Published on Saturday, November 17, 2001 in the Independent/UK
<http://www.independent.co.uk/>
Forget the Clichés, There is No Easy Way for the West to Sort This Out
by Robert Fisk
Afghanistan – as the armies of the West are about to realize– is not a
country. You can't "occupy" or even "control" Afghanistan because it is
neither a state nor a nation.
Nor can we dominate Afghanistan with the clichés now being honed by our
journalists. We may want a "broad-based" government, but do the Afghans?
We may regard cities as "strategic" – especially if reporters are about
to enter them – but the Afghans have a different perspective on their
land.
As for the famous loya jirga, a phrase which now slips proudly off the
lips of cognoscenti, it just means "big meeting". Even more
disturbingly, it is a uniquely Pashtun phrase and thus represents the
tribal rules of only 38 per cent of Afghan society.
The real problem is that Afghanistan contains only tiny minorities of
the ethnic groups which constitute its population. Thus, the 7 million
Pashtuns in the country are outnumbered by the 12 million Pashtuns in
Pakistan, the 3.5 million Tajiks in Afghanistan are outnumbered by the 6
million Tajiks in Tajikistan. The 1.3 million Uzbeks are just a fraction
of the 23 million Uzbeks in Uzbekistan. There are 600,000 Turkmens in
Afghanistan – but 3.52 million in Turkmenistan. So why should the Afghan
Pashtuns and Tajiks and Uzbeks and Turkmens regard Afghanistan as their
country? Their "country" is the bit of land in Afghanistan upon which
they live.
Indeed, Afghan Pashtuns have long disputed the notorious Durand line –
the frontier which divided Afghanistan from British India and which now
forms the Afghan-Pakistan border. In 1897, Sir Mortimer Durand took no
account of the fact that the Afghan Empire once included much of what
would become present-day Pakistan.
Hence, today, the constant fear for Pakistan's leader, General Pervez
Musharraf, is not so much an Islamic revolution but a rebirth of the
notorious demand for "Pushtunistan" in the North-West Frontier province.
A remark by a victorious Northern Alliance official – that his men might
push on to "the Pashtun city of Karachi" – caused a minor political
heart attack in Islamabad. In similar fashion, the journalistic idea
that Taliban leaders might "flee over the border into Pakistan" seems a
lot less odd to the Taliban themselves – who would merely be moving
across an artificial British-made border into another part of the
Pashtun tribal area.
Of course, it's not difficult to see how we Westerners like the idea of
a loya jirga. All we have to do is supervise a massive congress of
Afghan tribesmen – forgetting that the loya jirga is totally
unrepresentative because women are banned – in order to produce a
power-sharing government of the kind that the British created in
Northern Ireland.
Only it's not like that. The loya jirga became part of Afghan tradition
when, in 1747, Ahmed Abdalli took 4,000 soldiers to Kandahar – which was
then just two small towns – and brought together the leaders of the
eight major Pashtun tribes. They chose Ahmed Durani as the king. But
since then, despite the inclusion of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras,
Pashtuns have ruled Afghanistan for all but three brief periods of the
20th century.
It's easy to see why. The Uzbeks never had loya jirgas. The Tajiks are
an urban, non-tribal group. How can they obtain equal or proportionate
weight in such a meeting when they do not have tribal leaders? Will the
Tajiks have one representative for the Pashtuns' eight or more?
Nor can history be excluded. The Shia Muslim Hazaras – who may or may
not owe their origins to Genghis Khan's invading hordes – were the
victims of savage repression at the hands of Pashtun forces under the
"Iron Emir", King Abdur Rahman, in 1880. Abdur Rahman, it should be
added, repressed his own Pashtun people as well. He had been invited to
rule Afghanistan by – you guessed it – the British government.
© 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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THE END
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