Afghan Power Vacuum: 1989 All Over Again

by Mushahid Hussain

On both occasions, Pakistan was instrumental in helping the United States alter the Afghan status quo -- in 1989, in the defeat of the Red Army and in 2001, in the ouster of the Taliban.

Then, as now, a political vacuum exists in Kabul. The United Nations is seeking to fashion a broad-based administration through a meeting in Bonn.

It is actually one of two meetings that convened on Nov. 27: one in Germany to fashion a new post-Taliban regime under U.N. auspices with all the non-Taliban factions and groups present, and the other in Islamabad under World Bank auspices for putting together plans for Afghanistan's reconstruction.

In Pakistan today, as in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, a military regime presides over the country. Both military rulers -- Gen. Zia ul Haq and Gen. Pervez Musharraf -- were treated as virtual pariahs by the U.S. before new realities propelled a U-turn in American policy toward Pakistan.

In January 1978, President Jimmy Carter declined a stopover in Pakistan between trips to Iran and India, where he officially elevated India to the status of a "pre-eminent power in South Asia."

In March 2000, President Bill Clinton, after five days of euphoria in India where he granted New Delhi the status of a "natural ally" in the emerging "special relationship" between the two countries, reluctantly agreed to a five-hour stopover in Islamabad. There, he refused to be publicly photographed with Musharraf.

But the similarity between the two situations ends there, because the second Afghanistan War is being conducted in a qualitatively changed regional scenario.

The Central Intelligence Agency, through its 100-person Afghan Task Force, ran the largely covert war of the 1980s, unlike the current role of U.S. troops via bases in Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Russia, China, India and Iran are de facto allies of the United States, helping America defeat the Taliban and track down Osama bin Laden.

South Asia now has two nuclear-armed adversarial neighbors, Pakistan and India, with opposing positions on the insurgency in Kashmir that began after the Red Army's pullout from Afghanistan.

The biggest question lurking in the minds of Pakistanis is whether America's "rediscovery" of Pakistan will be sustained this time. They ask if Washington will tread a different path from the past, when the United States simply walked away from Afghanistan after the defeat of the Soviet Union in 1989.

According to the New York Times last week, among the things Secretary of State Colin Powell has committed American diplomats to do, "even before the military work (in Afghanistan) is fully accomplished," is to help assemble a Muslim-led peacekeeping force in Afghanistan and establish a stable government there, repay and reassure the government of Pakistan, try to defuse the explosive border dispute in Kashmir and seek a new relationship with Iran.

This ambitious regional agenda has endorsement from the European Union as well. The Belgian prime minister, in Pakistan after a visit to India, told Musharraf during a media conference on Nov. 24 that "2002 may be the year for a political solution of Kashmir dispute" given the "new international environment."

A couple of these myths are noteworthy.

The first myth is about the "joint jihad" in Afghanistan by the United States and Pakistan had begun well before the entry of Soviet troops in Kabul.

As a 1998 interview of Carter's national security adviser, Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, to a French newspaper, said: "According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahideen began in 1980, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in December 1979."

"But the reality is completely otherwise, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul," Brzezinski was quoted as saying. "And that very day, I wrote a note to the President in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention."

In other words, Afghanistan had already emerged as a pawn in the superpower "Great Game" prior to the Soviet invasion, with U.S. strategy to trap Moscow by trying to "induce" its army to intervene. Brzezinski added the "secret operation was an excellent idea (as) we now had the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War."

When the interviewer for the France's Le Nouvel Observateur asked Carter's national security adviser "do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?" he gave a very matter-of-fact answer, reflecting a cold calculation of the American interest:

"What is most important for the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" Brzezinski replied.

In other words, if the price for the United States to achieve the break-up of the Soviet Union was in the form of the Taliban's emergence, which U.S. policies helped create, then it was worth it from their perspective.

The second myth pertains to the Taliban and bin Laden. When the Taliban emerged on the scene in 1996, the United States saw in Taliban control a semblance of stability that met two key American goals -- an environment conducive to U.S.-built oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia via Afghanistan to Pakistan and countering Iran on its western flank.

In fact, the then U.S. assistant secretary of state for South Asia Robin Raphel through her visits to Kandahar to meet the Taliban leadership and Zalmay Khalilzad, now Bush's main adviser on Afghanistan, advocated in 1997 that the "United States should engage the Taliban" since "the Taliban does not practice the kind of anti-U.S. style fundamentalism practiced by Iran."

At the time, bin Laden, apart from being a CIA-backed holy warrior against the "Evil Empire" during the Cold War as late as 1996, or even 1998, was not yet on the top of the American hit list for the Muslim world.

U.S. media reports say that Sudan was willing to extradite bin Laden but the Clinton administration then felt that "it was lacking a case to indict him in U.S. courts."

Likewise, the interview last month of the former Saudi Arabian head of intelligence, Prince Turki al Faisal, by a Saudi newspaper, has not been refuted -- it said that just before the U.S. cruise missile attacks on Afghanistan in August 1998, Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar was apparently agreeable to handing bin Laden to a third country.

If both Pakistan and the United States accept that their past policies failed, a realistic premise for new policies toward Afghanistan and a new bilateral relationship would have been set.