The Sept. 11 observances and President Donald Trump's speech last month have returned Afghanistan to the headlines. The president said a rapid exit of U.S. forces, there since after the terror attacks of 2001, would leave a void that terrorist groups would fill.
I listened with an equal sense of irony and foreboding as he called on India and Pakistan to step in and help rout the Taliban and other such groups out of Afghanistan.
If past is precedent, that could be, at worst, highly dangerous, and at best, an unviable prospect. As a United Nations Development Program consultant, I lived in Afghanistan's capital city of Kabul in the late 1980s advising the Soviet-backed government on elevating the role of women. From that vantage point, I was witness to the early rise of the Taliban before it grew into one of the greatest repressors of women the world has known and destroyed the progress we had helped to make.
I also recall the United States' contributions to its inception and growth. The sad truth is, had it not been for U.S. administrations in the 1980s and '90s arming and funding some of the Taliban's radical Islamist precursors, Afghanistan may not have turned into what Trump calls "a government that gave comfort and shelter to terrorists."
"The Americans hoped that the Taliban could bring peace and stability to Afghanistan," wrote former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in his 2006 book, "In the Line of Fire." He wrote the U.S. "welcomed the emergence of a 'third force' ... " but later dissociated themselves from the Taliban.
Though Trump is not to blame for that history, there were other, more moderate wings of the Mujahedeen the United States could have supported, which shared the American objective of getting the Soviets out. But U.S. policy favored the political Islamists, joining Saudi Arabia in supporting them with arms and ammunition. Those would be used against the moderates favored by Afghanistan's then-minister of defense, Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was appointed in 1992 in post-communist Afghanistan
Massoud expressed grave concerns about the Taliban, which originated out of religious schools for Afghan refugees in Pakistan. He particularly objected to their repression of Afghan women. In 1994-95 he helped defeat most militant factions in Kabul, but with massive military support from Pakistan, the Taliban regrouped and expanded from their base in Kandahar to the capital to emerge as a new militant fundamentalist force. Massoud was killed two days before Sept. 11, 2001, in a suicide bombing.
Trump now calls for Pakistani assistance to rid Afghanistan of such groups. How likely is that when Pakistan has historically done the opposite? In the 1990s, the head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, Hamid Gul, wanted Pakistan's mujahedeen to establish a government in Afghanistan for an Islamic revolution that would spread to Central Asia. According to Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, 80,000 to 100,000 Pakistanis fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence was also actively involved with several al-Qaida training camps in 2000, according to British intelligence.
Two years after the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996 to establish the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, a U.S. State Department document said between 20 percent and 40 percent of Taliban soldiers were Pakistani.
In 2000, the U.N. Security Council imposed an arms embargo against military support to the Taliban, with a notable focus on Pakistan. By 2001, 28,000 to 30,000 Pakistani nationals were reportedly fighting anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan.
"We have been paying Pakistan billions and billions of dollars, at the same time they are housing the very terrorists that we are fighting," said Trump. He said 20 U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations are active in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"The terrorist of yesterday is the hero of today, and the hero of yesterday becomes the terrorist of today," wrote Pakistani author and political scientist Eqbal Ahmed in his 2011 book, "Terrorism: Theirs and Ours." He recalled that President Ronald Reagan in 1985 hosted Afghan mujahedeen and called them "freedom fighters."
As for India, Trump has noted its contributions to stability in Afghanistan but suggested its U.S. trade could be jeopardized unless India steps up its Afghan involvement. Yet even as he bases his Afghan strategy on co-operation from India and Pakistan, the president acknowledged they are, "two nuclear-armed states, whose tense relations threaten to spiral into conflict." That could certainly result if they get involved on opposite sides.
It is doubtful that creating a viable democratic Afghanistan is something the U.S. can achieve. Afghanistan was never a cohesive, centrally planned state. It was a nomadic, tribal Islamic society held together by village settlements. Even the Soviet hold was at best tenuous in the cities, and extended to only 20 percent of the countryside. The USSR couldn't hold onto Afghanistan; nor could the U.S. win the war.
As an Indian woman who has worked over 60 years toward global women's empowerment in New York, Afghanistan and India, and currently lives under the Hindu-centric government of India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, I see both the perils of militant Islamic fundamentalism and of the growing global anti-Muslim sentiment. To be blunt: Accelerating the existing tensions between those two South Asian nations and intensifying the tenuous status of Muslims targeted under Modi's regime could create a very dangerous, if not critical, situation in the region.
