One effect of the Sept. 11 tragedies in the United States has been the unleashing of a torrent of comment about areas of conflicts. During the past few weeks, I have had my share of the torrent. In a recent series of syndicated columns and radio and television appearances I have supported the US-led coalition’s military intervention in Afghanistan. This has drawn much comment, some of it angry, from readers and audiences in many countries.
One reader, writing from Canada, reminds me of the scores of articles I have published over the years in support of the peoples of Palestine, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, and East Turkestan (Xinjiang) in their respective struggles for self-determination. He also mentions the campaigns that I joined in support of the Afghan Mujahedeen when they were fighting to liberate their country from Soviet occupation. “So what is the difference between those countries and Afghanistan today whose destiny is being changed by American military intervention?” the reader asks.
This is a pertinent question.
Let us start from the case of Afghanistan under the Taleban. A close analysis of the situation would show that the Taleban regime was as much a front for foreign occupation of Afghanistan as had been the successive Communist governments in Kabul in the 1980s. Gen. Najibullah’s Communist regime was a front for the Soviet domination of Afghanistan. Mulla Muhammad Omar’s government was a front for Pakistani domination. This latter point is now abundantly clear. The best estimates show that almost 40 percent of Taleban’s soldiers were foreign, mostly Pakistani mercenaries. When it came to actual fighting, in Kunduz, Qalah-Jangi and Kandahar, for example, most of the Afghan Taleban surrendered without violence. Those who continued to fight were mostly non-Afghans.
“This was our second war of liberation,” Burhanuddin Rabbani, Afghanistan’s acting president, told me in a telephone conversation the other day. “The Americans helped with the first war of liberation for their own reasons during the Cold War. They also helped this time, again for their own reasons. But what matters for us Afghans is that we get a second chance to form a government of our own — without foreign intervention.”
That the Afghans shared that sense of liberation was manifest in the fact that they danced in the streets with joy, queued to have their beards shaved and, in the case of women, discarded their burqas. Over 2,000 foreign journalists present in Afghanistan have not found anyone who regretted the demise of the Taleban.
To be sure, it would have been better had Afghanistan won its liberation in both cases with the help of Muslim nations only. But that did not happen. During the Soviet occupation, many Muslim countries backed the Communist regime in Kabul because they sided with the Soviet Union against the US in the context of the Cold War. Iran’s mullas, for example, maintained ties with the Kabul Communists right to the end and prevented the Afghan freedom fighters from using Iranian territory for any attack on the forces of occupation. As far as the war against the Taleban is concerned, there was no Muslim international brigade to fight on the side of the Afghan people and against Mulla Omar and his foreign troupe.
During the Soviet occupation, the Mujahedeen were vulnerable against attacks by helicopter gunships. The US provided them with Stinger missiles that largely removed that threat. This time, too, what the Americans did was to destroy the aircraft and the heavy weapons, all furnished by Pakistan, that had enabled the Taleban to push their lightly armed opponents out in the past five years. In other words, the Americans did not liberate Afghanistan, either from the Communist-Soviet occupation or from the Pakistani-Taleban occupation. All that the Americans did was to create a level-playing field that in both cases enabled the Afghan freedom fighters to drive out the foreign occupier.
In both cases, the Americans acted out of their on national self-interest, not for the beauty of the Afghan black eyes. But that in no way diminishes the value of their support. Also for its own reasons, the US fought and won the Cold War which also led to the liberation of almost 60 million Muslims from Soviet rule and the emergence of six new Muslim states in the Caucasus and Central Asia.
The US was also the key player in imposing the rules that frustrated Serbian attempts at driving the Muslims out of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Muslim population of Kosovo and the Muslim minority in Macedonia also owe their survival, at least in part, to US intervention. In these cases, too, its own strategic interests and not any particular affection for Muslims primarily motivated the US. Should we reject any US help when our interests coincide simply because we do not like American policy in areas where our interests either do not coincide or are opposed to one another? Good strategy dictates that we should get all the help we can wherever it is found. In the world of rationality, the enemy of my enemy could be my friend. It is only in the world of cheap emotions that my enemy’s enemy could still be regarded as my enemy.
Let us briefly deal with Palestine, Chechnya, Xinjiang and Kashmir. As far as I am concerned, these are political, not religious, conflicts. In all four of those lands we have people who do not wish to live under foreign occupation. To be sure, the fact that the majority of people in those occupied lands are Muslims adds a strong measure of sympathy and understanding. But the main reason for my support for them is the justice of their cause that is national, not religious. On the same principle I also supported the right of the East Timor Catholic people to self-determination against Indonesian rule.
The Palestinian issue does not represent a clash between Islam and Judaism just as the Algerian war of independence was not a battle between Muslims and Catholics. It is a colonial issue that must be seen, and ultimately resolved, through political paradigms.
As far as Chechnya is concerned, the Russian aggression is in no way comparable to the US intervention in Afghanistan. The Russians invaded Chechnya despite the fact that it had a democratically elected president and government. Also, that democratically elected government and president had signed a solemn treaty with the Russian president and government that excluded all acts of aggression. Russia wants to annex Chechnya and deny its people the right of self-determination. The US, however, does not wish to annex Afghanistan and is, in fact, giving its people a chance to exercise their right of self-determination against plots and intrigues by neighbors.
And what about Kashmir? Again the situation is clear-cut. The overwhelming majority of Kashmiris want a referendum, promised to them by a UN resolution passed over half-a-century ago, to exercise their right of self-determination. Again this is not a Muslim-Hindu conflict but part of the colonial legacy which has to be resolved through political means.
A similar situation exists in East Turkestan (Xinjiang). The Turkic-speaking peoples of the province are fighting against a deliberate policy by Beijing to change the demographic structures in place. Massive immigration by ethnic Chinese into the province is clearly designed to turn the Turkic-speakers into a minority. There are other facts that point to the existence of a colonial situation. More than 80 percent of the best-paid jobs in the province are reserved for the ethnic Chinese while access to higher education is deliberately limited in the case of the non-Chinese natives. Efforts are also under way to destroy the half-dozen Turkic languages spoken in the province. The native people of Xinjiang, although all Muslims, are not fighting in the name of religion or ideology but of justice and self-determination.
To sum up: the world of politics is not divided between Muslim and non-Muslim but between right and wrong, just and unjust. The support that we must continue to give to the peoples of Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir and Xinjiang obeys the same logic that led us to support the Afghan people in both of their wars for liberation.
