A Chance for Peace in Afghanistan: The Taliban's Days Are Numbered

A CHANCE FOR PEACE IN AFGHANISTAN

THE TALIBAN'S DAYS ARE NUMBERED

By Peter Tomsen

The Taliban movement, depicted by Ahmed Rashid ("The Taliban: Exporting Extremism," NovemberffiDecember 1999), has passed its high-water mark. It is now disintegrating, echoing the rapid rise and fall of similar religious movements in Afghan history. With the Taliban's demise, Afghanistan faces a new challenge: who will fill their place?

As Rashid notes, the Taliban emerged in the mid-1990s, when their radical leader Muhammad Omar succeeded in melding religious fervor with the tribal patriotism of Afghanistan's largest group, the Pushtuns. Omar and the other militant mullahs from rural southern Afghanistan in the Taliban leadership were assisted by the powerful Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), the extremist Pakistani religious party Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), and radical Arab Muslims, including members of Osama bin Ladin's terrorist network. Together, these forces unleashed a powerful coalition that sallied northward from the Pushtun belt that borders Pakistan, ultimately gaining control of 90 percent of the country. The Taliban were initially welcomed by an Afghan population tired of war and disgusted by Kabul's inept, corrupt mujahideen government, led by Burhanuddin Rabbani.

THINGS FALL APART

Since their seizure of Kabul in 1996, the semiliterate Taliban mullahs have proven singularly incapable of governing the areas they control. Their rigid Islam, blending aspects of anti-Sufi and anti-Shia fundamentalism from India, Pakistan, and the Persian Gulf states, is alien to the moderate Islam practiced by most Afghans. Early on, the Taliban's authoritarianism and intolerance alienated non-Pushtun Afghans, who make up more than half the population. More recently, the Taliban have begun to alienate Pushtuns as well. The flow of thousands of extremist Pakistani and Arab Taliban supporters into Afghanistan has fueled the resentment of the local populace.

The Taliban's failed offensive in the fall of 1999 exposed the movement's declining military punch. A mostly non-Pushtun coalition in northern Afghanistan turned back the Taliban's attacks and has since pushed the front lines toward Kabul, capturing Taliban-controlled areas in northern, eastern, and western Afghanistan. The popular enthusiasm that greeted earlier Taliban offensives has faded: Pushtun youth are no longer volunteering to join the Taliban, and Pushtun fighters are leaving the Taliban's ranks, gravitating back to their southern tribal areas.

Signs of the Taliban's disintegration abound. Afghans are growing suspicious of how heavily the ISI controls the Taliban; ISI officers and Pakistani religious-party firebrands have become ubiquitous in Taliban-controlled cities, including Kabul. Taliban adversaries are profiting from these suspicions. Moreover, corruption, inspired by the lucrative opium business, has now started to infect Taliban leaders; this has raised questions among their followers about whether they have abandoned their professed spirituality in order to gain personal wealth and power.

A GRAND ASSEMBLY

Afghan supporters of a broad-based political reconciliation must now consider who will fill the vacuum left when the Taliban are forced from Kabul, perhaps as early as this summer. If the past seven years are any indication, Kabul will fall yet again to another foreign-supported, well-armed Afghan faction. But it, too, is doomed to be a transitory force, driven out by the overwhelming military strength of other groups that will eventually coalesce against it. Death and destruction could continually wrack the country.

Most Afghans agree that to escape this cycle of violence, the country's major religious and ethnic groups must cooperate to choose their own leadership, rather than have one imposed on them from the outside. They could do so through a mechanism such as the proposed Grand Assembly, for which models can be found in other times of trouble over the last 300 years of Afghan history. If successful, this type of large Afghan gathering could produce the first leader considered legitimate by the people since 1973. In November 1999, Afghan ex-monarch Zahir Shah presided over the second Afghan consultative conference in Rome to facilitate a Grand Assembly in 2000. Many Afghans consider Zahir Shah a suitable -- but not the only -- vehicle to achieve consensus within Afghanistan on how to restore peace. Worried about their own poor prospects, however, Taliban leaders and their radical foreign backers are already maneuvering to derail the Grand Assembly initiative.

The Grand Assembly could also consider reform more fundamental than merely changing the country's leadership. It could decide, for instance, what form of Islamic government is best for Afghanistan. Should the Afghan state be structured in a federal pattern, and how much power should rest at the state and at the national levels? What are the country's reconstruction priorities? What kind of constitution and legal system would best serve Afghanistan?

All non-Taliban Afghan groups, including Pushtun tribal leaders and the powerful Tajik northern commander Ahmed Shah Masoud, are advocating such a consensus-building process. Even mid- and lower-level Pushtuns in the Taliban's ranks have notified prominent Pushtun tribal leaders that they, too, support a broad-based intra-Afghan dialogue. Without exception, all Afghan groups have publically declared their preference for a united, unpartitioned Afghanistan.