Afghanistan’s Past Blocks Resolution of Its Future

A Soviet troop pullout from Afghanistan--the stated goal of U.S. policy--would not resolve the contemporary geopolitical problems in South Asia, nor would it deal with the inherent unstable political nature of Afghanistan itself.

Despite huge infusions of war materiel and cash from the United States and sympathetic Muslim nations, the resistance has failed to oust from their mountain homeland the invaders from the steppes of Central Asia. Had the resistance groups been united, the modern hordes would have had to withdraw, but in typical mountaineer fashion, the resistance has been riven by internal dissension and fragmented by antagonisms rooted far back in history. The tribal, ethnic, linguistic and sectarian divisions in Afghanistan are so deep that no consensus government could appear upon a Soviet withdrawal. In fact, the seven-year struggle has seen the emergence of further claimants to power based on new alignments of regional identity and religious ideology.

Afghanistan as we now know it came into being in 1880 when the British felt a need for a buffer state between expansionist czarist Russia and the Indian subcontinent. With Russian acquiescence, the British representative in Kabul negotiated the creation of Afghanistan with Abdul Rahman Khan, a local Pushtun chieftain. Ever since then, the emergent nation-state has almost continually been under the rule of the Pushtun tribal group, which suppressed all other tribal and ethnic groups that constituted the majority of the population.

With the Soviet occupation in 1979, these other claimants have strengthened their political power, indeed have been encouraged to do so by the Soviet regime, which recognizes them as national minorities. Talking about the “citizens” of Afghanistan or the “freedom fighters” is self-deception; no such homogeneous categories exist in the minds of the people who live there.

The most alarming feature of U.S. policy toward Afghanistan is its furtherance of a narcotics and gun-smuggling culture, which also is undermining the tenuous fabric of social order in neighboring Pakistan and India. The drugs smuggled via the resistance to earn capital and the guns supplied by the United States are finding their way into the hands of political malcontents of every stripe in South Asia. Authorities cite Afghan drugs and anarchy as a factor in the recent ethnic riots and deaths in Karachi, the violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims during religious observances in Pakistan last fall, and the ever-worsening situations in Muslim Kashmir and Sikh-dominated East Punjab. With millions of refugees stuffed into camps in a sector of Pakistan that remembers centuries of Afghan cross-border marauding, the situation is incendiary.

The Soviets are unlikely to withdraw from Afghanistan until their Central Asian boundary is secure. That requires the guarantee of a stable Afghanistan, an impossible condition given its origins as a creation of Russian and British imperialists and its hundred-year history of the Pushtuns’ royal, military, civil and religious subjugation of the rest of the population.

While the creation of Afghanistan made some sense to the imperialists, it was a prime example of what George H. T. Kimble called the Law of Geographic Absurdity--”putting boundaries that do not exist around places that do not matter.” In the latter half of this century, larger forces have brought the historic land-locked enclaves of South Asia under domination by plains states, either through incorporation into Pakistan, India or China, or through economic dependency relationships, as in the case of Nepal and Bhutan.

Given this history, the absorption of Afghanistan, part Central Asian, part Southwest Asian and part South Asian, by a contiguous power, either the Soviet Union or Pakistan, seems inevitable. The United States should recognize the inexorable nature of the annexation of mountain mini-states that cannot sustain themselves in the 20th Century except by playing off one powerful neighbor against other. In this way Afghanistan sowed the seeds of its own destruction.

If the carnage in Afghanistan is to stop, it will require a rethinking of what we call Afghanistan. A united homeland for the Pushtun tribal group, including the current independent tribal territory in Pakistan, seems a prerequisite. The Soviets will want a clearly demarcated and depopulated area for a Central Asian border; the Hindu Kush range, a cultural as well as physiographic divide between central and south Asian Afghanistan, might be acceptable.

Despite well-intentioned efforts by the United Nations, little progress has been made to resolve the Afghan conflict. What started as a local, internal problem of corrupt and unrepresentative government has now involved other governments, traumatized 12 million mountaineers and spread like a disease to nearby areas. It can be solved only by the two superpowers that have put so much at stake in this little land.

The United States’ insistence on a quick end to the Soviets’ presence is the worst possible solution. It would only create a vacuum in which a century of smoldering conflict would be re-ignited, this time to be fought by factions well-armed and hardened by seven years of war. Then, once again, some opportunistic larger power would be tempted to intervene and give yet another political definition to Afghanistan.