NEW DELHI, 18 November — President Pervez Musharraf’s graph was rising in Washington at precisely the same time that Mullah Muhammad Omar’s graph was collapsing in Kabul and Kandahar. Are the two related? Were the cynics of the Western world being especially nice to President Musharraf on his world tour while they took over his backyard?
The thought is not purely provocative. On Saturday evening in the elegant environment of New York’s Waldorf Astoria President George Bush made it a point to please his guest by saying that the Northern Alliance, which has repeatedly expressed its hostility to Islamabad, should restrict its victories to Mazar-e-Sharif and perhaps move down south bypassing Kabul.
When the commanders of the Northern Alliance bypassed the White House and went straight for the jugular, the same President Bush, now in the company of Vladimir Putin, could barely restrain his delight. Matching glee has not been forthcoming from Islamabad. This is understandable. No matter who forms the next government in Kabul, Pakistan will never have the kind of influence and even authority it possessed, as long as the Taleban was in power, over a nation vital to its strategic interests.
On the day that Bush was supporting Musharraf’s hands-off-Kabul policy, maybe at that very moment, James Clark and Adam Nathan, on board USS Theodore Roosevelt, were reporting for The Sunday Times that the Northern Alliance had been "urged by Britain and America last night to mount a swift offensive toward the capital, Kabul, driving home their advantage after a string of successes in the north."
Either Bush was fooling Musharraf or he was fooling The Sunday Times. The game was rather given away by Geoff Hoon, Britain’s defense minister, who told The Sunday Times: "I would be quite happy to see the Northern Alliance steam across northern Afghanistan and take Kabul."
Now that Kabul has fallen like a house of cads, we have to search for winners and losers in this high-stakes poker game that began on such an explosive note on Sept. 11. It might be stating the obvious to describe the Taleban as losers. But that depends on the definition of the Taleban. If the Taleban is a movement then it will re-space itself and wait for history to give it another opportunity.
If it has acquired vested interests and become a government, then it will fragment and disappear.
There could be a third option: Those of the Taleban who became a government and used power to achieve personal or political purposes might disintegrate, while a new ideological core could reinvent a movement from the shreds of this moment.
In all cases, the burden will fall on Pakistan; for the Taleban, in any manifestation, has nowhere else to go except to return from where it started. The situation is similar for Al-Qaeda, which had charismatic leadership, fidayeen followers and, thus far, a safe base from where to operate.
Theoretically, those of its members who were not from Pakistan could hope to return to their original Arab countries or Bangladesh, or wherever. But they will not be welcome. Their govrnments do not want their ideas at home, and in any case will be reluctant to confront the United States on their behalf. A ticket to Bangladesh would be equivalent to a ticket to trial in the United States as Washington continues its war on terrorism.
It is probably safe to suggest that Osama Bin Laden will not surrender or leave his camp in Afghanistan; he will die fighting, or be killed by incendiary bombardment as has happened to some of his companions. But most of his followers will walk through the passes to Pakistan, as will the Taleban (the latter have already begun to do so). Will Mullah Omar seek refuge in Peshawar? He, unlike Osama, has not been accused personally of masterminding the attack of Sept. 11.
What about the ministers of the Taleban government? Will they be picked up by the Pakistan authorities and handed over for war trials? Then there will be Osama’s family, an emotional resource for those who want to continue the war against the United States. Each one of these issues is a time bomb ticking at the heart of the Pakistan establishment.
In strategic terms, a decade of Pakistan policy has been decimated by the defeat of the Taleban. Civilians like Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif were as responsible as the army for the presence of the Taleban in Kabul, and why not? Foreign policy and national interest should be non-partisan.
One of the more remarkable facts (and one that might make the West uncomfortable) is that the government of President Musharraf had persuaded the West to accept the Taleban government as a reality without an alternative. This was an extraordinary success of Pakistani diplomacy. The process of legitimization of a government in Kabul that was in total harmony with Islamabad’s interests had gone a long way forward when, literally out of the blue, Sept. 11 destroyed so many years of patience.
No Afghan government in the foreseeable future will have anything but a formal relationship with Islamabad. As for the ISI’s role in Kabul’s decision-making; that is now effectively dead. Exclusive investigations published in Dawn and Herald prove that without the help of ISI operatives and Pakistan’s military specialists in the last five years, the Taleban’s successes against the Northern Alliance would have been less spectacular than they have been. M. Illyas Khan reports, with convincing detail, in the November issue of the Herald that the ISI supplied massive quantities of arms to the Taleban and that these supplies continued even in October this year.
He reports: "In the dead of the night on Oct. 13, a convoy of 12 ‘tarpaulin-covered’ trucks entered Afghanistan via the old Kurram Agency route, apparently escorted by military personnel. One wonders what the US spy satellites made of them."
No particular need to wonder; the information is almost certainly in some safe deposit, gathering interest, waiting to be sprung upon Islamabad when the West’s operational forces and the Northern Alliance have completed their military operations. It is possible that Islamabad believed Mullah Omar’s claims that the Taleban could fight another 10 years or a hundred years or whatever; intelligent agencies all over the world end up being gulled by their protégés. The shock in Islamabad when the Taleban punctured in Kabul was apparent.
Not too long ago Musharraf was asking America not to continue bombing during Ramadan. He did not estimate then that there might be very little left to bomb by Ramadan. As the holy month begins, American bombing is targeted at the homes or hideouts of specific Taleban and Al-Qaeda commanders. There is not much left to protest about.
Pakistan goes back to worrying about two borders rather than one. And there are a few things to worry about on the eastern border as well. I do not know if Musharraf picked up a signal beeping, softly, from more than one transmitter in the West during his tour. The debate on the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist is nearly over. There is a new consensus that you cannot really redraw the maps of nations anymore, irrespective of past rights and wrongs. It is simply too dangerous to do so.
Vladimir Putin, for instance, has picked up this signal. Washington, which used to have a few things to say about repression against the Chechens, is now happy to leave it off the agenda of either bilateral discussions or multilateral concern.
When definitions were being formulated from the debris of Sept. 11, Sri Lanka, quite naturally, asked whether the LTTE would be considered terrorists or freedom fighters. The answer has come. Terrorists. The freeze has started with bank accounts.
This does not mean a blank check for Delhi in Kashmir; but it does mean something that could be unacceptable to Islamabad. Nothing would make the rest of the world happier than to see a settlement of the Kashmir dispute along the line of control, with marginal adjustments.
Similarly, there will be pressure on Israel and Palestine to accept a partition of Occupied Jerusalem and get on with the rest of life.
This is no assurance that India and Pakistan, or for that matter Israel and Palestine, will submit to lines drawn to their west; but any arguments against what seems reasonable, or against rational compromise, will not find too large an audience.
This, by the way, is the good news. Don’t ask me what the bad news could be.
The relief in Washington at the collapse of Kabul is visible; it will take longer to reassure the rest of America. In one sense the whole of America has become Ground Zero, as it remains haunted by the possibility of what could happen even more than by what did happen. The American Airlines accident renewed an ebbing nightmare.
At the top, the pecking order has changed. Vice President Dick Cheney, who was once called the real president, is at the receiving end of the joke now. Each time there is any hint of a crisis, they haul him off to some "safe destination" and smile thinly as they do so. (On Sept. 11 George Bush was sent to a "safe destination" by Cheney.)
More recent is the victory of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over Secretary of State Colin Powell. Powell has been pessimistic about the military strategy; he too overestimated the Taleban. It could be that the State Department’s intelligence analysis was influenced by Islamabad. It is a Bush-Rumsfeld war now. Suits Texas.
As for Kabul itself: there used to be a joke when military operations started that the time to buy stock in razor blades had come. A whole new market was opening up. A picture sent by the agencies this week makes the point.
A barber is shaving the beard of a thirty-something man who looks at the mirror with aplomb as he rediscovers his face. We can’t see who the barber is, but of course we can see the hand holding the old-fashioned razor. On the barber’s wrist is a flashy new watch. You can see it glinting even in the photograph. It’s a good time to be a barber in Kabul.
