http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=105385
Robert Fisk: Forget the cliches, there is
no easy way for the West to sort this out
17 November 2001
Afghanistan - as the armies of the West are about to realise - 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.
