FWD: Northern alliance, part two

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Then, there is the drug question. Until last year, about three-quarters of  
the world's heroin came from Afghanistan. Both the Taliban and the  
Northern Alliance used profits from opium production and drug smuggling to  
finance their war against each another.
Last July, in a move to win acceptance from the U.S., the Taliban banned  
opium production in the 95 per cent of Afghanistan it controls. While the  
U.S. was initially skeptical, it finally acknowledged this year that the  
Taliban proscription was working.
Much to the embarrassment of those who would support Rabbani's forces,  
however, the Northern Alliance merrily continues in the heroin trade.
According to the U.S. State Department, virtually the entire Afghan opium  
crop this year - about 77 tonnes - was grown in territories controlled by  
the alliance. Russian media report that the heroin manufactured from that  
opium is smuggled to Europe and America through neighbouring states such  
as Tajikistan.

To the outsider, the convoluted interrelations of the Northern Alliance  
might seem pure pathology. But those who know Afghanistan say the  
alliance's history - and indeed the history of the Taliban - can be  
understood only in light of the country's tribal, ethnic and social  
divisions.
Afghanistan is a melange of peoples. The largest group, the Pashtun, who  
inhabit the southern parts of the country near Pakistan, are thought to  
comprise anywhere from 40 to 60 per cent of the population.
Tajiks, who tend to live in the northeast, form the next largest group.  
Smaller minorities include the Hazara of the west (roughly 15 to 20 per  
cent) and the Uzbeks of the northwest. Unlike most Afghanis (who are Sunni  
Muslims), the Hazara tend to be Shi'ite, with links to Iran.  
Traditionally, the Hazara have also faced more discrimination than the  
other groups.
For more than 100 years, a Pashtun clan, the Muhammadzai, dominated the  
country and provided the kings, including the current exiled monarch,  
Mohammed Zahir Shah. The Muhammadzai also provided the governing elite,  
which made efforts, often bitterly opposed by religious conservatives, to  
make Afghanistan more closely resemble the West. (In 1926, one king who  
tried to follow Turkey's lead by requiring women to give up the burqa, or  
head-to-toe veil, was forced to flee the country).
"The government in Afghanistan was like a club for the Muhammadzais,"  
noted Barnett Rubin, an expert on the region and head of New York  
University's Center on International Co-operation, in an interview with  
the U.S.-based Asia Society this year. "This is why so many other newly  
educated elites who were not Muhammadzais resented them and became  
Islamists or radical nationalists or communists or Maoists."
Meanwhile, in the countryside, local tribal leaders and, to a lesser  
extent, local religious leaders remained powerful.
Tensions finally came to a head in 1973. The king was deposed by his  
cousin, Mohammed Daoud, who proclaimed a republic and began - with the  
help of the U.S. and the Soviet Union - to accelerate the pace of reform.
Daoud's move met instant opposition. Islamists - including Rabbani,  
Hekmatyar and Massood - fled to Pakistan to plot against the regime.
Pakistani authorities, alarmed by Daoud's support for carving out an  
independent Pashtun state in their country, eagerly welcomed the Islamist  
dissidents.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, other anti-Daoud forces, including many in the  
military, coalesced around what was, in effect, the Communist party. In  
1978, the more radical wing of the communists seized power in a military  
coup. Their ambitious social and land reform plans, as well as their  
murderous repression of political enemies, sent the country spiralling  
into chaos.
A year later, the Soviets invaded and installed in power the more  
moderate, pro-Moscow wing of the Communist party. That only worsened the  
crisis. It also brought the U.S. into the fray as chief sponsor of the  
anti-Soviet mujahideen. Whatever peace had existed among the country's  
competing groups evaporated during the bitter 10-year war.
Nominally, the mujahideen were all friends. In fact, there was constant  
friction. Rabbani and Massood were Tajiks. Hekmatyar and his forces were  
Pashtun. Hazaras gravitated towards the Shi'ite Party of Islamic Unity,  
now controlled by Karim Khalili.
In the northwest, the country's Uzbek minority under Dostum made peace  
with the Soviets and war on the mujahideen. Not only were the Uzbeks  
different ethnically, they also were less militantly Islamic. (Dostum  
himself drove an armoured Cadillac and vowed he would never bow to those  
who banned whiskey).
The Soviets withdrew in 1989 and the communist government fell in 1992. It  
was at this point that the pent-up ethnic, regional and religious tensions  
spilled into view. At one level, the complex series of alliances and  
betrayals among the mujahideen factions, the Taliban and Dostum's Uzbeks  
that characterize the past nine years boiled down to simple turf  
protection.
Each faction had its own base. The point was to oppose anyone who  
threatened it. For each faction, today's ally could always be tomorrow's  
enemy.

Vickers, the former CIA agent, acknowledges the difficulty of backing a  
Northern Alliance that isn't really an alliance. But, he says, the U.S.  
doesn't have much choice. "The Taliban is the central objective here. Air  
power won't deal with them. We will need ground forces".
"The question is: Whose ground forces? That's why the opposition looks  
attractive ... "
"They may not be perfect. But the question is: Is it better to use them or  
to use Western ground troops?"
Ultimately, however, Vickers and other analysts say the problem the U.S.  
faces is political. To Afghanistan's biggest ethnic group, the Pashtun,  
the Northern Alliance is a melange of old tribal enemies.
"It's not that they (the alliance) are horrible," says Vickers." You don't  
have to demonize them to see that (without a Pashtun component) it won't  
work."
Presumably, this is what the deposed king is supposed to offer: Mohammed  
Zahir Shah is Pashtun. But the 86-year-old ex-monarch has been away from  
the action for 28 years and, as Vickers points out, the king's Muhammadzai  
clan was "not great to the minorities." Still, there appears to be no  
other anti-Taliban Pashtun leader on the scene who is even remotely  
credible.


Would Afghanistan be better off with the Taliban replaced by the alliance?

Vickers, expressing the common wisdom, says it couldn't be worse.
But others point out that the position of women, for instance, is not  
expected to improve greatly under a Northern Alliance government. They  
note that Sayyaf, in particular, tried to introduce his rigorous brand of  
Islamic law to the parts of Afghanistan he and Rabbani controlled well  
before the Taliban became a force.
In 1992, for instance, when Rabbani, Sayyaf, Massood and other mujahideen  
finally captured the country's cosmopolitan capital, Kabul, one of their  
first acts was to ban the use of female newsreaders on television.
Two years later, and still before the Taliban took Kabul, the United  
Nations reported that women in the capital were being told to quit their  
jobs and wear the full-length burqa.
Women who didn't comply were liable to be raped by members of the various  
mujahideen militias that prowled the city. Ironically, Afghan women did  
better - in Western terms - under the communist government that the West  
so vehemently opposed. Still, as far as the war against terrorism goes,  
the welfare of Afghanistan is seen as secondary. The point is to get bin  
Laden.
"I don't want more civil war," says Vickers. "But I suppose even chaos is
better than what we have."


More reports from Afghanistan on

http://www.rawa.org  >>




Kurt-Werner Pörtner