Ethnic supremacy seeing revival in Afghanistan

THE PASHTUN'S ARE THE PROBLEM THEY ARE THE TALIBAN IN AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN

By KAMBAIZ RAFI

I am reminded of my short and sturdy-looking math teacher in a school built by Afghan refugees in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, where I had migrated with my family during the Taliban regime. A man of sharp acumen and snappishly honest temperament, we called him Ustad Nadir (Professor Nadir).

One day Nadir recounted how he had landed his job, a profession that is valued for the social good it can deliver but is largely considered dead-end and lacking in ambition among Afghans. Usually other professions such as medicine, engineering, or law make a hit with aspiring youth. In his case, one reason he became a teacher and not a military officer, the career in which his heart lay originally, was that he was Hazara, a historically persecuted ethnic group in Afghanistan.

Back when Ustad Nadir was probably mapping his future life in mid-20th-century Afghanistan, becoming a military officer was for Pashtuns only, who held a monopoly on social privilege as the politically dominant ethnic group. Even though Afghanistan had signed the 1946 Universal Declaration for Human Rights, the “liberty, dignity and equality” promised in it refracted when adapted to Afghanistan’s society and politics. Here, only one ethnic minority could enjoy those rights and be “more equal” than the rest.

Notwithstanding his career-related bad luck, if my teacher had been born a few decades earlier, his life could have taken a much more tragic turn. He could have been bought and sold in open markets like other members of his ethnic group as a slave.

As chronicled by the early-20th-century historian Faiz Mohammad Katib in his opus Siraj al-Tawarikh, appropriation and exchange of Hazaras as slaves intensified in the late 19th century after Afghan King Abdur Rahman Khan’s bloody push to expand his reign in semi-autonomous central Afghanistan in a series of conquests that laid the foundations of the modern nation-state, ligaturing its birth with plunder and displacement for thousands of Hazaras. A big part of the ethnic group fled to neighboring Pakistan and Iran, where they continue to live after many generations.

Trading in Hazara slaves was officially banned in the 1920s by reformist King Amanullah Khan. However, the ban did not stall the Taliban regime who, nearly 80 years later, resorted to ethnic cleansing after entering Afghanistan’s central highlands in the late 1990s, an area called Hazarajat (“land of Hazaras” in Persian). Hazaras’ belonging predominantly to Shia Islam did not help in assuaging the zeal of the Sunni extremist Taliban in committing mass-scale persecution.

Their journey to normal citizenship in Afghanistan has been long and is far from complete. Saying their name is still widely adjoined with a patronizingly polite “brother” – as in, “Hazara brother” (beradar’e Hazara) – as if saying “Hazara” alone might sound inappropriate.

Rise of the Pashtun

Ethnic supremacy has been central to Afghanistan’s politics and was embodied in a program of Pashtun settlement in the fertile north and northeast, a policy that continued under Afghanistan’s longest 20th-century ruler King Zahir Shah and was backed by his cousin Mohammad Daoud. As a young officer before becoming Afghanistan’s prime minister, Daoud didn’t hide his support for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi cause. History curricula written in those years and still taught to children in public schools in Afghanistan continue to preach the revolting racial fallacy that “Aryan” means najib (noble or superior), a race among whom Afghans include themselves.

The settlement policy, while not leaving Hazaras unharmed, came at the vast expense of Tajiks and Uzbeks, two other ethnic groups who, despite widespread neglect and deprivation that was common to all in impoverished Afghanistan, saw arable land around them given to Pashtun settlers. State-administered irrigation programs were implemented mostly by forcing the able-bodied among rural Tajiks and Uzbeks to build the canals.

Fast-forward to the present and one might witness some changes in the country mainly because four decades of war, beginning in the late 1970s, disrupted the structure of ethnic hierarchy. According to political scientist Mujib Rahman Rahimi, the wars in Afghanistan represented a moment of “dislocation” in its history. According to his doctoral thesis now published as a book, Afghanistan was a client state of British India, for which hegemonizing Pashtun rule over the country’s ethnically diverse population was deemed necessary for functional bilateral relations. This top-down politics cemented the Pashtuns’ hold on power even after gaining control of the country’s foreign policy from the British in 1919, but was undercut by the bloodshed and social unrest of the recent wars.

Hazaras and other ethnic groups are now at least free to dream of a career of their choice. Ethnic boundaries no longer retain their prewar legitimacy. Ordinary Pashtuns, Hazaras, Tajiks and Uzbeks, among others, share their views on politics, stage protests and partake in civil society. Elections are at least held but still have some way to go to invite trust.

The effort to shrink the space for exclusionary practices on ethnic and gender grounds offers the promise of some form of impending pluralism, where liberty, dignity and equality no longer remain the preserve of one ethnic group. This was the unintended consequence of decades of violence and sacrifice that resulted in easing oppressive rule by one social group; in part it was also promoted by the institutions put in place after the US-led 2001 invasion. But not because of the Americans, as is generally assumed in the outside world.

In fact, reinforcing Pashtun hegemony over other ethnic groups has proceeded in tandem with other changes in the post-2001 period, which has now become strong enough to reverse the positive disrupting influence of recent wars in the form of ethnic pluralism.

US influence post-2001

Exclusionary politics was rapidly built into US policy early on, calling to mind British colonial policy of the late 19th century, through appointing Zalmay Khalilzad – an ethnic Pashtun – to do the United States’ foreign-policy work in its longest war, first as special envoy and ambassador of George W Bush and now President Donald Trump’s special peace envoy.

Currently, the US-educated Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, and the heads of the ministries responsible for the country’s security and economy are Pashtun, an ethnic group comprising anywhere between 30% and 40% of the population (attempts to conduct a population census have been repeatedly blocked by members of parliament from the Pashtun-majority southern provinces). Ghani’s partner in the current administration, Abdullah Abdullah, was also born of a Pashtun father. The country’s former foreign minister, who belonged to the second-largest ethnic group, the Tajiks, largely because Ghani noticeably never established a working relationship with him. He was replaced by a Pashtun.

Outside the cabinet, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the president of the Independent Election Commission – the body in charge of holding presidential and legislative elections – and the head of the central bank are all Pashtun. The only remaining branch of state power, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, is a Tajik who gained the post only after a raucous controversy. He came first in a parliamentary election by 73 more votes than his rival, a Pashtun who has previously called for ethnic groups rejecting Pashtuns’ traditional rule in Afghanistan either to leave the country or be forced to leave, who didn’t accept the result. He and his supporters brought the parliament to a standstill for a month before a second election was held, in which the Tajik candidate won.

During the Soviet-backed regime in the 1980s, which broke with some past ethnic privileges, a Hazara even rose to the rank of prime minister, and after the regime’s collapse in the early 1990s, the country experienced a debilitating but important stalemate in ethnic power balance, even opening the way for a Tajik, Burhanudin Rabbani, to become the country’s president.

This period was cut short by a civil war. The subsequent rise of the fundamentalist Taliban group represented a horrifying setback for ethnic pluralism because of their regime’s strong Pashtun character. The appointment of Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun from southern Afghanistan, as interim president in late 2001 strengthened  this pattern, facilitated through unwavering back-channel support by US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad despite Karzai’s loss to an ethnic Uzbek, Abdul Satar Sirat, in a selection process at the Bonn Conference. In a symbolic return to the past, the country’s new 2004 constitution changed the national anthem from Persian, Afghanistan’s widely recognized lingua franca, to Pashto.

Absence of clear planning for Afghanistan among the US military and civilian authorities, as revealed in the Afghanistan Papers, gave the reign of US involvement in Afghanistan to a clique of returnees from the West, including Ashraf Ghani, whose first position in post-2001 Afghanistan was as finance minister. He believed in restoring the country’s prewar centralized rule, considered harmonious and un-chaotic. An arrangement that was, before the war, built on institutionalized segregation and denial of ordinary rights for the majority of the country’s population was now required to be reinstated in order to re-establish the “right” balance of power.

Perhaps in a fitting sign of his push for return to past, Ghani ordered the construction of a mausoleum for Mohammad Daoud, the controversial cousin of the former King Zahir Shah and the last prime minister before the period of wartime disruptions, to show his political loyalty.

As a Japanese proverb goes, when the character of a man is not clear, look at his friends. Ghani, known at first as a fair-minded technocrat, has a close friend and ally in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose vision of Hindutva (Hinduness) aiming for Hindu supremacy is upsetting India’s long-standing secular tradition. A right-wing extremist befriending another right-wing extremist should hardly appear as startling nowadays.

Among the legacies of the United States’ military involvement in Afghanistan, the restoration of ethnic hierarchy should be held as its most deleterious to Afghanistan’s internal politics and society in the long run. In a multi-ethnic country with no clear demographic majority, an overwhelming hold on power by one group can bode ill. Before the period of war when a rigid ethnic hierarchy reigned, suppression of dissent happened as part of an ethnic despotism far more efficient and centralized, with far wider reach over the country’s territory.

Most important, people like my childhood teacher didn’t question their place in society and accepted what was ordained from the top. This isn’t the case now and largely, it was the wars and an indigenous historical shift that was responsible for it, which now risks being undermined by internal and external forces.

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The Afghan war began in December 1979, and lasted until February 1989. About 15,000 Soviet soldiers were killed, and about 35,000 were wounded. About two million Afghan civilians were killed. Credit: Christian Science Monitor.

Failure in Afghanistan: Lives lost, nothing gained

Currently, US forces are protected in various military bases, only venturing out by Black Hawk helicopter and acting as advisers to Afghan military

ByDAVE MAKICHUK

During the early days after the 9/11 attacks and the initiation of the US intervention in Afghanistan, it was relatively common to reference the disastrous Soviet experience in that country.

After years of fighting, analysts conceded, the Soviets only could secure a few blocks of downtown Kabul — the rest was a no man’s land of death.

Nothing gained, despite the loss of human lives and military materiel.

Here was a clear paradigm of what not to do in order to avoid getting stuck in a quagmire. Surely, American leaders would be more adroit. By employing advanced US technology along with a more sensitive effort to win “hearts and minds,” the Taliban — what was left of it — would be quickly vanquished.

But it might be worth exploring yet again some historical aspects of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, 1979–1989, in order to shed some light, not only on the present predicament of the American war in Afghanistan, now lamentably in its sixteenth year, but perhaps also to gain some insights into contemporary Russian foreign policy and society too.

Currently, US forces are protected in various military bases, only venturing out by Black Hawk helicopter and acting as advisers to Afghan military. Navy SEALs still do hit and run night raids with Afghan special forces, but largely, American troops are only there now in supportive roles.

A recent Taliban attack at Bagram Air Base killed at least two Afghan civilians and wounded more than 70 others. However, what the media did not report, is that someone discovered a nearby van jammed with weapons and suicide vests.

The plan was for unarmed Taliban operatives to gain access to the secured area, grab the weapons and vests, blow open the base gates, and launch a firefight. Armed with suicide vests, many could have been killed — a tragedy averted, only just in time, according to a confidential source.

According to Lyle J. Goldstein of The National Interest, a detailed appraisal covering the military aspects of the Soviet war appeared in the mid-April 2018 issue of the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the agreement on 14 April 1988 to withdraw all Soviet forces from Afghanistan.

The writer of this interesting piece is the rather conservative but quite independent-minded Russian defense analyst Alexander Chramshikin. The piece appears under the headline “The Afghan Lesson for Russia: A Collision with Islamic Extremists Was Inevitable.”

The author explains that there was misperception back then on both sides concerning the origins of the war. He notes that the Soviet leadership was seriously convinced that “American forces would invade Afghanistan in the near future,” while Washington thought that Soviet forces were determined to drive all the way to the Persian Gulf in order to interfere with the transfer of oil supplies to the West.

These assumptions were both completely wrong, of course, but Chramshikin says the assessment that the Americans got right was to seize the opportunity to “arrange for the Soviets their own Vietnam.”

It is observed that the Soviet Army was completely unprepared to fight a counter-insurgency war. “It was a war without fronts and without a corresponding rear area.” Contact with the enemy could occur at any time and in any place. Weapons and tactics had been designed for Central Europe or the Far East, but not for mountainous Central Asia, and “all this led to many failures.”

Assaults against Ahmed Shah Massoud’s partisan forces in the Panjshir Valley proved costly to Soviet forces again and again, “because all of the operational plans were received by Massoud in advance.”

To be sure, the Soviet brass tried to rectify the situation by giving transport vehicles additional armor and making sure their swivel guns could fire “almost vertically into the air” to cope with ambushes in Afghanistan’s innumerable narrow valleys, the report said.

Yet, it seems to be an immutable fact of counter-insurgency warfare that the insurgents have superior intelligence and understand the ground better.

The Soviets sought to innovate by developing a doctrine that focused on the use of helicopters and particularly the employment of special forces. Moreover, the new “main task was to be finding and interdicting convoys of arms coming from Pakistan.”

Do these strategic responses all sound familiar? There were some successes for Soviet forces. Chramshikin relates, for example, an episode at the end of 1984 when 220 partisans were killed in such an interdiction operation without losing any Soviet soldiers. But just a few months later, twenty-nine Soviet special forces soldiers were killed in a single battle.

During the year 1985, Soviet forces lost eighteen aircraft and fifty-three helicopters, according to this analysis, and that was before the introduction of the Stinger shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles into the war. And that development, beginning in September 1986, “caused a sharp increase in losses, especially with respect to helicopters.”

Despite such significant setbacks, Chramshikin claims that many thought that due to hard fighting in 1987 that the “Soviet Army could still completely win the war.”

In the end, Chramshikin concludes that the Kremlin could not sustain the war due to the “economic catastrophe” at home, but he also blames the advent of Glasnost, which he says caused the Soviet society to turn actively against the war effort. He asserts that in this sense, the end of the Soviet war in Afghanistan was very similar to the end of the war in Vietnam.

He describes the April 1988 agreement that ended the war as a “complete and unconditional capitulation of the USSR,” since he says that Washington and Islamabad did not even go through the motions of complying with their promises to stop aiding the partisans, the report said.

While Chramshikin clearly seeks to absolve the Russian Army from culpability, saying they “fullfilled their duty,” he does admit that the underlying logic behind the Soviet war in Afghanistan was “obviously absurd.” He even goes a step further and asks the provocative question regarding whether indeed Al Qaeda and the Taliban would have come about had the Soviets never become involved in Afghanistan.

He says, “The answer to this question is extremely complex, but it can be said with certainty that neither the (Soviet) Fourtieth Army, nor even the CIA created Islamic extremism. Its emergence is much more complex and it grew out of internal factors within the Islamic world itself.”

Thus, while suggesting that the Soviet leaders relied on “erroneous logic,” he does actually reference briefly both the war in Chechnya and also Syria to arrive at the conclusion that the Soviet war in Afghanistan may seem more understandable (or even inevitable) as it recedes into the deeper past.

The piece is somewhat interesting as an example of contemporary Russian discourse on the subject of Soviet-era mistakes. Some may view it as yet another attempt to whitewash an inglorious past. But if this is the so-called “totalitarian system” at work, it hardly seems to conform to the imaginations of various virulent Western critics of the Russian press and politics.

Indeed, Chramshikin’s rendering seems to be reasonably objective with an added and quite understandable sensitivity to the many veterans of the Soviet War in Afghanistan. Nor is it strange that the author would try to find some kind of continuity between this most obvious strategic failure and more recent military engagements on Russia’s southern flank, whether Chechnya or Syria.

There is little doubt, moreover, that this rather candid portrayal of the disastrous Soviet War in Afghanistan will trigger some Russian readers, even if that is not the author’s intention, to question anew Russia’s commitment to fight in Syria — a commitment that does already evince certain aspects of a quagmire with a variety of possibilities for strategic “blow-back.”

RUSSIAMIDDLE EAST

JANUARY 13, 2020

A Russian soldier on the advance in Syria, following the US pullout from this region, near Aleppo, in November 2018. US missteps in the Middle East are offering opportunities to Russia. Photo: AFP/Bekir Kasim/Anadolu Agency

US hit on Soleimani plays into Kremlin’s hands

On a complex chessboard, the US assassination grants Moscow immediate benefits – and wider regional potential

ByGIOVANNI PIGNI

The US assassination of key Iranian General Qasem Soleimani potentially favors Moscow’s game in Syria, while the collateral benefits of Baghdad-Washington tensions offer the Kremlin opportunities in Iraq.

The killing, on US President Donald Trump’s orders, brought Tehran and Washington to the brink of open conflict which potentially could have had catastrophic consequences for the balance of forces promoted by Russia in the Middle East.

However, Iran’s retaliation against the US has so far been limited to a weak missile attack on American military bases in Iraq, which caused no casualties. With the risk of an escalation fizzling out – at least for now – the crisis is increasingly looking like an opportunity for Moscow.

Russia is already reaping economic benefits. Oil prices have soared, leading to the strengthening of the Russian ruble, a currency closely linked to energy exports.

Moscow wasted no time painting Washington, its key geopolitical adversary, as an irresponsible, erratic aggressor, while reinforcing its own self-perceived role as a grown-up actor.

In that framework, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s trip to Damascus was deft – showing an assured world leader being welcomed to a Middle Eastern capital as a player for stability. That should win traction at home, where Russians love Putin for raising their country’s global status, as well as across a region and a world that is weary of US militancy.

Also, the removal of the highly competent Iranian general may weaken the role of destabilizing militias in Syria, while US-Iraq tensions are opportunities for Moscow to leverage.

‘Grave consequences’

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov minced no words. The assassination “grossly violates the principles of international norms and deserves condemnation,” he told his American counterpart, Mike Pompeo.

Moscow also warned that the attack could have “grave consequences for regional peace and stability.”

The ministry’s high-profile spokesperson Maria Zakharova suggested the attack was designed to win US President Donald Trump a domestic consensus. “Everyone should remember and understand that US politicians have their interests, considering that this year is an election year,” she said.

Experts joined the barrage of condemnation.

“The US has proved several times to be a highly unpredictable actor that cannot be trusted,” Nikita Smagin, an expert at the Russian International Affairs Council think tank, told Asia Times. “By contrast, Moscow has an opportunity to underscore its role as the most reliable  player in the region.”

Russian state media talked up what it saw as a humiliation for the US.

“Iran demonstrated to the whole world that the hegemon could be kicked,” said Yevgeny Primakov, Russian State Duma deputy and host of the state TV program International Review.

Olga Skabeeva, another prominent TV host on state television, claimed that “Trump got scared of Iran” and described Tehran’s retaliation in glowing terms.

“What other examples could you give when some country, some regional power that doesn’t possess nuclear weapons – as far as we know – delivered a strike at the United States of America?” she asked.

The Moscow-Tehran axis

Since its intervention in the Syrian civil war in 2015, Russia has partnered with Iran to support the regime of Bashar Al-Assad.

As reported by Reuters, Soleimani was among the main architects of the Russian intervention in Syria. According to unconfirmed sources, he met with President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in summer 2015, convincing him that Assad’s regime could still be saved with Russia’s help.

Allegedly, Soleimani traveled several times to Moscow in the following years to coordinate joint military efforts with senior officials.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry praised his “well-deserved authority and significant influence” in the region.

Yet Soleimani’s killing, despite his apparently close ties to senior Russian officials, offers some pluses for Russia – which is far from being entirely on the same page as Iran.

Moscow-Tehran tensions

According to Leonid Isaev, associate professor at the Asia and African Studies Department of the Higher School of Economics University in St Petersburg, Soleimani’s killing is likely to weaken Iran’s influence over the Syrian government, giving Moscow greater freedom to maneuver in upcoming Syrian political settlements.

Isaev notes that Iran’s uncompromising stance in negotiations has been a frequent complication for the Kremlin, especially over the conflict in the Idlib region

“Soleimani’s death represents a serious loss for Iran,” Isaev told Asia Times. “He played a key role in coordinating the various Iranian proxy groups in the region and especially in Syria.”

The pro-Iranian militias handled by Soleimani have triggered multiple sectarian conflicts on liberated Syrian territories, which has long concerned Moscow.

“Now that Soleimani is dead, it will take time for Tehran to restore the same level of coordination among its proxies across the region,” said Isaev.

Despite their strategic partnership aimed at shoring up Assad’s regime, Moscow and Tehran are not full-fledged allies. In fact, they diverge on many issues.

Tehran’s hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East and its ceaseless hostility towards Israel are out of sync with Russia’s attempts to preserve a balance of forces.

“Moscow is deeply worried about Iran using its proxies on Syrian territory to threaten Israel,” said Marianna Belenkaya, an expert on Gulf affairs and a journalist at Kommersant publishing house. “Moscow wants to avoid at all costs any escalations between Israel and Damascus.”

Last November, Israel launched airstrikes on the outskirts of Damascus, allegedly in retaliation for attacks carried out by pro-Iranian forces the day before. Russian air defenses have not been used to shield pro-Iranian forces.

A US withdrawal?

The latest crisis might generate opportunities for Moscow beyond Syrian borders.

Soleimani’s killing on Iraqi soil without authorization from local authorities prompted the Iraqi Parliament to ask US troops to depart. Even though that demand was non-binding, the status of GIs on Iraqi soil now looks shaky and a future withdrawal cannot be ruled out.

That would create another vacuum that Russia could exploit – if not exactly fill.

“Russia’s ambitions in the Middle East are hardly limited to Syria …  Moscow clearly aims to drive the United States out of the whole region, and affirm its own role as the architect of a multi-polar world,” said Farhad Ibragimov, politologue and expert at Moscow-based think tank the Valdai International Discussion Club.

“Iraq could be another piece of the puzzle in achieving this goal.”

Still, Russian analysts agree that Moscow’s involvement in Iraq is likely to be limited to diplomatic moves and arms sales. Direct military involvement in Iraq is unlikely for two reasons.

One is that overseas interventions have faced huge domestic sensitivities ever since Moscow’s disastrous 1979-1989 Afghan adventure. The second is that Russia’s armed forces have limited resources, which are already stretched.

A military intervention in Iraq “would require military capabilities Russia simply cannot afford,” said Belenkaya.

Isaev agreed. “Syria is already draining the bulk of Russia’s military capabilities,” he said. “It doesn’t have the resources to establish itself as a key player in other countries in the region.”

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