Authors: David Isby
The pro-Soviet Afghan governments of 1978–92 had no desire to follow this model. The Khalqi governments of 1978–79 targeted many Pushtun tribal leaders for death as “feudal remnants.” The 1986–92 regime of Najibullah, the Soviet-appointed ethnic Pushtun former secret police chief, tried to revive this approach, but by then Kabul had little legitimacy or capability. Najibullah himself, in his efforts to maintain power, increasingly turned to Pushtun nationalist approaches.
The Pakistan governments of 1978–92 used as their instruments of
power not the Afghan Pushtun tribes but six of the seven Peshawar-based resistance parties that were predominantly Pushtun. The outside supporters of the Afghan resistance—especially the US—found that the Pakistani military was unwilling to share control of the resistance parties’ politics. Rather than use traditional Afghan institutions (such as tribes), Pakistan used the distribution of aid to “buy” control. When Pakistan’s “chosen instrument” among these parties, HiH, failed to gain state power in 1992–94, the Taliban emerged as their replacement, a status it still, in some ways, retains as part of the insurgency fighting inside Afghanistan.
The actions of outsiders, whether in Kabul, Moscow, or Islamabad, set back for a generation the emergence of independent, non-dependent Pushtun political leaders. Outside patrons gave their Pushtun clients the resources to choke out alternatives, either by killing them, driving them into exile, or politically marginalizing them. Such leaders have every interest in preventing elections, for in both Afghanistan and Pakistan Pushtuns have elected moderate leaders. Those seeking to influence Pushtuns rely on bribery, so it is not surprising that the most effective Pushtun political leaders to emerge since 1978 have generally been political fanatics with outside support who have been the most ruthless toward Pushtun competitors: Najibullah, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Mullah Omar, Behtullah Mehsud.
Pushtuns have been both instigators and victims of the post-2001 insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pushtun nationalism has been a powerful force in motivating and mobilizing insurgent support from the population, building on resentment and the widely shared feeling that state power in Afghanistan must be equivalent to Pushtun power and that, in both countries, the insurgents are fighting an unjust, corrupt government supported by anti-Islamic foreigners. To some, Pushtowali is under attack. The theme that the conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan are part of a global attack on Islam by the US has struck a responsive chord among many Pushtuns. In retrospect, the attack on Pushtowali—the code of the Pushtuns, the champions of Islam—is seen as having gone on for decades, marked by the rise of the cash economy in the Pushtun world, when men came to care more about money than honor and when
tribal chiefs cared more about attaining comfortable exiles than helping their suffering kinsmen.
Pakistan in the Vortex
The Frontier did not become the Vortex overnight, nor in the short time between Al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban arriving from Afghanistan in 2001 and the Pakistani Army’s disastrous South Waziristan campaign of 2005.
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In fact, by 2008, the Pakistani military had lost more soldiers fighting the insurgency in Pakistan than the US and NATO had lost fighting the insurgency in Afghanistan. It took decades of decisions and policy implementation from multiple parties and players to create a disaster this large. The policies of Pakistan, especially its security service, including the military’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, however, were instrumental in creating it. While these policies have changed as the insurgencies emerging from the Vortex threatened both Afghanistan’s and Pakistan’s continued existence by 2008–10, their impact continues to affect all the conflicts in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The British stressed divide-and-rule along tribal lines. Institutions or individuals—secular or religious—that had the potential to have a cross-tribal appeal and could provide a matrix for Pushtun integration therefore had to be countered and kept under strict control. This approach was different from the practice in Afghanistan. Governments in Kabul since King Abdur Rahman were also historically practitioners of divide-and-rule tactics, tribally based throughout the Pushtun areas, but there was never the need to place a firewall between the tribes and Pushtun-controlled state power in Afghanistan like the British did.
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When the British Empire left, there was less need for a firewall between the tribes and the government of Pakistan. The Pakistan military withdrew frontier garrisons that the British (like their Mughal and Sikh predecessors) had maintained; shared Islamic identity rather than armed force would support state power in the borderlands. Instead of being seen as a threat to the new state, cross-border Pushtun loyalties were seen as a strength, and Pakistan relied on traditional lashkars raised on both sides of the Durand Line as their main fighting force in the 1948 Kashmir conflict with India.
For their firewall, Pakistan decided to create the FATA. The tribal agencies that make up the FATA, under Pakistan as they had been under the British, is a place where, off the main roads and aside from narcotics, the laws of Pakistan do not run. The firewall included the political status of the FATA; its institutions, especially those of the political agents and maliks, the Frontier Corps, the banning of political parties in the FATA, and the enforcement of the British-drafted Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR) with its emphasis on collective responsibility and punishment rather than the laws of Pakistan, all remained. While Prime Minister Yousaf Reza Gilani called for abolition of the FCR and extension of the laws of Pakistan to the FATA in his 2008 inaugural address, it remains in place to this day.
The population of the FATA is uncertain. It is estimated at about four million, about two percent of the population of Pakistan. In the 1980s it also contained two to three million Afghan refugees in a small (the size of Massachusetts) resource-constrained area. An estimated 88 percent of the land is unused, with three percent irrigated, eight percent under crops, and one percent under the remaining forests. The lack of development affects the people as well as the land. Overall literacy is estimated at 17 percent, compared to a national average of 42 percent. Female literacy in the FATA is about three percent, while there are over 8,000 people per doctor there as opposed to about 1,500 in the rest of Pakistan. This degree of underdevelopment was not the result of insurgency or Islamic radicalization, but of decades of Pakistan’s governance.
The FATA did not even have voting privileges until 1996. Political parties remain banned. The widespread dissatisfaction with the banning of political parties and activities in the FATA means that in recent decades it has been the mosque that shapes political action under the cloak of religious activity. By doing this, the Pakistani government policy effectively provided years of monopoly to the religious organizations in the FATA without the competition from other political parties that they face for Pushtun votes in the NWFP, Karachi, or elsewhere in Pakistan.
Pakistan started in the 1970s to line up support behind the groups that were the ISI’s chosen instruments for controlling events in Afghanistan.
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Linked to this was the policy of multiple Pakistani governments to make
the nature of the government in Kabul the focus of Pakistan’s Pushtun politics (rather than contesting for power within Pakistan). Former US ambassador to Afghanistan James Dobbins described this policy by Islamabad as the “aspirations of Pakistan’s Pushtuns are to be projected onto Afghanistan by the Government of Pakistan rather than being focused on Pakistan.”
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An extremist Muslim infrastructure appeared along the Afghan-Pakistani frontier: religious seminaries (madrassa), numerous training camps and staging areas for international Islamist action as a tool of Pakistani statecraft. To the ISI, building this religiously based infrastructure and its networks that ran throughout Pakistan and, eventually, globally, was consistent with then-president Zia ul Haq’s embrace of Pakistan’s religious parties. He believed that the Islamic dimension was one way Pakistan could counter India’s superior battlefield strength. Zia was suspicious of Afghan secular nationalism, blaming it for Pushtunistan crises of previous decades and offering India, in return for a trivial amount of aid, a chance to encircle Pakistan through cooperation with Kabul. At the same time, Zia distrusted Pakistan’s secular Pushtun organizations, such as the Awami National Party, seeing them as potentially secessionists and having a heritage of links with New Delhi. Pakistan believed that religious-based insurgent groups were, in the end, something that it could control and could make a powerful counterbalance to Pakistan’s national security dilemmas, both in terms of the competition with India and combating the Soviet “southern thrust.” Pakistani government policies including supporting the “Afghan Arabs” (Muslim foreigners who volunteered to take part in the jihad against the Soviets). Networks established in the 1980s for bringing in funding for Deobandi and (neo-) Wahabi-based Islam were the forerunners to what Al Qaeda would use to create a worldwide terrorist threat. In the words of Pakistani Ambassador Husain Haqqani, “This political commitment to an ideological [Pakistani] state gradually evolved into a strategic commitment to jihadi ideology.”
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How this commitment played out was most clearly seen in Peshawar, the headquarters of the seven Pakistan-supported Afghan Sunni resistance parties, and the refugee camps in the 1978–92 anti-Soviet conflict. Islamic radicalization became the guiding ideology. Pakistan aimed at
empowering those Afghan Pushtuns that espoused this radicalism, most notably Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his Hezb-e-Islami Hekmatyar (HiH) party.
Afghanistan’s Shias were also losers in Pakistan’s policies in 1978–92. Pakistan largely refused to recognize any Shia Afghan resistance parties (leaving the field open for Iran to pull together its eight-party alliance of Shia parties) or, until 1987, actions that would pull together the bitterly divided Shia Afghans. President Zia was afraid that this would lead to integration of Afghan Shia groups with Pakistan’s restive Shia population, with the result being subject to Iranian influence. When Afghanistan’s Shia groups did come together in the late 1980s, it was largely in spite of rather than because of Pakistan and reflected Iranian efforts.
In the 1970s and 80s, the secular military ISI ended up creating infrastructure and networks that included mainly religious institutions and organizations. Former Afghan military officers were marginalized in the Pakistan-based leadership of the war against the Soviets. Secular Afghan elites, especially leadership figures, were driven into exile from Pakistan by the repressive atmosphere attending the creation of what became the Taliban culture. In Pakistan during the 1970s and 80s, the emergence of the Taliban culture also reflected both the systematic weakness in civil society and the marginalization of the FATA in terms of political participation and economic development. The failure of the state school system in Pakistan was a powerful impetus to the rise of the madrassa network that provided the groundwork for the Taliban culture.
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At the same time, the existing tools of Pakistani control over the Frontier were allowed to atrophy, replaced by direct influence by the ISI and other security services or indirect control through the actions of favored groups, either Pakistani or Afghan.
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The malik system among the Pushtun tribes fell into disrepute. The positions of political agent in each of the seven FATA agencies, considered by their predecessors to be the most challenging posts in all of British India, were now given to junior civil servants.
The ISI created a network of camps and support systems on both sides of the Durand Line. The ISI, starting in the 1980s, brought in groups
waging a cross-border insurgency in Kashmir, plus allies whose focus was on Pakistan’s domestic policies. Thousands of radical Arabs and other foreign extremists were processed through this infrastructure en route to jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s and against Afghan Muslims opposing the Taliban in the 1990s, although, increasingly in the late 1980s, Kashmir became the main focus until the Kargil crisis of 1999 led Pakistan to change its policies away from a support for transborder insurgency there. In the 1990s, the network spread into Afghanistan, making use of the Pakistan-supported Taliban’s control of areas along the Pakistan border. This gave Pakistan even more deniability. By the late 1990s, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and Pakistani intelligence cooperated with groups supporting the insurgency in Kashmir like the Harakat-ul-Mudjahedin (formerly Harakat ul-Ansar), Lashkar-e-Taiba (Tayyaba), Jaish-e-Mohammed, Al-Badr Mudjahedin, and the Hizb-ul-Mudjahedin, which was the Kashmiri militant wing of Pakistan’s largest Islamic radical political party, the Jamaat-i-Islami. They used training camps and other facilities in Afghanistan, especially in Paktia and Nangarhar provinces, that were also used to support the increasing Pakistani involvement of these groups in Afghanistan’s 1992–2001 civil war. On the Pakistani side, there were networks for logistics, communications, transportation, safe houses, and a population expected to be supportive and ask no questions.
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One veteran Afghan political observer, whose work with Pakistani intelligence dates back to the 1970s, described this network as “the privatization of terror.”
While the creation of this infrastructure was paralleled by the rise of Islamic inroads into the Pakistan military, its creators were by no means all or even primarily Islamists. They were primarily uniformed but also civilians and Pakistani nationalists first and foremost. Since the decision in 1948 to counter the Indians in Kashmir with Pushtun tribal lashkars (armed groups) recruited from both Afghanistan Pakistan, secular nationalists counted on cross-border Islamic and tribal-based links as a way to redress the balance of power with India and saw this as a way for Pakistan to confront threats on its borders without the threat of a conventional conflict that it would likely lose. Building on a strength Pakistan has, namely its connections with transnational Islam, which its opponents
could not match, and trying to use them to achieve its policy aims against the Indian and (pre-1989) Soviet threats, helped create the Vortex.