15.11.2001
Afghan pipeline politics
Ahmed Rashid - Taliban: islam, oil and the new great game in central Asia - IB Tarus, 2000, pp274, ?12.95
The Taliban, after suffering serious military reverses at the hands of imperialism and the Northern Alliance, are now facing collapse. So George W Bush and Tony Blair hope.
The Taliban might have become the bogeymen of the official western world, but for many, especially the most desperate, in the muslim countries they represent hope in what appears to be a hopeless world.
Not surprisingly their origins and the physiognomy of this movement are the subject of much public interest, reflected in the publication of a number of books. The author of this work, Ahmed Rashid, has impressive credentials as an authoritative source on the Taliban in particular and Afghan history in general. Rashid is a correspondent for both The Daily Telegraph and numerous other media outlets.
This book, written before the September 11 suicide attacks, formed the basis of a recent Socialist Worker article which served as an apology for the repressive Taliban regime. In it Rashid is lauded as ?one of the most knowledgeable journalists about Afghanistan? (October 6).
The backdrop to the rise of the Taliban is well known. Following the conquest of Kabul and overthrow of the People?s Democratic Party of Afghanistan government of Mohammed Najibullah in 1992, internecine fighting continued amongst the various factions of the mujahedin. Rival warlords jockeyed for position and carved out their own fiefdoms.
The rise of the Taliban is commonly viewed with something approaching awe. Phrases like ?they came from nowhere? are commonplace. In this respect Rashid?s account is invaluable, adding substantially to the rather spare analysis offered in the mainstream media.
Mullah Mohammed Omar is the Taliban?s charismatic founder-leader. He ?emerged as a Robin Hood figure? who allegedly ?asked for no reward or credit from those he helped, only demanding that they follow him to set up a just islamic system? (p25).
His Taliban movement began life of as a small group within the mujahedin, veterans of the US-backed counterrevolutionary war against the PDPA and its Soviet backers. They eventually formed the core of a more substantial group of ?second generation? mujahedin. These ?were young Koranic students, drawn from the madrassas [islamic colleges] that had been set up in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan? (p1) - the talib (students) which gave the movement its moniker.
According to Socialist Worker, they were ?poor young men?, for whom the ?only continuity, [as for] many people in Afghanistan, was religion? (October 6). Rashid?s evaluation of their social roots is more clear cut: for him they were ?what Karl Marx would have termed Afghanistan?s lumpenproletariat? (p32).
The difference in wording is not incidental. The Socialist Workers Party predicates its attitude towards the Taliban on the grounds that they are a movement with origins in a rebellion of the oppressed that has some sort of ?progressive? content. Disclosure of their declassed origins would not easily lead one to conclude that they were likely to fill the role of progressives.
However, while Omar?s demagogy was enough to attract a small but devoted group, more social weight was needed to transform the Taliban into a movement that would at its zenith control 90% of Afghanistan. Here we gain a useful insight into the early years that are shrouded in myth. It is often suggested that they swept the south on the crest of a wave of mass support against corrupt local warlords - or ?muslims that had gone wrong?, as Omar called them. In fact it was other influences which were decisive in smoothing the Taliban?s path to power.
Sponsors were bound to emerge for a movement that had the ideological coherency of the Taliban. Among them were truck transporters from Quetta in Pakistan. Not as surprising as this may seem at first sight. After all Afghan warlordism was economically crippling the truckers, who faced the prospect of having to pay multiple tolls around Kandahar. Several hundred thousand Pakistani rupees were donated to the Taliban in return for clearing the roads. This in turn provided the Taliban with the means with which to win over the local warlords - whose political allegiance came with a price tag. When the Taliban captured Kandahar in 1994 they could elicit tolls in addition to any donations they received. Robin Hood-style piety this was not.
More significantly, the Taliban developed links with first Pakistan and later Saudi Arabia. Pakistan, in its desire for a friendly regime in Kabul, was at the time of the Taliban?s emergence backing general Hikmetyar, who was shelling Kabul in an effort to dislodge the government of Burhanuddin Rabbani. The Taliban share the same Pashtun ethnicity as the population in north-west Pakistan.
There is, by the way, no better illustration of the complexity of the tribal structures of Afghan society than the Pashtuns. All Pashtuns trace their genealogy to Qais, a companion of the prophet Mohammed. However, the Pashtuns themselves are subdivided into two groups: the Durrani and the Ghilzai. The essential difference being that the Durranis claim descent from Qais?s eldest son, while the Ghilzai say they are descended from his second son.
Anyway, Hikmetyar, unable to unite the Pashtuns, consequently failed to defeat Rabbani, causing Pakistan to seek new clients. With the Taliban the Pakistani government assumed it had found a reliable and pliant accessory in Afghanistan - half army, half church. While Pakistan and Saudi Arabia lined up with the Taliban, other significant players in the region - Iran, India and Russia, and the two central Asian states of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan - supported any force that opposed the Taliban.
It would be crude in the extreme to reduce this to narrow economic interest alone. While it is true that Pakistan needed a stable Afghanistan to allow it to open up trading routes with the central Asian states, it also sought strategic advantage over India. Equally germane concerns informed the policies pursued by other states. Saudi Arabia backed the Taliban for almost purely ideological reasons, seeing in the Taliban potential carriers of the Wahabbi message of the House of Saud. Meanwhile the attitude of the US was essentially indifferent.
Socialist Worker unsurprisingly provides us with a clear example of a crude reductionism when it comes to analysing the geo-politics of the region. After detailing the opening of negotiations between the US oil company Unocal and the Taliban regime in 1997, it matter of factly states: ?But by the end of 1997 it was clear the Taliban could not conquer all of the country and make the pipeline possible? (October 6).
Clearly for our SWP allies, the main determinant of US policy towards the Taliban was the need to construct a pipeline from the oil-rich Caspian. Rashid does provide some useful and revealing material on the geo-politics of the region and specifically what he calls ?pipeline politics?. However, his analysis is much more sophisticated than that of Socialist Worker.
The US?s shift in policy towards the Taliban in 1997 was not prompted simply as a result of the new difficulties around the construction of an oil pipeline, but more importantly its fear that the Taliban could overwhelm Pakistan and further destabilise the region. Rashid?s criticism of US involvement (and non-involvement, as it were) find an echo in other commentators, whose basic criticism of the US was that it took too much of a ?hands off? approach towards Afghanistan since aiding the mujahedin in order to defeat the Soviet Union.
It was the treatment of women that the US used as justification when it decided to terminate all support for the Taliban, and it is on this issue that the distortion of Rashid by the SWP is particularly pernicious.
It is true that Rashid cites conditions of isolation in the madrassas in particular as a contributory factor towards the acceptance of the policies of the Taliban leadership by the rank and file talib. But he emphasises that, ?The mullahs who taught them suggested that women were a temptation, an unnecessary distraction from being of service to Allah?. This meant that ?when the Taliban entered Kandahar and confined women to their homes by barring them from working and even from shopping, the majority of the madrassa boys saw nothing unusual in such measures? (p33).
In other words Rashid makes it clear that organised gynophobia was part of the political programme of the Taliban from the very inception of the movement. It is a truism for Marxists that ideas are a product of objectively existing social relations and material circumstances. Unfortunately the SWP needs to opportunistically (and patronisingly) downplay the reactionary political content of the ideas that drove the Taliban in order to paint them in progressive colours. After all the SWP (secretly) supports the Taliban against US imperialism instead of fighting for independent working class politics.
Understandably then, Socialist Worker does not quote the sentiments of Nasiba Gul, a 27 year old Kabuli women interviewed by Rashid before the Taliban took Kabul in 1996: ?No woman, not even the poorest or most conservative, wants the Taliban to rule Afghanistan? (p110).
James Mallory