Sunday 26 July 2009

the Afghan Jihad-Taliban-Ethnic Strife-US role

The Afghan Jihad-Taliban- Ethnic Strife
American Role in the Strife

The U.S.A. had not forgotten their humiliation in Vietnam. The image of senior officers scrambling to get on fleeing helicopters, stamping on the hands of women and children trying to hold on to the boarding ramp of the planes was indelibly printed on their conscious mind and thought. They had blamed the Soviet Union for the debacle, declining to accept any blame whatsoever for the uncalled for interference in the affairs of another country, which was no threat to its own security. They were given a chance for sweet vengeance on an old adversary, on a platter. Led by Berzhenev, a man in advanced dotage, the Soviet Union sent in troops to depose a double agent masquerading as a communist loyalist and replace him with a trusted minion.
As a by-product of super power tussle Zia got a reprieve. From a pariah the status he fully deserved after overthrowing a civilian government in 1977 and executing Bhutto in 1979, he metamorphosed into a saintly defender of all Godly faiths. He was offered a few hundred million dollars by the US President Carter, which he contemptuously rejected as peanuts . Zia made the most of the Afghan situation. In pre-independence days, the Afghan government had supported Indian national congress against the Muslims League. Afghans have never accepted the so-called Durand line between British India and their country drawn by a British administrator. It had actively aided and abetted the separatist Pukhtoonistan movement in the NWFP. It had continued to support archrival India against Pakistan.
Zia offered Afghan rebels moral, political and material help. They needed it and gratefully accepted it. By waging a “holy” war on the infidel Soviets he could also rehabilitate himself in the Muslim world. He could get into the good books of the West and was able to extract arms and financial support. Having established his Mujahid (Holy warrior) status he could also impose his vision of Islamic rule on Pakistan . With money and material to spare, he was successful in making the whole country one vast detention camp.
Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were pinned down in Afghanistan draining the grinding Soviets economy to near halt. Pakistan military’s arsenal was over flowing. Officers in their hundreds were sent to the USA for training in armed forces academies. British commonwealth, a fossilized elephant invited Pakistan back as a member. Zia was welcomed with open arms in the brotherhood of Muslim heads of state.
. Bhutto had threatened to try Zia for treason. He would pose an unacceptable risk in exile. He could come back. A murder case was the only recourse. Some judges had to be replaced before Bhutto was put on trial. The presiding judge was the same person whom Bhutto had threatened with abduction of his daughter. Death sentence for allegedly ordering execution of an opposition politician was duly handed down by the high court. A while later the Supreme Court confirmed the sentence.
Foreign observers including a former highly regarded U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark stated categorically that proper procedures of Pakistan penal code had not been followed. Judges had acted with impropriety, openly favored the prosecution, and accepted dubious evidence.
I was on a visit to Pakistan when Bhutto was hanged. There were a few riots; one man torched himself publicly to death. The people had been thoroughly cowed. If Bhutto had not so callously betrayed the working class, they would have stood by him. In the end his support had dwindled to a narrow group of courtiers with no constituency of their own .
It was a tragic though perhaps fitting end to a life of great promise. But his ambition and arrogance were overwhelming. He had no scruples either. All his political life he had let his mentors down. Once entrenched in power he took on all the centers of power in the country and the USA simultaneously.
Zia was averse to the risk of holding an election. His patrons in the West and public opinion at home forced his hands. He resorted to a time worn subterfuge. Harking back to the Islamic traditions that the rightly guided Caliphs were chosen by consensus, candidates did not present themselves for office and that there were no political groups-parties in Islam, he hit upon the idea of referendum to choose a President . His was the only name on ballot and the question was something like “If you believe in the rule of Islamic Shariah, Zia ul Haq is the President”. No Muslim could deny Shariah, so there were hardly any negative votes.
I made a tour of polling stations in Karachi, the most politically savvy, aware and conscious city in the country. Few went to the polling booths. I found only the agents of the election commission lounging around in most of the polling stations. There were actually more armed policemen in the tents housing the ballot boxes than there were voters.
Elsewhere in the country police and other officials bussed and coerced people to vote. That could not be done in Karachi. Denizens of the city, veterans of numerous uprisings, are not easy to cow down. It has a concentration of foreign press too.
. According to neutral observers less than 15% of the people voted. Zia got 99.9% of the votes cast. Included on the ballot papers were names of candidates for membership of a Majlis’ e Shoora. Candidates were barred from declaration of affiliation to a political party, though the restriction was honored more in breach than in compliance.
Zia also created senate. Shoora elected some members of the senate, others were chosen by the President from different professions. Professional bodies of journalists, doctors, lawyers were asked to offer their choice, with the admonition that only compliant persons be designated .
Only second-rate timeservers participated in the elections. The assembly was a motley crowd of rank outsiders and nobodies. After picking up a non-entity for PM, Zia even engineered deposition of the first speaker of his hand picked assembly, Fakhre Imam, head of a “Pir” house, who though an erstwhile disciple of Bhutto, yet was a man of integrity .
The Afghan Jihad, in addition to corrupting Pakistan with easy money, was to have serious and far-reaching deleterious consequences. Soviet Union lavished Klashnikovs an assault rifle, on Afghans. The other major preoccupation of these tribesmen besides blood feuds and “honor” killing , is smuggling contraband goods.
Afghans, though second to none in loving combat, do not cherish fighting for others. They, in any case, prefer a buck to a bullet. With touching impartiality, they sold the arms, Russian and American, to any who could pay. They ended up in Iran, some Arab countries. Drug dealers, warlords, racketeers and smugglers also bought the arms. They could now out gun the police and militia and out class Pakistan coast guard. International arms dealers made immense profit, beyond the dreams of avarice. Pakistan army, the handlers of the traffic, kept a large portion for themselves.
Afghanistan’s main cash crop is poppy out of which opium is extracted. They had, hitherto, sold the low-tech product. Opium addiction, innocuous compared to that of its sophisticated end products morphine and worse still heroin, was fairly common in South Asia and China. Zia, as a part of his “reforms” cancelled the licenses of the native shops, which sold opium. That measure only sent them underground.
Russians, in a diabolically clever move, imparted the know how and wherewithal for making heroin to the Afghans. Bulk of heroin ended up in the West. Pakistan being the transit territory also spawned a large crop of drug dealers. From a minuscule number in nineteen sixties, the count of addicts rose to a million by the time Zia died in 1988. In 2007 they were estimated at three million.
Army generals supervised the traffic, provided safe logistic support and raked in millions of dollars. A feudal, Nawab Hoti, with land holding larger than the area of many small countries, reportedly offered to exchange all his property for a general’s income in a month. Other entrepreneurs joined in. Many ventured abroad. Some were caught and are still languishing in European and American jails.
A combination of factors was taking toll of the quasi-military dispensation under Zia. Russians, meeting more organized opposition in Afghanistan, were surreptitiously looking for a way out. They offered a deal to the Americans. Americans knew that Zia was taking them for a ride. Their main clients were Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Umar of Taliban fame. Though not able to foresee the grief the men would cause them, they wanted to disassociate with the likes of these people too.
Benazir released from jail on health grounds went to England for treatment. She now had freedom to lobby foreign governments. Zia’s administration was riddled with scandals, financial and salacious. He had ditched Mullahs after using them in early years of his rule. They were getting restive too. A combined front, Movement for restoration of Democracy , was rigged.
Past master at the game of divide and rule Zia created an ethnic immigrant (Mohajir Qaumi Movement) party and three second string native ethnic groupings, Punjabi-Pakhtoon front and Jeay Sind. The first two were in direct economic competition with Mohajirs, the third, in denial of the reality that Mohajirs comprised at least forty five percent of the population of Sindh province, and the majority in all but a few urban centers, disdained any dialogue with the former.
The “law and order” situation, as the governments are so fond of calling it, deteriorated and would lead to the birth of armed gangs. They would make daring day light raids into businesses, banks and wedding receptions . Kidnapping for ransom became a routine. Police, of course, gave back up support. In honor of the occasion they would exchange their official garb for fancy dress.
The gangs recruited unemployed university graduates. They were invariably polite, respecting women, and considerate to children and elders and would shoot only when they had to, on meeting resistance. They always warned men folk, that they would not be harmed if they were sensible.
Soviet Union, drained out of all vitality, and in a desperate attempt to save vestiges of super power status, had been shifting ground. They sent peace feelers and made profession of coexistence. They had a glamorous, articulate sophisticate in Gorbachev who played skillfully on fears of the West, and got them to agree to mutual arms reduction. The package included the nuclear arsenal and a nuclear nonproliferation treaty. He was an unequaled charmer. In one of the summits he even got Reagan to agree to total nuclear disarmament. After his advisors had told him in simple words what he had conceded to the Russian, he had to retract.
Gorbachev offered a deal to America to extricate his forces out of Afghanistan. Zia sent his PM Junejo to sit in on the parleys and look out for Pakistani’s interest. Going beyond his brief (? emboldened by the USA to do it) he agreed to the Soviet-American agreement.
Zia wanted no part of it. He had visions of restoring glory of Islam by annihilating Soviet army in Afghanistan. He had made his opposition to any accommodation known all over. Fully aware of the reach of powers that be, he became jittery. Far from being unfailingly polite, he became rude and short tempered.
Zia dismissed the PM. The poor man was told of the shove when he landed at the Islamabad Airport, after what he thought, had been a notable achievement. Zia refused to call off his hounds, and vowed to ambush the retreating soviets. But Americans would not take lightly to their own poodle snapping at the heels of their new bosom buddy .
Zia was a high level agent, too big to be ignored, or sidelined with impunity. An incident had to be contrived to get rid of him. Zia was scheduled to observe a test run of a tank America wanted to sell to Pakistan in a place called Bahawalpur. He invited a very reluctant U.S. military attaché and the ambassador to accompany him. He also took along a dozen senior Pakistani generals on the ride .
On the return trip, Zia invited the vice chief of the army who had flown in his own aircraft to join him on the plane to discuss the merits of the tank. The man politely declined the honor on some pretext. Zia’s plane, C 147 transport workhorse of U.S. army with a very high safety record, exploded a few minutes into the air taking him and fellow generals into their cherished paradise. It was rumored that just before the plane took off a crate of choice mangoes, a gift of the sacked PM, had been taken aboard and had explosives tucked inside .
The vice chief , turned his plan around, landed at the airport, made sure Zia was good and dead, and flew to military headquarters to a hastily convened meeting of Lt generals which decided to abide by the constitution and hand the presidency over to the chairman of the senate. The latter gentlemen appointed an interim PM and cabinet. They, in their turn, rubber-stamped the U.S.-Soviet agreement on Afghanistan.

TALIBAN
A brief resume of early Muslim history is a pre-requisite to understand the Taliban movement. An under current of messianic zeal is never far from the surface in Muslim societies. It goes back to the Prophets time. He would, however, temper his message with due consideration for human frailties and preferred persuasion to coercion. On the occasion of the signature ceremony on the peace treaty document (Suleh-e-Hudaibiah) between Muslims and the Quraish of Mecca, the latter objected to his title “ Messenger of God” under his signature. He scratched out the title when he signed the document, rather than forego the obvious advantages of the treaty.
He was to capture Mecca the following year with out firing a shot, or in his case with out launching an arrow. He did not seek revenge from the leaders of Mecca, forgiving even the woman Hinda of the Umayyad clan who had, after the defeat of Muslims in the second battle against the Quraish, chewed the raw liver of his favorite uncle Hamza.
The prophet was gradualist and tolerated affronts to his person with a smile. He forbade alcohol in stages, first asking the believers to abstain from it before the congregational prayers. At the height of his power a Jewish woman on a street in Madina verbally assaulted him. Hid devotees wanted to lynch the woman. He restrained them and listened to her patiently.
I have gone to some length in describing the Prophet’s sagacity to emphasize the fact that his followers, soon after his demise, cast aside his open minded and judicious approach to problems. After him Umar who was to be the second caliph imposed the first Caliph Abu Bakr on the populace.
About a hundred and fifty years after the prophet Abbasids who took over the caliphate, which was by then full-fledged hereditary office. They got the clerics and jurists to meddle with the traditions of the prophet .
The main body of traditions was adulterated with spurious quotations. In the process all the saying which emphasized tolerance, compromise, free will in adoption of any creed, proscription of coercion in conversion, near equal status of women, fair treatment of minorities, pursuit of education etc were eradicated from the texts. A noted scholar Imam Bokhari found about six hundred fifty credible ones among the seventeen thousand then extant.
One “scholar” Ibn-e-Tamayya in early Abbasid period followed an intolerant version of Islam as propounded by one of early jurists of Islam Imam Ibne Hanbal. Another disservice the scholars did to Islam was to proscribe Ijtehad-research, innovation and critical thought- thus closing the gates of rational analysis, leaving only blind belief in stead. The name of Imam Ghazali an eminent jurist of his time springs to mind. His influence was overwhelming. His stated intent was to discourage dissention in ranks.
Fortunately for the faith, the intolerant version did not take root; that is till the eighteenth century when a mediocre Arab cleric by the name of Abdul Wahab revived it. He was not very successful either till he made a compact with am ambitious Chieftain, the founder of the house of Saud.
Wahabi beliefs were largely confined to what is Saudi Arabia now, though a tiny percentage of Muslims did follow the system in other Muslim countries. Mainstream Sunnis in India shunned them before independence. Eighty percent of Muslims are of Sunni and the majority of those follow the most known jurist of Sunni Islam Imam Abu Hanifa. Twenty percent of the faithful are Shias and follow Imam Jafar Sadiq. Imam Abu Hanifa was Imam Jafars’s pupil.
Wahabi sect was given a tremendous boost by the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia. Erstwhile minor tribal Chiefs wanted to live it up. The Mullahs objected. They palmed them off with funds for Madresahs- seminaries out side their own country. Literally thousands were established in Pakistan. That country suffers from grinding poverty and abysmally low literacy rate. If any one offered food, clothes and shelter, millions would swamp him. The seminaries offered religious education too. It was actually memorizing Quran and indoctrination in fantasy- of wine women and dance in the after world. A cadre of hypnotized youth was thus created. When unleashed, they went around targeting and attacking non-Muslims and even Muslims who did not agree with their handlers.
In historical terms, the recent set backs like establishment of Israel, the debacle of 1967 six day war, the 1971 Civil war in East Pakistan, the total reversal after early successes in 1973 Yom Kippur war, Afghan Jihad and post Gulf II war demolition of Iraq, have driven Muslims further away from the path of development, sciences and enlightenment.
Students at the seminaries, now popularly known as Taliban, did not need much persuasion to cross over to Afghanistan to wage the jihad against the infidel. They got a new patron with messianic zeal, Osama Bin Laden, who was worth six hundred million Dollars. All sections and ethnicities of Afghans fought the war against the Soviets. Taliban were the best organized, financed and led. After soviet retreat they eliminated other factions in short order and committed atrocities especially on the minority Shias and women. They closed girl’s schools, sent all female workers, Doctors, teachers, and office workers home. Incessant warfare over two decades had left innumerable widows and orphans with no means of support. No longer allowed to work many resorted to begging and prostitution.
Taliban imposed “religious” courts where destitute women and other disenfranchised populace were summarily tried with out the benefit of defense, witnesses or even prosecuting attorneys. Deranged clerics handed down judgments after a few minutes deliberation. The punishment could be public beatings, amputation of a hand or foot or stoning to death. Thousands in Kabul’s main sports stadium watched the spectacle. On the streets religious police caned women not covered from head to foot, or wearing high heels. Men were subject to measurement of beards, which had to be regulation length, and the more zealous security guards would check the pubic area to see if it was properly shaved. Men had to wear ankle length lower body wear to play soccer- football. Members of one Pakistani soccer team had their heads shaved because they wore shorts.
The virus spread to Pakistan where a common slogan used to be “who will save Pakistan, Taliban, Taliban”. Sectarian violence increased. Members of the “other” sect were murdered for the greater glory of Islam. In Karachi alone, scores of young Shia physicians were killed in cold blood. Mosques were torched, clerics butchered, and kidnapped. Christians and Hindus were not spared either.
Things have actually been getting worse. The political wing of the parties on the lunatic fringe actually won elections in two provinces in Pakistan. But for 9/11 when the US government was forced to exorcise the ghosts-Osama and Saddam-, which were largely their own creation- the deadly virus of Taliban, would have engulfed Pakistan in an epidemic of extremism. It may still do so.

This was a particularly unkind cut. Carter, a highly intelligent man with a master’s degree in physics, had taken to peanut farming after retirement. He was too intelligent, modest and honest, liked to ponder over things, took too long to decide and was a misfit For American Presidency where they preferred Reagan and Bush 2.
Pakhtoon better known as Pathans live on both sides of Pak-Afghan border. A pro Indian National congress leader Ghaffar Khan led a Pukhtoonistan movement, which wanted to merge NWFP with Afghanistan to create a new country.
Afghanistan had been a part of India through most of the Muslim period as well as during the time of Asoka and earlier rulers of the country. Afghans claim that part of their region was carved out into British territory.
An interesting aside is that some academics trace the Pathan race to the lost tribe of Israel and present their large noses as a proof!

. They couldn’t openly support a dictator who had overthrown a democracy, but one US ambassador to Pakistan was to remark famously that he did not care if Mickey Mouse became the PM of the country, as long he/she supported his country’s interests.
Zia was able to promulgate the highly controversial and gender discriminatory Hudood laws.
He infiltrated Pakistan’s prime security agency the Inter Services Intelligence-ISI- with Mullahs.


But still valuable; according to a saying in India a dead elephant is also worth 125,000 Rupees. The saying goes back to a time when you could buy a house for 500.
Students had led protests, were assaulted, jailed and killed by the much more powerful Ayub regime but that did not keep them from toppling his rule.
Expanding on the myth of Islamic state, Zia renamed the national assembly as Majlis e Shoora-consultative assembly. He, as a latter day Caliph, would not be bound by a legislative assembly.
Pakistan Medical Association nominated its long time Guru Dr Hashmi as its nominee only to be told to submit another name. They obliged.
He had resigned from the office of a minister under Ayub, as he had lost a local body election.
Klashnikov is a particularly deadly Russian assault rifle. Together with Heroin it shaped the social norms in the country. It came to be known as “Gun-Drug Culture.

Honor killing, a medieval tradition of murder by sanction of tribal councils for sex outside marriage
MRD Opposition parties in Pakistan concocted a coalition, which fall apart, with amazing speed, after the government has been toppled.
Zia hit upon a not very novel, but as it turned out, a highly pernicious scheme of creating linguistic/ethnic parties. He found ready agents.
Wedding receptions are more of a fashion show than the ones in the West. Women are literally draped in gold and silver ornaments. Just not the recent brides, but the ones married for several years don their wedding gowns.
Reagan was elected largely on the backlash of humiliation of Iranian hostage crisis. Reagan was an intellectual lightweight. When asked a question about foreign policy he recited “ Roses are red, violets are blue; what Al Haig (his first secretary of state) says is always true. Churchill’s daughter Pamela married to an American diplomat Harriman had called an amiable dunce.
His other achievements were sending arms against specific instructions from US congress to Nicaragua through Israel and Iran (the so called Iran contra scandal), attack on tiny Granada and bombing of Gadafi’s tent in which his wife and daughter died.
When asked why they jilted their foreign agents so callously once they had served their purpose, a high CIA official had disdainfully remarked that social security was not part of the contract.
After falling out with Americans Zia started taking extraordinary precautions. He required any one who had any thing to do with the plane he was to fly in, service techs, cleaners, and other staff, to come aboard too. To no avail on this occasion.
This speculation gained credibility in my view when I heard an interview by John Perkins, a former intelligence operative, author of a book “Confessions of an economic hit man”. I have dealt with it in greater detail in the chapter on Globalization.
Zia wore two hats. He had himself ‘elected’ President of the country and kept his job as army chief of the staff. He elevated his vice-Chief to full Generals rank, which only the chief used to have.
These gentlemen are the real power brokers in Pakistan and even their own chief would cross them at his peril.
Quraish were the leading tribe and primary opponents of the prophet. The prophet himself belonged to the tribe, but to a subsidiary branch.
A Muslim Canadian scholar had challenged Muslim clerics to prove that he proscribed the blushful Hippocrene totally. He apparently got the better of his challengers.
As mentioned else where too the prophet had expressly forbidden any documentation of his sayings lest they compete with the word of god. They had been recorded two hundred years after him from memory passed on from his companions to their progeny over several generations.
King Husain of Jordan had flown in a helicopter to Jerusalem to warn Israeli PM Golda Meir of the impending attack. Her defense chief, Moshe Dyan had arrogantly discounted the possibility.
Besides the establishment of a new Muslim state Pakistan in 1947, the only other positive event in recent Muslim history was the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1957. Muslims all the world over specially in the USA, Europe, Pakistan, India and the Far East were were euphoric. Shia-Sunni divide was, for the time, set aside. Arabs were ambivalent.
But the gain was lost in the eight year war with Iraq. Rulers of Arab countries were apprehensive that people in their own countries will be encouraged by the successful revolution in Iran and rise against them and along with the USA which was smarting under the insult of hostage crisis, gave the go ahead to Saddam for the aggression.
Establishment of a theocratic Shia regime also antagonized Sunni Muslims

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