The long forgotten Pushtoonistan issue has acquired a new dimension as a result of the end of Soviet control in Central Asia and the outbreak of a power struggle among rival mujahideen groups in Afghanistan more or less along ethnic lines. As such, it cannot be long before it once again comes to command the headlines. Indeed, discerning policy-makers in Islamabad, New Delhi and elsewhere must already be seized of it.
Internal Rot
Soviet control in Central Asia would have collapsed even in the absence of the disastrous military intervention in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union has disintegrated primarily as a result of an unmanageable internal rot. But the intervention led to the rise of mujahideen armies at the grassroots level along ethnic lines. The two developments have combined to inject a new potentiality in the moribund Pushtoonistan question, this time via Kabul and not Peshawar as earlier.
Northern Afghanistan is part of Turkic Central Asia proper; eight of its nine provinces abutting on the former Soviet Union are Turkic, very different from the Pushtoons. Afghanistan owed its existence as an independent entity, above all, to the British empire’s need for a buffer against the Russian empire. In the wake of the liquidation of the British empire in 1947, it continued to serve the same role of a buffer against the same Russian empire, this time armed with the communist ideology and known as the Soviet Union. After the interregnum of Soviet military intervention and mujahideen resistance, that role is finally over and with its principal raison d’etre.
As was only to be expected in the new context, old links between Uzbeks, Turkomens and Tajiks across the former Soviet-Afghan border have been resumed. Northern Afghanistan is bound to become oriented towards the newly independent states in Central Asia even if these states too are going through a painful period of transition. The power struggle in Kabul along ethnic lines cannot but strengthen this possibility.
Though it is premature to write off either the efforts at reconciliation by Islamabad and others, or Hekmatyar, it is difficult to believe that the status quo ante can be restored in Afghanistan under a new non-monarchical dispensation for long. The reasons are obvious.
Pakistan cannot substitute for the British empire as a support base for the Pushtoons in their struggle for power in Kabul. Both Washington and Moscow are opposed to Hekmatyar in view of his commitment to Islamic fundamentalism which he cannot give up since this is his main asset. Shia Iran also is not, and cannot be, enthusiastic about him in view of his Sunni dogmatism.
It is not yet possible to see beyond the present struggle and say how a de facto division of Afghanistan on Pushtoon-Turkic lines is likely to take place. But it is obvious that the division is too deep to be overcome. Even the communists were divided along ethnic lines into the Khalq and Parcham factions. It is fairly certain that President Najib’s regime also collapsed finally as a result of such a split within it. It had withstood the withdrawal of Soviet military support.
It has still not been possible for Indian and other intelligence agencies to confirm that Najib himself met Hekmatyar before his fall last April. But it is widely accepted that he had come to think in terms of the Pushtoon-Turkic divide. As such, it is only logical that he should have tried to establish contacts with Hekmatyar. Indeed, the then former defence minister, General Tanay’s, “defection” last year might have been part of such a move. In any event, it is notable that Najib’s bid to escape last April was foiled by Dostum’s Uzbek militia, till then a bulwark of support for his regime and that Pakistan was the first country to offer him asylum.
Ethnic Divisions
In an article published in the April issue of The Atlantic monthly and obviously written earlier, Mr Robert D. Kaplan, an American specialist, wrote: “These (ethnic) divisions are mirrored in the regime of Najibullah … which is also fracturing along Pathan-Tajik lines … As Afghanistan evaporates, the border between Central Asia and South Asia is effectively shifting northward from the Khyber Pass to the Hindu Kush mountains, which separate the Turkic world from the Pathan one. No doubt, we will be hearing more about “Pakhtunistan”… That was a notion one heard little about in the 1980s … In the 1990s it could become the rallying cry for an ethnic upheaval in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
In India we are so used to thinking of Pakistan as an integral part of South Asia that we do not care to recognise that “Pakistan is where the fault lines of Central Asia join up with those of the Indian sub-continent.” But whether or not we are sensitive to it, this reality has to assert itself now that the constraints of the imperial “great game” and the Cold War have disappeared. If the arbitrary lumping up of the Turkic and Pathan peoples across the Hindu Kush cannot hold, nor can the division of Pushtoons across the Khyber.
The Durand Line
The Durand Line, dividing the Pushtoons, was drawn by the British for defensive-offensive purposes. No government in Kabul has ever acknowledged its validity since 1947. Indeed, even of the mujahideen group based in Peshawar and, therefore, dependent on Islamabad’s goodwill, only Hekmatyar’s Hizbe Islam can be said to have done so. But all that is less pertinent to recall than to take note of the more recent turn of events such as the arming of hundreds of thousands of Pushtoon with sophisticated weapons, the growth of a massive drug trade across the Khyber, the linking up of the power struggle in both Kabul and Islamabad with that lucrative trade estimated at over $ 10 billion a year and, above all, the rise of a powerful northern non-Pushtoon Turkic coalition which has managed to seize control of Kabul.
These developments make it inconceivable that the Durand Line virtually annulled by the jihad against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan and movement of millions of refugees since 1980, can be reinstituted.
Kaplan, quoted earlier, speaks two possibilities – extension of Pakistan’s border to the Hindu Kush and an ethnic upheaval in both Pakistan and Afghanistan on the issue of a separate state for Pathans. Islamabad has for years been pursuing the first goal within the framework of a “united” Afghanistan. The framework has been worn down by events. This changes the implications of the goal for Pakistan. Islamabad has now to think in terms of having to live with turbulence in Afghanistan for years and a radical transformation in the character of Pakistan itself.
The Times of India, 8 October 1992