban are also linked, increasingly as their isolation from the

global mainstream grows, to the transnational fringe of global Islamist

politics, including Usama Bin Ladin. They also provide a haven to the

Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, some Chechens and Uyghurs, and

assorted militants from other countries. While these links began opportunistically,

as they persist, they too become complemented with

various forms of structural integration.

The Taliban began with Afghan Islamic goals: restoring peace to the

country by imposing their conception of sharia. The events of the

past few years have brought them into increasing confrontation with

the mainstream international community, which they did not anticipate

(having little or no direct knowledge of the entities that compose

it), and increasing contact and collaboration with radical Islamic

groups with which they previously had almost as little contact. The

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result has been a conflict between their national and ideological goals,

which most recently played itself out in the internal conflict over the

destruction of statues. Is their main goal to rebuild Afghanistan under

their leadership, which would require engagement with international

forces who can assist that effort, even at the expense of ideology? Or

is it to establish an uncompromising Islamic state in alliance with

Islamist transnational extremists? Mullah Umar recently was quoted as

saying that half of Afghanistan was already destroyed, and that he was

willing to destroy the other half to protect Usama Bin Ladin. This

contradicts the Taliban’s original goals. The process of escalation between

the Taliban and the mainstream international community has

strengthened the radical elements, which now appear to be in full

control with the backing of both Mullah Umar and the relevant portions

of the Pakistani military.

2.2.2 Anti-Taliban Groups

A number of the groups arrayed against the Taliban form a nominal

alliance called the National Islamic United Front for the Salvation of

Afghanistan (Jabha-yi Muttahid-i Islami-yi Milli bara-yi Nijat-i Afghanistan),

the political force that supposedly exercises authority over

the Islamic State of Afghanistan (ISA). Though the ISA holds Afghanistan’s

UN seat and claims to rule the entire area outside of Taliban

control, it never controlled a coherent state structure, a major reason

it lost to the Taliban. This group includes:

This group, primarily composed of Tajiks, is nominally led by Burhanuddin

Rabbani, leader of the more or less defunct party Jamiat-i

Islami and President of the more or less defunct ISA. The most powerful

leader of this group is Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of

the Panjsher Valley and founder of the older Supervisory Council of

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the North, who is officially Rabbani’s deputy and Minister of Defense.

Both are Sunni Persian-speakers (hence Tajiks) but from different

subregions and with different bases of support. Reports claim that

the forces of Ismail Khan, trained in Iran, will join Massoud’s on the

front this year (airlifted to Dushanbe and thence to Afghanistan). Ismail

Khan, the Amir of Herat, was ousted by the Taliban in 1995,

captured by them in 1997 and escaped from their prison in Qandahar

last year. He was thereafter based in Iran and is reported to have returned

to Western Afghanistan. Thus far, however, Massoud is the

only leader who counts in this group and has increasingly surrounded

himself solely with Panjsheris. These include some of the most talented

people still in Afghan politics in Afghanistan, but they have an

extremely narrow ethnic and political base. They are succeeding, however,

in increasing their international support (Massoud was received

by the French government and European parliament in April 2001)

through campaigns against the Taliban, which the latter have obligingly

facilitated. In private conversations, Massoud’s top officials admit

that they do not believe they can rule Afghanistan, but that they

intend to resist the Taliban until an alternative Pashtun leadership

with whom they can work emerges.

This group brought together Northern, mostly Uzbek, former militias

of the Communist regime. It has lost all territory under its control,

and many of its commanders have defected to the Taliban. Its founder

and principal leader was Abdul Rashid Dostum, based in Turkey

at least until spring 2001. Dostum returned to Afghanistan and met

Massoud and supposedly has proceeded to a base area to raise troops.

His principal rival, Abdul Malik Pahlawan, thought to be responsible

for the massacre of thousands of Taliban prisoners in Mazar-i Sharif

in June 1997, seems to be based in Mashhad, Iran.

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The principal Shi’a party in Afghanistan with support mainly among

the Hazara ethnic group, this group was originally formed under Iranian

sponsorship in order to unite eight Shi’a parties. Its leader, Muhammad

Karim Khalili, is now based in Iran. It lost control of most

of its base in Hazarajat in August 1998, though it continues to hold

out in some pockets and occasionally recaptures some territory. The

party split, with one major leader (Akbari) joining the Taliban. Besides

Massoud, this party (together with the Shi’a Harakat-i Islami) forms

the only anti-Taliban military forces still operating in Afghanistan.

Harakat is a Shi’a party that never joined Wahdat, originally led by

Ayatollah Muhammad Asif Muhsini, and long allied with Jamiat. Its

relations with Iran are strained, and it split within the past year. Its

leadership is mostly non-Hazara Shi’a. One faction of this party constitutes

the mainstay of the successful resistance to the Taliban in

Dara-yi Suf district.

Abd al-Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf, also a Kharruti Pashtun (from Paghman,

near Kabul) was the leader most favored by Saudi Arabia in the jihad,

and was known by Afghans as “Wahhabi.” He has stayed allied with

Burhanuddin Rabbani, with whom he worked at Kabul University in

the 1970s, and has a small base in Kapisa province.

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This faction regroups some former leaders of the shura of Jalalabad,

notably Haji Abdul Qadir. Abdul Qadir and his Arsala clan, major

landlords and tribal khans in the area around Jalalabad, fought as mujahidin

against the Soviets under the nominal leadership of Deobandi

clerics who now support the Taliban. After they took power in Jalalabad

in 1992, they made millions of dollars through smuggling consumer

goods from Dubai to Pakistan and involvement in the drug

trade, of which his province became one of the centers. Usama Bin

Ladin originally sought refuge in their area. Some small groups in the

East are still said to be loyal to this group. Together with Sayyaf, this

group enables the UF to claim it is not exclusively composed of non-

Pashtuns.

These groups had somewhat different aims. Wahdat and Junbish articulated

the need for regional autonomy and power sharing among

various groups in Afghanistan. Hazara groups in particular insisted on

control over their own areas and recognition of Shi’a law (fiqh-i

Ja’afari) in their own affairs. Jamiat’s articulated plans for the future

Afghan state seemed as centralized as the Taliban’s, though the ISA

was less successful in implementing such plans. Massoud is said to

have developed a plan for a quasi-federal system based on nine regions.

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This radical Islamist party, led by Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, a Kharruti

Pashtun from Northern Afghanistan, favored by Pakistan until 1994,

now controls few military or political resources other than the infamy

of its leader. Hikmatyar apparently still has much of the US and Saudi

money he was given for jihad, however, which he could use to disrupt

developments he opposes.

2.3 International Actors

The combined effects of the war and the dissolution of the Soviet

Union have restored Afghanistan’s previous status as a country with

open borders crossed by trade routes and subject to the conflicting

ambitions of regional powers. The relevant international actors now

include not only states in Afghanistan’s neighborhood and the US,

Russia, and China, but also international oil and gas companies, Islamic

movements based in the Middle East, the United Nations, including

both its political department and humanitarian agencies, and nongovernmental

organizations (NGOs), both Western and Islamic.

2.3.1 States

The state with the closest ties and strongest links to Afghanistan is

Pakistan. It is a proactive rather than reactive player. Pakistan’s military

rulers saw the war in Afghanistan as an opportunity to reverse

Pakistan’s antagonistic relations with Afghanistan over Pashtunistan,

providing it with “strategic depth” in its confrontation with India.

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Hence successive governments, regardless of ideology, supported

only Islamist rather than nationalist groups in Afghanistan, as the

former opposed ethno-nationalist claims against a fellow Muslim

state, or at least did not raise them so loudly. The deep involvement

of Pakistan in the war also helped incorporate many ethnic Pashtuns

more firmly into key military and civilian elites there. As a result the

Pashtun question changed for Pakistan. Previously, Afghan nationalist

governments had used Pashtun border tribes to raid or exert pressure

on Pakistan, which had consequently been hostile to Pashtun rule in

Afghanistan.

Now, however, Pakistani Pashtun elites, well integrated into the Pakistani

state, could exercise clientelistic control or influence over religiously

oriented Pashtun groups in Afghanistan, while nationalist

groups and their tribal base had become weakened. Pashtun rule of

the “right” kind in Afghanistan thus became an instrument of Pakistani

influence, rather than a security threat through the Pashtunistan

question. The opening of Central Asia led some in Pakistan also to

see trade and pipeline routes through Afghanistan to Central Asia as a

key to the country’s future security and well-being. These would add

yet greater “strategic depth.”

Since 1994 the government and military of Pakistan have provided

comprehensive assistance to the Taliban, including military supplies,

training, assistance with recruitment of Pakistani and Afghan madrasa

students, seconding of military advisers, financial support, diplomatic

representation and advocacy, and, according to several governments,

regular military units for key offensives. The Pakistani Directorate of

Interservices Intelligence (ISI) also uses bases in Afghan territory for

some training of Pakistani extremist groups who supply many of the

non-Kashmiri fighters in Kashmir. These links constitute a major

contradiction in Pakistani policy: some of the same groups the ISI

uses in Kashmir are responsible for sectarian terrorism in Pakistan itself.

Half-hearted attempts by elements of the Pakistani military regime

to get the Taliban to hand some of these over have failed.

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But the Taliban’s links to Pakistan do not end (and did not begin)

with the government. As mentioned above, the Taliban derive much

of their religious inspiration from the Deobandi movement in Pakistan.

Virtually all of the Taliban leaders were refugees in Pakistan for

several years and studied in madrasas there affiliated with one branch

or another of the Deobandi political party Jamiat ul-Ulema-i Islam

(JUI). These links remain important and provide thousands of new

recruits (both Afghans and Pakistanis) to the Taliban.

The Taliban also receive support from traders based in Quetta, Peshawar,

and Karachi who benefit from the Taliban’s improvement of

road security. Afghan, Pakistani, and Arab traders based in the UAE

have also contributed to the Taliban. They are linked to the local administrations

of NWFP and Baluchistan, who are remunerated for

permitting smugglers’ markets to continue. Officials of these provinces

also benefit from the system of permits in force for the export

of food and fuel to the Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan. The

Taliban thus have a broad set of links to Pakistan’s society and polity.

At the same time, the economy of smuggling, drug production, terrorism,

and illegality that has grown up in Afghanistan and flourished

under the Taliban directly menaces the alleged reformist goals of

Pakistani Chief Executive General Pervez Musharraf. Some of the

harshest “sanctions” against the Taliban have been imposed not by

their political enemies but by their greatest supporter, Pakistan, as it

tried to gain greater control over the ATTA, cross-border trade, and

wheat exports. Forcing Pakistan to confront this contradiction (rather

than easing it through weakly-conditioned IMF loans) should be high

on the international agenda.

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Saudi Arabia appears to have continued to fund much of Pakistan’s

policy in Afghanistan through both official and unofficial channels

until mid-1998, when relations broke down over Usama Bin Ladin.

Private Arab groups in the Persian Gulf may continue to supply support.

Iran’s links to Afghan groups have changed and deepened over time.

Iran’s policy is dictated by a combination of solidarity with the Shi’a

in Afghanistan (and in Pakistan) and strategic concerns over the US

embargo, access to Central Asia, and rivalry with Saudi Arabia. Hostility

to the Taliban deepened when forces fighting alongside the latter

(apparently Pakistanis from Sipah-i Sahaba) murdered eight Iranian

consular officials and a journalist in Mazar-i Sharif during the August

1998 Taliban takeover. Iran is a major supplier of arms and ammunition

to the UF and serves as a base for meetings among the UF’s

various feuding factions. Iran has mounted a significant military effort

against drug traffickers from Afghanistan, who present a significant

security threat in some provinces. Some forces in Iran, notably the

Foundation of the Shrine of Imam Ja’afar in Mashhad, have invested

in the transit trade and thus have economic links with Afghanistan

and, indirectly, the Taliban. Iran and the Taliban have renewed the

traditional Afghan-Iran dispute over the Helmand river waters, intensified

by the current drought.

Russia has taken the lead in seeking sanctions against the Taliban in

the UN Security Council. Moscow sees the Taliban as central to a

network of Islamist groups, including Usama Bin Ladin, undermining

security in Russia itself, as in Chechnya and Daghestan, and elsewhere

in the former Soviet space, in particular Central Asia (as through the

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Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan). Afghanistan now plays a central

role in Russian policy in the region as the main argument for returning

Central Asia to Russian military hegemony. Russia has also played

an important role in selling arms to the northern groups, especially

Massoud. Russia has granted Massoud access to an air base in Kulab,

home of Tajikistan’s Russian-supported ruling clan. Within the region

Russia plays both an Islamic card (aspiring to be the protector of Central

Asia from fundamentalists) and an ethnic card (protecting Tajiks