Down the Road to Chaos?

Once again, Afghanistan has hit the headlines; once again for all the wrong reasons.

Unlike my earlier post which was written after the most recent attack on Kabul University, this one is triggered by a global event - the withdrawal of USA and its allies after over 20  years in Afghanistan. The withdrawal has enabled the Taliban to sweep across the country with almost daily reports of deaths in bombings, attacks and counterattacks. A sense of uncertainty about the country seems poised to spread across its borders, to the rest of South Asia and the world.

As someone with a bit of experience in Afghanistan(2018-19), I have been approached by friends for an opinion on how things are going to unfold in the months to come. This was my response in a WhatsApp group a few days ago:

Ethnic and tribal loyalties are becoming more important than the "Afghan" identity for surviving this crisis.

Did you see that clip where a Talib asks a man if he's a Hazara and then shoots him dead? The Hazaras will avenge that. The 22 commandos who were killed after they surrendered; the Afghan ambassadors daughter who got abducted in Islamabad today... these too will be avenged, and at the tribal level all this will fuel old blood-feuds on both sides of the Durand line.

About ~$10 billion of annual aid that drove the Afghan economy is now the turning off... resources are limited... people are losing jobs, schools and small businesses are closing down, families are getting split and displaced...a whole new generation is dealing with the jehadis and their insular, medieval mindset.

So far there is no sign of a strong unifying national leader,  so the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras (Shias) will fight against the talibs (mostly sunni Pashto)...and the Pashtos tribes will fight each other to control the border posts (tax revenue) and poppy fields.

The Pakistanis will of course try to push more of these displaced jehadis into Kashmir/India.

Sad days ahead 😞

I hope my rather simplistic assessment is wrong. I hope an amicable solution will be found to prevent a repeat of the devastation that visited Afghanistan two decades ago. I hope all the good work done by the UN and other international agencies - especially in primary education, infrastructure and agriculture - will not go down the drain.

And yet, an interview I saw recently seemed to confirm that this is going to be another long bloody struggle. A retired Pakistani general, Tariq Khan, a Pathan officer who led a government offensive against the "Pakistani Taliban" or TTP, seemed quite sure that the Taliban will take over Kabul in a few weeks because the city is already under a "soft siege" because supplies to the city - especially of fuel - is already being disrupted. While this may be true it is not clear if the Taliban have what it takes to dominate the rest of the country - especially non-Pashtun areas.

Unlike the Soviet occupation era when the mujahids had a strong backing in terms of armaments (USA) and petrodollars (Saudi Arabia), things are a lot more complicated now. This time, money is not so easily available; there is some in Afghanistan's biggest exports - Poppy - but the Taliban is known to be against it;  the non-Pashto groups are better armed and may not give up the cities without a bitter fight, and there seems to be little in terms of common ground between the countries that have a direct interest in the final outcome -- Iran, Russia, China, Pakistan, USA, Turkey, and India.

If the Taliban continue with their refusal to share power with people who represent half the country, what they ultimately get may be a Pyrrhic victory, and the peaceful silence of graveyards. This may not come as an explosion of a grenade with a missing pin but as a slow, painful descent to chaos. 

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LINKS & REFERENCES:

* 26 July 2021 - Turkey eyeing a new sphere of influence in Afghanistan - https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/868701-turkey-eyeing-for-new-sphere-of-influence-in-afghanistan

* 18 July 2021 - Gen. Tariq Khan's interview - https://youtu.be/Tb8hMrqBXP4

Kabul - A City Under Attack...Yet Again

 

Kabul has been on my mind all day today.

It started with a trickle, with a photos-app reminding me that exactly one year ago, I had taken some pics of an office commute that took me across a hill to Jamal Mena. The narrow road had snaked past a large fuel-storage facility, past water-tankers supplying houses tightly packed on the hillside, across the ridge to a lovely green cityscape that stretched from Kabul University to mountains of Paghman.

Towards noon, news of an attack on Kabul University starting appearing on Twitter. For the rest of the day I was checking on friends working and staying around Jamal Mena - they were all safe but by evening reports said, "At least 50 students including 5 professors, 4 members of Kabul University Police, including a policewoman killed."

Is there no end to the violence inflicted on Afghanistan? 

Perhaps the answer to this question lies outside Afghanistan because it has been decades since the Afghans had some real control over their own affairs. During the days of the "Great Game" the British said that the king must return, and so he returned to play the role of an unwilling puppet. A couple of centuries later a Pakistani General said "Kabul must burn!", and so not only Kabul but the whole country was burnt so that the Soviets could be forced out. 

"The Bear Trap", written by Mohammad Yousaf, a former IGI general,  in charge of ISIs Afghanistan operations, gives a detailed account of how a few individuals, backed a 'superpower' can destroy a country in a few years.  From 1984, through 1987, over 80,000 Mujahideen went through ISIs training camps, hundreds of thousands of tons of weapons and ammunition were distributed for operations in all the 29 provinces in Afghanistan. These operations killed over 13,000 Soviet soldiers and wounded some 35,000. during nine years of bitter fighting.

As fighting raged in the countryside, Kabul's population shot up from 750,000 to over 2 million in 1985, most of whom were crammed into into tents on the outskirts of the city. 

Gen. Yousaf was quite clear that neither ISI nor his mujahids would have been able to sustain the fight if it did not have a steady flow of money and modern equipment:

As I was about to discover, nothing moves, in peace or war, without money. The Mujahideen could achieve nothing without financial support. No matter how brilliant my strategy might be, the implementation depended on the availability of a vast reservoir of cash with which to arm, train and move my forces. Almost half this money originated from the US taxpayer, with the remainder coming from the Saudi Arabian government or right Arab individuals.

As the Soviets started leaving Afghanistan, USA realised that a radical islamist government was not in its interest, so they kept the Taliban away from Kabul as long as they could.

Then came 9/11, Osama bin Laden, and the Americans returned to bomb the Taliban out of the country. Then then tried to force-feed democracy a country that has always been a diet of strict autocracy. The Taliban simply said, "You have the watches, but we have the time."   The waiting game seems to have ended this year. 

Over two decades of relative peace and quiet is now being lost again to the sounds of gunfire in universities, assassinations, and street bombings.

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LINKS & REFERENCES

* Kabul University Attack 2020 - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-attack-university/death-toll-from-kabul-university-attack-rises-to-at-least-35-as-anger-grows-idUSKBN27J178?il=0

* Book - The Bear Trap -  https://www.amazon.in/Bear-Trap-Afghanistans-Untold-Story/dp/0850522676

On Broken Buddhas

Among the many disturbing videos that turned up on twitter last week, there was one from North West Pakistan.

At first glance it looks a benign video of rural development - on what seems like the the outskirts of a village, a few villagers are laying a pathway through the hills. In their effort to remove some obstruction on the ground, a man is seen smashing a sledge hammer on an oblong piece of stone. The camera then pans closer to show us that this is not ordinary stone that his being smashed. It was a 1700 year old statue of the Buddha. You recoil with shock, memories of the Taliban destroying the Bamiyan Buddhas with tanks and artillery comes to mind.

The place where this happened in called Takht-e-Bahi. When I looked this up on the web, interesting details emerged - this place is about 15km from the town of Mardan in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and is famous for the ruins of an "exceptionally well preserved" Buddhist Monastery. Exceptional perhaps because hardly any archeological site older than a 1000 years has survived in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Conjectural restoration of the Monastery

However, I was in for a surprise and my shallow assumptions were soon busted. The Buddhist monastery here was built in the 1st century CE and thrived through the centuries under the Kushans and the Parthians, but it is under the Huns - especially Toramana and his son, Mihirakula - that this area witnessed genocides and wholesale destruction of Bushiest monasteries. In other words, the Takht-e-Bahi monastery was destroyed long before Mohammad was born and Islam as a religion was even conceived!

So who were the Huns? Why did the father-and-son duo of Toramana (493-518 CE) and Mihirakula (515-540 CE) get so upset with the Buddhists? According to a version recorded by the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim-monk Xuangzang (Hsuan Tsang):

"...initially Mihirakula was interested in learning about Buddhism, and asked the monks to send him a teacher; the monks insulted him by recommending a servant of his own householder for the purpose. This incident is said to have turned Mihirakula virulently anti-Buddhist. Xuangzang states that he destroyed 1,600 monasteries in Gandhara and had 9,000 men killed or sold into slavery on the banks of the Indus."

Further, according to the historian DN Jha (1998) -

"The Huna king Toramana had Vaishnavite association but was converted to Jainism and this tyrant son Mihirakula, ruling from Shakala (modern Sialkot), was a devout Shaiva who founded the temple of Mihireshvara. He persecuted the Buddhists as was later sone by Shashanka, a fanatic ruler of Bengal"

It is almost a relief to be reminded that destruction of temples was not the monopoly of Islamic fanatics, zealots and conquerers.

At the same time it is ironic that the descendents of the people who suffered the most under the waves of conquests, today consider themselves so far removed from their own roots that they consider it an honor to destroy, in the name of religion, the very things that they ought to proudly display, in their own museums!

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jH0AnRXCzI
* The past is a different country (FT 2014)- https://www.thefridaytimes.com/the-past-is-a-different-country/
* http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Ancient-statue-of-Buddha-destroyed-as-un-Islamic-50623.html
* Jha DN (1998): Against Communalising History, Social Scientist, Vol 26 (on JSTOR) - https://www.jstor.org/stable/3517941?read-now=1&seq=5#page_scan_tab_contents

* A Neelakantan (2018) - https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/why-d-n-jhas-claim-that-ancient-hindus-were-given-to-violence-is-far-from-the-truth
* Pinterest - Takht-e-Bahi Gandhara sculptures -https://www.pinterest.com/sophialiu0808/takht-e-bhai-gandhara/