[sacw] Afghanistan in the Far Eastern Economic Review

[Harsh Kapoor]

30 July 1999
Posted below is the cover story on Afghanistan in the Far Eastern Economic
Review.
Harsh Kapoor
(South Asia Citizens web)
---------------------------------

Far Eastern Economic Review
August 5, 1999 / Vol.162, No.31
Cover Story

AFGHANISTAN
Heart of Darkness

''As peace talks falter and the Taliban prepare for a new offensive against
opposition forces, the threat which this Islamic regime poses to regional
stability has gone unnoticed. Terrorists fighting the governments of
virtually every Central Asian power find shelter with the Taliban. An
equally dangerous by-product is the criminal economy supported by the
Taliban, which spread weapons and drugs throughout the region.''

AFGHANISTAN.
Heart of Darkness.

By Ahmed Rashid in Kabul and Faizabad

August 5, 1999

Soviet-made tanks and armoured personnel carriers spew clouds of black
diesel fumes as they lumber up the potholed road north from Kabul. The
Taliban are on the move, preparing for what they hope will be a final
offensive that will defeat the sole remaining opposition army and bring the
last 20% of Afghanistan under their control.

Travelling with them in convoys of Toyota pick-up trucks are about 400 Arab
Islamic militants from a dozen Middle East and African countries. These are
the fighters of the 055 Brigade, armed and funded by alleged Saudi terrorist
Osama bin Laden. When a reporter heads down the road in hopes of catching
up with the Arabs, Pakistani militants manning a checkpoint block his way,
waving their Kalashnikovs persuasively.

Desperate for manpower and moral support, the Taliban have welcomed Islamic
militants of diverse nationalities to join them on the front lines. Bin
Laden and his brigade may be the best-known since the United States accused
him of masterminding the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa and
offered $5 million for his capture. But bin Laden is far from the only
Taliban guest with a price on his head. The REVIEW has learned that armed
insurgents accused of terrorist attacks in China, Iran, Uzbekistan,
Tajikistan and Pakistan have found sanctuary in a symbiotic relationship
with the Taliban: They help the Taliban; the Taliban let them set up
training and arms-supply bases on Afghan soil.

And in a worrying development, bin Laden has been working to establish ties
with his fellow militant groups and may be helping to fund some of them,
diplomats in the region say. The diverse groups have their own agendas,
mainly focused on undermining the regimes at home, but some share bin
Laden's zeal for a global Islamic revolution. The resulting web of
dangerous friendships threatens to export Afghanistan's chronic instability
throughout central and west Asia.

The expatriate fighters who join up with the Taliban find not only a haven
but a source of income--trafficking in Afghan heroin and smuggling consumer
goods through Afghanistan. The money helps fund their political activities,
even as the trade undermines their home economies (see story on page xx).
Why do the Taliban help them? In some instances, it's simple logic: The
enemy of my enemy is my friend. Iran and Uzbekistan give military support
to the Northern Alliance, the last opposition group standing between the
Taliban and full control of Afghanistan.

The Taliban are also deeply frustrated by the refusal of the international
community and Muslim world to accept their government--only Pakistan, Saudi
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have recognized the Taliban.
Increasingly, many Taliban leaders comfort themselves with the belief that
their strict interpretation of Islam is the ultimate truth, capable of
unleashing a new wave of Islamic revolution across the region. The more
militant movements flock to them for sanctuary, the more justified the
Taliban are in this view.

"Our prestige is spreading across the region because we have truly
implemented Islam and this makes the Americans and some neighbours very
nervous," says Taliban Information Minister Mullah Amir Khan Muttaqi. But
their dangerous liaisons are costing the Taliban dearly. On July 6,
Washington imposed economic sanctions on Afghanistan, barring Americans
from trading with or investing in the country. It was a step short of
declaring the Taliban a terrorist movement, which the White House
reportedly favours. The State Department prefers to keep up a dialogue in
hopes that it can eventually extradite bin Laden, whose exact whereabouts
is known to only a few Taliban leaders.

In interviews with the REVIEW, Taliban officials showed no sign of
softening. "Bin Laden is our guest and there is no proof he is involved in
terrorism," Muttaqi says. "Clinton is just hounding bin Laden and the
Taliban to cover up his own inadequacies and failings." There are signs
that another U.S.-bin Laden confrontation may be looming. U.S. diplomatic
sources say surveillance of bin Laden's worldwide alliance of
fundamentalist militants, Al Qaeda or "The Base," picked up signals that he
may be planning a strike against a U.S. target. Washington put its
embassies on alert in early July. Meanwhile, rumours abound that the U.S.
will attempt a pre-emptive strike. Some say a U.S. commando group has
arrived in Peshawar in northern Pakistan and is preparing to grab him,
others that a U.S. aircraft carrier is in the Persian Gulf ready to launch
air strikes against his hideout//?. Last September, the U.S. launched 70
cruise missiles against suspected bin Laden training camps close to the
cityof Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan; he escaped harm.

The Taliban just laugh at Washington's demonization of one individual. "What
will the Americans do even if they find bin Laden?" asks an officer of the
Taliban intelligence service. "There are hundreds of bin Ladens just up the
road." Many members of bin Laden's 055 Brigade members fought individually
with the Taliban for years. But it was only after the Saudi was introduced
to the Taliban in 1996 that he pulled his fellow Arabs together to form a
force with a much larger agenda: not just to put the Taliban in power in
Afghanistan, but to support fundamentalist Islamic uprisings across the
region. The 055 Brigade--which includes hundreds of wanted terrorists who
have fled governments from Algeria to Egypt and Kenya--gained prominence
last year when it helped the Taliban capture the northern city of
Mazar-e-Sharif from the Northern Alliance.

Bin Laden's brigade is the best financed and organized of all the expatriate
militant groups in Afghanistan. But he is suspected of providing aid also to
militants fighting Uzbekistan's authoritarian President Islam Karimov and to
Uighurs fighting Beijing's rule in their homeland, the western Chinese
region of Xinjiang. When six bombs exploded in the Uzbek capital of
Tashkent in February, the Uzbekistan government said it was an
assassination attempt on Karimov by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or
IMU, an armed underground group. Instead, 16 other people were killed and
128 wounded. Uzbek officials and Asian diplomats in Tashkent say that the
IMU's leader, Tahir Yoldasev,subsequently fled to Kandahar, the base of
Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.

In interviews, Taliban officials deny they are helping the IMU. But a senior
political aide to former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, now leader of
the opposition Northern Alliance, says the Taliban gave Yoldasev a house in
Kandahar, then in May let him set up a military training camp in Taliban
controlled Mazar-e-Sharif, just a few miles from the Uzbekistan border.
"Yoldasev is training 200 to 300 militants from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
Kirgyzstan and Uighurs from Xinjiang province in China," says the aide.
(TheTajiks are militant Muslims who rejected a 1997 ceasefire agreement
with Tajikstan's neo-communist government.)

Western diplomats in Islamabad say they believe Yoldasev is financing his
operations through the Afghan drug trade. On June 2, Uzbek Foreign Minister
Aziz Kamilov held talks for the first time with Mullah Omar in Kandahar and
asked for Yoldasev's extradition. "Omar flatly refused to do so and said he
is a guest of the Taliban," says an Asian diplomat in Tashkent. Several
hundred other IMU militants have fled to Russia, Tajikistan and Turkey to
escape Karimov's crackdown and are expected to eventually turn up in Mazar.
Iran's Shia regime is also feeling threatened by the Sunni Taliban, who
killed nine Iranian diplomats in Mazar last year. Australian journalists who
visited Kandahar last year interviewed members of the Ahl-e-Sunnah Wal
Jamaat, a small and little-known group of Sunni Iranians that is trying to
overthrow the Teheran government. Iranian diplomats say the Taliban
subsequently moved the group to Herat on the Afghanistan-Iran border, with
the aim of carrying out sabotage inside Iran.

More worrisome to Teheran are reports that leaders of the main Iranian
opposition group, the Iraqi-backed Mujheddin-e-Khalq, have frequently
visited Kandahar and asked the Taliban for an operational base. So far
there is no sign that the Taliban have accommodated them. But in a
statement issued last September that did not name any specific group, the
Taliban bragged: "Afghanistan is capable of harbouring opponents of the
Iranian government inside Afghan territory and thus to create problems for
Iran." China is also affected. Beijing shunned involvement in Afghanistan's
civil war until February, when the first Chinese delegation arrived in
Kabul for talks with the Taliban. At the time, Chinese officials said that
their concern was to stem the tide of heroin from Afghanistan into
Xinjiang. But more is at stake: The heroin traffic is helping fund
anti-Chinese Islamic and nationalist movements among the Uighurs and other
Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. Uighur militants have trained and fought
with fellow Islamic guerrillas in Afghanistan since 1986 and Chinese
officials say the arms and explosives the Uighurs are using against Chinese
security forces come from Afghanistan.

Taliban officials say they have assured China they are not harbouring
Uighurs. A Taliban deputy minister visited Beijing in mid-July to discuss
Chinese construction of cement plant in Kandahar. However, Western
diplomats in Islamabad say the Uighurs have ties with Yoldasev and bin
Laden, if not directly with the Taliban.

Pakistan's relationship with the Taliban is the most complex and fraught
with severe repercussions for Islamabad. Mainstream Pakistani Islamic
parties jostle for strategic alliances with the Taliban. Between 3,000 and
5,000 Pakistanis belonging to a dozen different Islamic fundamentalist
parties are in Kabul with Islamabad's blessing for the Taliban summer
offensive against the Northern Alliance.

Their leaders have set up receiving centres and offices in the central
district of Kabul, which now resembles a Pakistani suburb. Afghan
restaurants sell "Punjabi tea" and "Karachi curries" to satisfy the
Pakistanis' dietary needs. Some of these Pakistanis are war veterans from
earlier Taliban campaigns and from recent fighting in Kashmir against
Indian forces, while others are on summer holiday break from madrassas or
Islamic schools.

Also in Afghanistan, however, are the leaders of Sipha-e-Sabaha Pakistan, or
the SSP, and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi--extremist Sunni groups accused in Pakistan
of killing hundreds of Pakistani Shias and of twice attempting to
assassinate Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The leaders have houses in Kabul,
while their followers fight for the Taliban. "I can't understand the logic
that while the military supports the Taliban, our police in Punjab are
trying to hunt down SSP leaders who are actually in Kabul," says a senior
adviser to Punjab Chief Minister Shabaz Sharif.

The Taliban have also given sanctuary to fighters from Pakistan's Harakat-ul
Mujahideen, who have been linked to bin Laden and whom Washington declared
a terrorist group last year for attacks on civilians in Bosnia, Chechnya,
Indian-held Kashmir and Tajikistan.

For many Afghans, the crux of the problem is the fall-off of U.S.
involvement in the region since the end of the Cold War. From 1994 to 1997
the Clinton administration quietly allowed Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to
back the Taliban, seeing it as a convenient foil for Iranian influence in
Central Asia. Since last year's attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania, the Clinton administration's only agenda vis-a-vis the Taliban
has been to "get Bin Laden."

The Washington-based Afghanistan Foundation recently issued a report urging
that the U.S. government pursue a broader-based policy to restore peace in
Afghanistan. The U.S. "should do more to weaken and transform the Taliban,"
says the foundation's head, former Republican Congressman Don Ritter. "The
Taliban must stop hosting any terrorist groups and close terrorist training
camps." The foundation's report suggests that the CIA--which supplied arms
to the Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviets in the 1980s--fund and arm
Taliban moderates with the aim of overthrowing Mullah Omar, or alternately
support a return to power of Afghanistan's exiled Zahir Shah, who ruled the
country for four decades before being ousted in a 1973 palace coup.
However, most Western and Afghan analysts believe the CIA's reinvolvement
would only further fragment Afghanistan. "Given Washington's policy
flip-flops and general incompetence on Afghanistan, it would be disastrous
if the CIA tried to fund anti-Taliban groups," says a European diplomat in
Islamabad.

What the U.S. can and should do, say UN officials, is put serious pressure
on neighbouring states to halt the supply of arms into
Afghanistan--beginning with Pakistan. Many Afghans agree. "The Americans
hold the key to stop the external interference in Afghanistan, but they
don't seem to have the will or determination to do so," says Rabbani,
leader of the anti-Taliban opposition.

Adds the European diplomat: "Until the U.S. has a coherent Afghan policy
rather than just a 'get bin Laden policy', the war will continue." And
unless the international community resolves to end the Afghan conflict,
Islamic militants and terrorists will always find a safe haven in
Afghanistan.