by EQBAL AHMAD
(The following article was written by late Professor Eqbal Ahmad in 1998. It is obvious that the dire consequences predicted were ignored by the Pakistani establishment, and as usual, the victims have been the common people. Ed.)
The costs of Islamabad’s Afghan policy have been augmenting since 1980 when Mohammed Ziaul Haq proudly declared Pakistan a “front line state” in the Cold War. Those costs — already unbearable in proliferation of guns, heroin, and armed fanatics — are likely now to multiply in myriad ways. The Taliban will certainly be assisted by Islamabad to consolidate their precarious conquests. Successful or not, this will be an expensive undertaking, an expense Pakistan is ill-prepared to bear. Taliban victories have not put an end to their challengers; they are there and do not lack sponsors. The prospect is for protracted proxy warfare. It may cost some billions to keep the Taliban in the saddle, assuming that Pakistan avoids being sucked into a larger war with Iran or Russia or both.
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The domestic costs of Pakistan’s friendly proximity to the Taliban are incalculable and potentially catastrophic. Our embroilment, willy nilly, in the Bin Laden affair, is a case in point. More importantly, the Taliban’s is the most retrograde political movement in the history of Islam. The warlords who proscribe music and sports in Afghanistan, inflict harsh punishments upon men for trimming their beards, flog taxi drivers for carrying women passengers, prevent sick women from being treated by male physicians, banish girls from schools and women from the work place, are not returning Afghanistan to its traditional Islamic way of life as the Western media reports sanctimoniously. They are devoid of the ethics, aesthetics, humanism, and Sufi sensibilities of traditional Muslims, including Afghans of yesteryears. To call them medieval, as did the protesters in Tehran, is to insult the age of Hafiz and Saadi, of Rabi’a Basri and Mansur Al-Hallaj, of Amir Khusrau and Hazrat Nizamuddin. The Taliban are the expression of a modern disease, symptoms of a social cancer which shall destroy Muslim societies if its growth is not arrested and the disease is not eliminated. It is prone to spreading, and the Taliban will be the most deadly communicators of this cancer if they remain so organically linked to Pakistan. The Sipah-i-Sahaba leader’s greetings to his Afghan co-believers is but one signal of the menace ahead.
Policy-makers in Islamabad assume that a Taliban-dominated government in Kabul will be permanently friendly towards Pakistan. The notion of strategic depth is founded on this presumption. This too is an illusion. The chances are that if they remain in power, the Taliban will turn on Pakistan, linking their brand of Islamism with a revived movement for Pakhtunistan. I have met some of them and found ethnic nationalism lurking just below their “Islamic” skin. It is silly to presume their debt to Pakistan as an impediment to their ambitions. Old loyalties rarely stand in the way of new temptations. Also, as the threat of local rivals recedes, their resentments against Pakistan’s government will rapidly augment since Islamabad will be in no position to meet their expectations of aid. The convergence of ethnic nationalism and religion can mobilise people decisively. However inadvertently, Islamabad is setting the stage for the emergence in the next decade of a powerful Pakhtunistan movement.
There may still be time to help avert the disasters that are likely to accrue from the Taliban’s domination of Afghanistan. Pakistan’s interest lies in the establishment of a common peace there, one as welcome to Afghanistan’s other neighbours as to us. Our future is best served if power in Afghanistan is pluralistically shared by its ethnic groups, for that alone can inhibit the pursuit of ethnically-based territorial ambition. If we must live with a theocracy next door, it is better to live with an enlightened rather than a barbaric version of it. Also, if Afghanistan is to regain life, it needs a government hospitable to international aid and this, patently, the Taliban are not.
It is unlikely that the architects of Islamabad’s Afghan policy will pay heed to arguments such as these. Dissenting points of view have always been ignored in Pakistan with tragic consequences. After hesitating for a while on the side of wisdom, Ayub Khan ignored them in 1965. We were relatively young and gullible then, and so lost a costly war but declared victory. In 1971, Yahya Khan, Bhutto and others dismissed warnings of impending disaster as treachery and lost half the country. Bhutto rejected early friendly criticism of the failings of his government, suppressed the magazine in which they were published, and ruled on to be overthrown and executed by a usurper of his choice. He alone paid for his blunders personally; for those of the others only the land and the people continue to pay. Yet they do not hear and do not see even the obvious. No wonder they are looking for strategic depth.
Al-Ahram for more