Soon after Taleban forces evacuated Kabul last week, the Bush administration said that it would apply “intense pressure” on the Northern Alliance, whose fighters had newly captured the city and much of Afghanistan, not to act unilaterally but wait for the United Nations to put together a “broad-based government” to run the country.
A “broad-based government” implies a “national unity government,” a concept that highlights the magnitude of the problem facing the UN in Afghanistan, a country whose social formation has been organized around ethnic and tribal ties that stretch back centuries.
Building a nation clearly is preceded and determined by national identity, and national identity is forged at the whetstone of a long, protracted struggle against a common enemy, or against shared historical challenges, that ultimately codify a people’s social reflexes, view of the world, twists of national feeling and cultural oneness. In short, their communal sense of reference.
The irony of Afghanistan’s modern history is that Afghanistan was one of the few countries in the Third World that was able, during the era of European imperialism, to maintain its independence.
And that happened as a consequence of the Great Game (otherwise known to its victims as the Great Con) that czarist Russia and imperial Britain played in the late 19th century, who took it upon themselves in 1895 to define the final borders of what we today call Afghanistan, creating a buffer state between Russia and British India. The logic behind the move was that the British would insure that their much-prized “Jewel in the Crown” was protected from having to share a border with the expansionist czar.
The irony here lies in the fact that unlike the peoples of, say, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, whose national identity over the decades derived from a common opposition to imperial masters, Afghans were “denied” the colonization that would have triggered the emergence of an enduring national struggle, through which they would have subsumed their tribal and ethnic rivalries in pursuit of nation building.
Though in the 1980s the Soviet occupation created an analogous situation to colonization, which rallied the Afghan people to joint armed struggle, that struggle lasted a mere decade, not long enough to loosen ethnic loyalties in favor of national ones. Thus to this day, the four major ethnic groups that make up Afghan society express more solidarity with their ethnic kin outside Afghanistan’s borders than with their putative fellow Afghans.
Look at this way: Pashtuns look to fellow Pashtuns in Pakistan; Hazars, who are Shiites, focus on Iran; Uzbeks reach out to Uzbekistan: and Tajiks to Tajikistan. It is unfortunate, but perfectly understandable under the circumstances, that the “unity of arms’’ that characterized the coming together of these four groups in the fight against the Soviet occupation army proved short-lived. In 1992, traditional rivalries resurfaced, culminating in civil war.
Now a new window of opportunity will open for long-term stability, and for the creation of a central government in post-Taleban Afghanistan. But will that window be slammed shut before progress can be made, with warlord style commanders going around carving up the country into personal fiefs? (Reportedly, many of the commanders vying for power are figures from the early 1990s, a time when Afghanistan fell into lawlessness after the defeat and withdrawal of Soviet troops.)
The UN secretariat, it would appear, has ideas. One of these is to ultimately create in Afghanistan institutions with traction and staying power, beginning with a broad gathering of influential leaders, or “notables,’’ to set up a provisional council which in time would call a General Assembly, known as a “loya jirga,” a gathering of representatives of all tribal groups to pick a central government with national reach — a central government with viable ministries that can build roads and schools, provide health care, and create jobs — and a new head of state to run the country. And later, much later, a constitution could be drafted.
Meanwhile, bowing to pressure from Washington, various groups, including the Northern Alliance, agreed last Sunday to attend a meeting “somewhere outside the country,’’ eliminating whatever stumbling blocks may have existed to the eventual creation of an interim government. This came as an effort to catch up with the unbelievably swift military developments on the ground, which had left the Taleban in control of only two isolated pockets in the country. The venue for the meeting is Germany.
The UN no doubt will have its work cut out for it as it goes about choosing who gets a seat at the conference table. Eric Falt, a UN spokesman, lamely, not to mention vaguely, defined the standard for choosing the delegates as those who “can make a constructive contribution to Afghanistan.”
Surely these various Afghan leaders have to come round to the recognition, sooner or later, that by allowing for space in Afghan politics for universalist Islam, ethnic loyalty and national unity their constituencies will not be sacrificing anything.
Only through that recognition will law and order come to Afghanistan. Well order at least. Law can wait.
