Bin Laden

The Alienated Frontier: Why the United States Can’t Get Osama bin Laden by Vanni Cappelli Vanni Cappelli is a freelance journalist who has covered conflicts in the Horn of Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia since the early 1990s. He is a co-founder and the current president of the Afghanistan Foreign Press Association. Since the Russian-supplied Afghan army overthrew progressive President Daud in 1978, the nation has endured the long Soviet-Afghan war, the Taliban, and the arrival of U.S troops. These military actions have only heightened the historical alienation of the Pashtun tribes who overspread the long-contested border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. These are the people who are almost certainly sheltering Osama bin Laden. The Alienated Frontier is a centuries-old problem that must be solved if we are to win the war on terror, and solving it will require rebuilding the infrastructure, developing alternatives to poppy cultivation, and solving the ‘‘Pashtunistan’’ question. The capture or elimination of given individuals will achieve little if the conditions that allow radicals to thrive are not addressed . O n December 7, 2004, as the Pashtun tribal leader Hamid Karzai was being sworn in as the first popularly elected president of Afghanistan at the Arg Palace in Kabul before an assemblage that included Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a swarm of weed-green nato helicopters hovered far above the limbless beggars and leishmaniasis-scarred street children who congregate daily in war-battered Pashtunistan Square, in front of the presidential palace. The choppers were but the latest performers in a quarter-century airshow over the square. First there were the Afghan army officers’ Russian- supplied jets in 1978, overthrowing and assassinating the progressive pre- sident, Mohammad Daud Khan. These were followed by the Soviet helicopters that strove for over a decade to extend Russian control outside of Afghanistan’s cities. After them came the American jets, which, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, drove the Taliban back into the frontier mountains from which they had come. All of these foreign warplanes have tried to determine the destiny of Afghanistan solely by force. All of them have failed, and in their method lies the # 2005 Published by Elsevier Limited on behalf of Foreign Policy Research Institute. Fall 2005 | 713 key not only to the great current failure of the United States to get Osama bin Laden, but also to the historical alienation of the people who are almost certainly sheltering him, the Pashtun tribes who overspread the long-contested border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Four years after the tragic events that opened our present crisis, and despite mounting attacks such as the July 7 bombings in London, apart from periodic exclamations of ‘‘Why can’t we get him?’’ emanating from politi- cians, the media, and citizens, Americans show a marked disinterest in grappling with the complexities of the issue. Afghanistan has fallen off the national radar screen amid the preoccupation with the war in Iraq. At the heart of this disengagement lies a lack of interest in the Pashtuns. What forces in their history have led some of them to give sanctuary to the most wanted outlaw in the world, and caused many of them to look up to him as a hero? The Alienated Frontier is a centuries-old problem that we have done little to ameliorate, but which we must solve if we are to win the war on terror. ‘‘The Problem of the Tribes’’ The traditional Pashtun homeland, which stretches from the Indus River in Pakistan to the Hindu Kush mountains in central Afghanistan, has long been fabled as one of the most wildly romantic regions on earth, a place whose stark topographic discords are echoed in the culture of its inhabitants. Within its territory one encounters rare natural beauty alternating with arid desolation, lavish hospitality concurrent with savage blood feuds, and secular moderation set against religious fanaticism. The remoteness, vastness, and breathtaking variety of the Pashtun frontier are often cited as obstacles to the great manhunt that is underway there. Yet the difficulty of the land is nothing compared to the towering massif of alienation that frustrates the quest for bin Laden. ‘‘The problem with the Americans is that they don’t even try to get to know the people they are dealing with,’’ says one Afghan-American businessman who returned to his native land after a long exile in the hopeful spring of 2002. ‘‘They don’t have a clear picture of the framework they are operating in. And tribes, cultural traits, and disputed borders are the least of it. The Americans don’t have an insight into people’s minds. They don’t understand the nature of the grievances they are confronted with—or why they have become the latest target of these grievances.’’1 CAPPELLI 1 Author interview, September 2004, Kabul, Afghanistan. 714 | Orbis The complex alienation that is at issue here began with the formal sundering of the Pashtun tribes by conquest in the early nineteenth century, which created the ‘‘Problem of the Tribes,’’ as the British soldier and diplomat W. K. Fraser-Tytler memorably called it.2 ‘‘There is a fate about this restless frontier which has been too strong for mankind ever since the days when the Greek rulers of Bactria died fighting in face of the invading nomads till now, when we have handed over the problem still unsolved.’’ The ethnic Pashtun lands formed the core of the Afghan state founded in 1747 by Ahmad Shah Durrani, the country’s first king, and comprise what can be most naturally called Afghanistan (‘‘Afghan’’ is a poetic variant of Pashtun). Famed for their warrior spirit, love of freedom, and strict adherence to their tribal code of Pashtunwali—a way of life that balances revenge and hospitality and stresses honor and the granting of sanctuary—the 20 million Pashtuns who find themselves split roughly in half by the present international border are one people in blood, language, and spirit. Yet a series of imperial conquests and successions have divided, brutalized, and stunted the devel- opment of this people, creating resentments that are at the heart of an Alienated Frontier 2 Sir William Kerr Fraser-Tytler, Afghanistan: A Study of Political Developments in Central and Southern Asia (Oxford, 1950). Fall 2005 | 715 unresolved problem that was allowed to fester for many decades until it became a major threat to global security. Taking advantage of instability within the Afghan state in the 1820s, the Punjabi Sikh potentate Ranjit Singh conquered the southeastern half of the Pashtun lands, which were incorporated into British India (known as ‘‘the Raj’’) after the British conquered the Sikh state in the 1840s. Thus the most fertile, productive, and spirited parts of Afghanistan fell under foreign rule. Far from being merely a curious fact of long-forgotten imperial history, this conquest, its formalization by the Anglo-Afghan Durand Treaty of 1893, and the passing on of these territories to Pakistan upon the partition and independence of India in 1947 remain a toxic contemporary force, having set the parameters within which the war on terror in south-central Asia is now being waged. Never accepted and violently resented by the Pashtuns on both sides of the Durand Line to this day, the conquest has been a continuing source of alienation and violence on the frontier over the last two centuries. But more importantly, it has been a prime factor in the poverty and lack of development that feed the extremism and bloodshed. Countering assertions that the Pashtuns are incorrigibly backward and violent by nature, rather than kept in such a state by outside intervention, Fraser-Tytler gave some indication of the promise they held, had they been left to their own devices or subjected to enlightened rule: Here was a country and a people wild, savage, and untamed, but a country and a people of great potentialities, the people virile, intelligent, and ready to learn, the country practically undeveloped but teeming with possibilities for the farmer, the mining expert, and the engineer. . . . Here was a chance for some wise economic and cultural planning, to raise the standard of life by the development of the country’s material resources, while at the same time raising the standard of thought by a careful scheme of educational development.3 That the British Raj made some progress along these lines in its century of rule on the frontier cannot be denied. But their policies towards the Pashtuns subordinated long-term considerations to narrow, perceived short-term strategic interests, an attitude that would have catastrophic consequences in these remote mountains and that would eventually culminate in global conflict. Although some of the leading nineteenth-century British frontier experts—among them Charles Masson, Alexander Burnes, John Lawrence, and James Outram—advocated restoring the trans-Indus territories to Kabul in order to create a strong and allied Afghanistan and cement Central Asian security, their counsels were rejected. The results of this imperial myopia during the British-Russian Great Game rivalry in the region were three Anglo- Afghan wars and decades of brutal frontier skirmishing that bred distrust of all foreigners among a people previously fabled for their tolerance. CAPPELLI 3 Ibid., p. 201. 716 | Orbis Realizing that differences in temperament and topography required different administrative approaches in different areas, the British in 1901 reorganized their portion of the Pashtun lands into the directly controlled Northwest Frontier Province and the more loosely administered Tribal Lands, an arrangement retained by Pakistan to this day. Though the rulers of the Raj were generally successful in keeping the peace and initiating development in the more settled districts closer to the Indus of the former area, the story of their relations with ‘‘the free tribes’’ along the Afghan frontier is a long and sorry tale of tribal revolts ineptly provoked and poorly handled. Fraser-Tytler, who spent some forty years serving Britain on both sides of the Durand Line, pointed out that this failure was largely due to a British inability to answer the question, was the frontier problem primarily a civil or a military responsibility? This is the burning question facing the Americans and their tenuous Pakistani allies today. Fraser-Tytler argued that in failing to recognize that ‘‘it was in fact hardly a military problem at all,’’ the British again and again engaged in bloody and futile campaigns that only heightened the psychology of alienation on the frontier. He provided a roadmap for dealing with the intractable ‘‘Problem of the Tribes’’ without which the current adventurers into this trackless, quasi-mythic space will come to similar grief: Had fate so willed it, I have no doubt that in the end the British would have solved the frontier problem. It would have taken a long time before the steady pressure of civilization, operating from both sides of the border, so altered the economic condition and the mental outlook of the frontier tribes that they discarded their weapons, their blood feuds, and their tribal customs for a more settled and peaceful way of life. But it could have been done, and it would have been done in the end by the British and the Afghans working each in their own fashion with the common aim of bringing peace and security to an area which has known neither peace nor security for maybe a thousand years.4 Yet as great as was the general failure of past empires to adopt the more enlightened policies that would have brought about this end, no act committed by the great powers who have played the Great Game in Central Asia has resounded with such destructive force in our own time as has their repeated suppression of homegrown progressive forces on the frontier. The Frontier Gandhi and the Red Prince Justifying Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, Mikhail Gorbachev wrote: ‘‘Afghanistan has many problems owing to its extreme backwardness, which largely stems from the British rule. Therefore, it was quite natural that many Afghans wanted to help their people overcome medieval patterns, update state and public institutions, and speed up progress. But as soon as Alienated Frontier 4 Ibid., p. 270. Fall 2005 | 717 progressive changes were charted, imperialist quarters began to pressure Afghanistan from without.’’5 This accurate summation of what went wrong on the frontier over the last eighty years suffers from one obvious defect: it was the Soviets themselves in the 1970s whose crushing of progressive Pashtun forces was the most disastrous. But though the violence of their methods was unparalleled, there was ample precedent for such an enterprise. Two dynamic mid-twentieth-century figures working on different sides of the Durand Line, Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Mohammad Daud Khan, attempted to syncretically fuse tradition and modernity among the Pashtuns. Both were intimately associated with the ‘‘Pashtunistan’’ issue of self-deter- mination for the tribes living south and east of the border in Pakistan. The path from their failure to bin Laden and his allies’ success in promoting radical Islam to this people is brutal and direct. Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a legendary figure known as ‘‘the Frontier Gandhi,’’ whose message of nonviolence, inter- religious brotherhood, and social reform inspired the Pashtuns of today’s Pakistan, was in every sense the anti–bin Laden. This disciple of the Mahatma and member of Nehru’s Congress Party waged a seventy-year struggle to win autonomy for the tribes and to empower the tenants and small landowners of the frontier’s impoverished rural society, only to be met by systematic persecution and eventual marginalization by a long succession of British and Pakistani governments. There can be no understanding of the religious extremism that pervades large areas of northern Pakistan today without coming to terms with this brutal suppression of a popular democratic move- ment of the opposite character by a major Western nation and its clients. Taking up the developmental challenge spoken of by Fraser-Tytler, Ghaffar Khan and his Khudai Khidmatgar (‘‘Servants of God’’) movement tried from the 1920s on to encourage the Pashtuns to overcome their blood feuds and static traditionalism, attempting to persuade them that these phenomena were at the root of their poverty. Acting as champions of Pashtun identity, the movement was able to promote its vision of economic development, pacifism, women’s rights, and a liberal, modernist Islam by linking it to the idea of a resurgent Pashtun nation. For a time they achieved great success. Progressive schools were opened on the frontier, Congress captured the provincial legislature, and Ghaffar Khan (Badshah Khan) became a folk hero, acclaimed as ‘‘King of Khans’’ for his Gandhian refusal to respond with violence to the torments to which he and his followers were subjected by the Raj. This all fell apart, however, in the 1947 partition struggle. As an advocate of a united India, Ghaffar Khan found little room to maneuver when the Muslim League and Ghaffar Khan’s rival Mohammad Ali Jinnah proclaimed Islam to be in danger as CAPPELLI 5 Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 177. 718 | Orbis the Pashtuns were asked to choose between India and Pakistan. His move- ment was banned by the new Pakistani authorities, but Ghaffar Khan carried on his struggle in the new British-allied state by advocating an autonomous Pashtunistan within a federal Pakistan, but this endeavor met with severe repression. By the time of his death in 1988, he was a revered but powerless figure, his efforts to win autonomy for his people having been successfully stifled first by the British and then by the Pakistanis, who countered his Pashtun nationalism with Muslim nationalism. Indian historian Parshotam Mehra summed up the legacy of these events when he wrote, ‘‘The end-result is there for all to see—an alienated frontier whose proud Pathans have added their mite to Pakistan’s myriad other problems.’’6 The reverses of these years pale, however, before the tragedy into which the Pashtuns were plunged by totalitarian violence on the other side of the Durand Line in the 1970s and 1980s, which put an end to the other great attempt to bring harmony to the frontier. The Soviet-Afghan War began with the destruction of the most pro- gressive regime ever to rule Afghanistan, led by Mohammad Daud Khan. A member of the Afghan royal family known as ‘‘the Red Prince’’ for his lifelong advocacy of progressive solutions to the country’s problems, Daud’s two periods of rule (as prime minister from 1953 to 1963 and then as president of the republic he proclaimed after he overthrew the king in 1973) were times of unprecedented socioeconomic progress.7 An infrastructure of roads, dams, electric power, warehouses, and communications was laid down, and industry began to provide an alternative in what had been an agricultural economy. Education was vastly expanded, women’s rights promoted, and land reforms promulgated. Such a poor country could hardly carry out this transformation by itself, however, and it inevitably became a pawn in the Cold War super- power rivalry. The seeds of ruin were thus present even in the country’s build- up. Today’s crisis is the result of Daud’s inability to stave off the Soviet Union, combined with short-sighted U.S. policies. Left-leaning, non-aligned, but well aware of the dangers posed by the presence of the Soviet Union on his northern border, Daud initially approached the United States for economic and military assistance in 1954. But the Americans were no more able than the British had been to see how vital a strong Afghanistan was to Central Asian security. Washington favored Pakistan, which it saw as the true bulwark against communism in the region, in Afghan-Pakistani issues such as the Pashtunistan question. It denied Daud’s requests for aid. Moscow was only too happy to fill the void, finally shaking Washington into an aid race in which the latter never caught up. Alienated Frontier 6 For more on the legacy of these years, see Parshotam Mehra, The North-West Frontier Drama, 1945–47: A Reassessment (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 230. 7 Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan—A History of Struggle and Survival (London, New York: I. B. Tauris, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 130. Fall 2005 | 719 The U.S. approach to Afghanistan at the time saw everything in terms of the perceived needs of the hour, paying no attention to either long-term considerations or questions of justice. George McGhee, a senior State Depart- ment official in the early 1960s, quite openly expressed this attitude when he wrote of the Pashtunistan question: ‘‘We attempted . . . to dissuade the Afghans from pressing this issue, since it could have led to war with Pakistan and created opportunities for Soviet intervention in both countries. Apart from these con- siderations the disposition of the Pathans has little strategic interest to us.’’8 Half a century later, Washington’s frontier policy is essentially unchanged, and its parsimony and lack of sensitivity to Pashtun needs and grievances are denying it the necessary basis to counter bin Laden’s influence effectively. Over the last quarter century the accusation that America has no regard for the Pashtuns other than to use them when it needs to gave many opportunities to America’s enemies on the frontier, giving them a chance to prove to the tribes that their own concern ran deeper. From One Extreme to Another Daud was overthrown by Soviet-backed Afghan army officers in April 1978. This Saur Coup (named after the Afghan month in which it o