THE end game in Afghanistan’s war is drawing to a close. The country is now divided into Afghan city-states. Capital Kabul and the Tajik north-east is in the hands of the former commander Ahmad Shah Masud’s Shura-i-Nazaar militia. The north-west Turkic-Afghan Mazar-i-Sharif region is under control of Jumbunsh-i-Milli of General Rashid Dostum. Jelalabad and its surrounding provinces were left by retreating Taliban forces to Mualvi Younis Khalis’ faction of the Hizb-i-Islami who has revived the Nangarhar Shura under the governorship of Haji Qadir.

The Persianized Pukhtoon majority of Herat city has been retaken by the Tajik leader Ismail Khan, who is nominally aligned with president Rabbani. Pukhtoon northern city of Kunduz has now surrendered to the Northern Alliance forces. However, deep-seated rivalries within the Northern Alliance surfaced in the siege of Kunduz. The situation is confused in Kandahar where Taliban militia is holding out in four southern provinces. Broadly speaking the country is now ethnically divided between Pukhtoons and non Pukhtoons along the east-west axis of the Hindukush. Range.

While the world’s most powerful air-armada broke the back of Taliban resistance, the Northern Alliance considers itself a victor. Burhanuddin Rabbani till recently a puppet in the hands of Ahmed Shah Masud has been installed as president by General Fahim and foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah. Al Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden have melted into the countryside. In the face of immense loss of life and military hardware, Mullah Omar’s defiance persists. In the eyes of many Pakistanis the Taliban did the dishonest act by leaving hundreds of misguided Pakistani and foreign Mujahideen in Mazar-i-Sharif to be massacred.

So much for Pukhtoon honour of the Taliban and their brand of Islam. The Pakhtoon-Taliban identity is now broken. Their causes now are diverse. The Taliban are on the run seeking safe havens in the central highlands and the southern desert plateaus. Many would probably have trekked across the porous Durand line to seek protection in the Pukhtoon tribal areas and the Afghan refugee camps, not to mention the religious seminaries run by doctors of theology.

But while the Taliban remain busy in dispersal, the Pukhtoons worry about their future. This worry is shared by Afghanistan’s neighbours and the world at large. Is Afghanistan on the verge of peace or is it on the verge of a new civil war? If the Pukhtoons who are two-thirds of the country, are denied their rightful place in Afghanistan, they will fight a bitter and possibly a prolonged civil war. There should be no ambiguity on that score.

In the past the Pukhtoon cause was served by the Taliban. If the civil war continues, the Taliban warriors would raise their voice for the Pukhtoon cause. They will not only sit it out and let the impending Jacobian drama of ethnic turmoil unfold itself. The deeply hidden Taliban cadres may emerge to tilt the military balance in the future. They will not then fight under the banner of Deoband or Wahabi Islam, but under the flag of Pukhtoon nationalism.

The recently liberated Hazaras have traditionally been at the receiving end of both Pukhtoon ascendancy and Tajik callousness. The Hizb, a Wahadat faction, can take to arms if it is left out in the cold. Fearing renewed Tajik atrocities 1,000 armed Hazara warriors are well on their way to Kabul to provide security to their kin. Burhanuddin Rabbani was not famous as a coalition-maker when he ruled Kabul in the past. He was at war against the Pukhtoons, the Turko-Uzbeks, the Hazaras, and the Ismailis. Now as a victor how much will he be willing to cede is a major worry.

Mercifully all the main parties to the conflict have agreed to the UN sponsored Bonn conference. The results of this conference of the Afghans, will depend less on the professed intentions of the Northern Alliance; more on the muscle of the international coalition and its determination to see the process through. The world is about to find out the daunting task of negotiating with the wily Afghan leadership which is going to be very very difficult. The Bonn process will not be easy but is necessary.

In the absence of a neutral Afghan army or a security apparatus, any provisional government in Kabul will become a hostage in the hands of the Northern Alliance forces. This vacuum can either be filled by UN peace-keeping troops from some neutral countries, or by the international coalition forces present in and around Afghanistan. Such a force will need to remain in Afghanistan till such time a provisional government is able to create an Afghan national army. Before a broad-based government can succeed, a broad-based neutral Afghan army will need to be created.

Only such an internal and external security apparatus can insure the writ of a future legitimate government in Afghanistan created through the Loya Jirga process. A broad-based provisional government backed by the neutral Afghan security forces with the help of the international coalition can accomplish the risky task of arms de-commissioning, Afghan reconstruction and repatriation. All other vital nation-building tasks will largely hinge on these steps. The international coalition appears determined to go through the process of peace unlike in the past. This is encouraging. If Afghanistan is left to its own devices, it will once again sink into darkness. That must not be allowed to happen. If the United States leaves its job half-done, terrorism will once again raise its ugly head from the unrest in Afghanistan. President George W. Bush owes it to the America people to settle the Afghan question so that the breeding grounds of international terrorism are eliminated.

While Pakistan is assessing its role in post-Taliban Afghanistan, two distinct impressions have gained currency — one foreign, one domestic. There is an attempt on the part of the western media to heap all the blame on the past policies of Pakistan.

This is an unjust and dishonest distortion of truth. For 22 years thousands of Pakistanis were killed or maimed as a result of Afghan-Soviet related bomb-blasts. Pakistan’s physical environment was degraded, drugs and lethal arms caused criminalization of civil society and mafias and Jihadi outfits were let loose on the people. Pakistan’s economy was weakened and the polity was marginalized.

Those who now sermonize us should consider that donor countries refused to pay beyond a fraction of the cost of maintaining two and a half million refugees on our soil. The last eleven years have been a lonely time for Pakistan which left it out in the cold holding the baby by itself which the West had left at our doorstep. That was immoral and dangerous.

Pakistan carried the cross of western sins against Afghanistan. We did our best to cope with the Afghan situation. The Taliban militia were not created by Pakistan, but in Pakistan’s Islamic seminaries. The Taliban had brought peace in Southern Afghanistan . So we welcomed them just as we welcomed peace brought about by General Dostum in the country’s six north western provinces, just as the Nangarhar shura of four eastern provinces had brought peace there.

We urged President Rabbani to give up war against other ethnic groups and widen his government. But his warlord Masud wanted to conquer Afghanistan for which he sought Indian, Iranian, and Russian arms to achieve his Bonapartist ambitions. We opposed military solutions by anyone in Afghanistan. We urged the Taliban militia not to take over Jalalabad and Kabul militarily.

But once they did, we used every possible persuasion for them to broaden their government. In 1996 we were on the verge of a Taliban-Dostum agreement for a broad-based government. Six more months to Benazir Bhutto’s government would have seen this agreement through. My thinking at the time was not to create a military alliance between two of the three powerful sides. The purpose was to isolate the most belligerent one so that it would be forced to reconsider its policy of conquest as opposed to compromise.

The other serious attempt was made in 1995 with ex-king Zahir Shah. I met him in 1994 and 1995 in Rome, and convinced my government to invite his special envoy General Wali to visit Pakistan. To support the ex-king’s cause I travelled extensively in Afghanistan to generate support for him. The ex-king was very highly respected all over the country. The Taliban also spoke well of him. Except for President Rabbani, nearly all regions and ethnicities were prepared to welcome him.

It is a tragic irony of fate, that the United States refused to consider this option and I came back from Washington in early 1996 empty handed. The point is that America had just walked away and a poor, debt-ridden country was left to its own devices. Western sermons apart, only Pakistan knows the anguish of those wasted years.

The domestic situation of Pakistan is equally baffling. The fall of Kabul to the Northern Alliance is being seen as a fall of Islamabad by the super-Islamists and the super-nationalists. Neither has any constituency in the largely moderate Pakistan. For two decades we were fed on the concept of strategic depth. No one really explained what it was. To question the concept was to indulge in sedition. In the age of deliverable nuclear weapons in South Asia, what strategic depth could a protectorate in Afghanistan have given us? If anything the Taliban got strategic depth in Pakistan which they might yet use.

Pakistan does not need a vassal state in its west for survival. It needs a broad-based peaceful Afghan state that is at peace within and at peace with its neighbours. Pakistan has an opportunity to mend its fences with Iran and Uzbekistan. Instead of looking for strategic military depth, Pakistan should work for an economic out-reach into Afghanistan and Central Asia. The dividends of peace will be enormous for Pakistan.

The next few years will see a massive Afghan exodus back to their homeland, as well as massive reconstruction of Afghanistan, and a flow of Central Asian gas and oil into South Asia. Pakistan must not act as an aggressive ideological wedge between Central Asia and South Asia. It needs to act like a bridge between the heartland of Asia and the Arabian sea. Pakistan geographically is the best bet for Central Asia. So it now needs to overcome its gloom and regain its lost confidence. The future is ours if we decide to reach it.

The writer is a former foreign minister of Pakistan.

COMPARISONS are odious. Still the defeat of the Taliban may have as much effect on the world, particularly on the countries in the neighbourhood of Afghanistan, as the September 11 carnage had on America and the West. There is no doubting that liberalism will be in ascendancy even if fundamentalism does not lose its total appeal. At least, the fear of clash of civilizations, between the cross and the crescent will recede.

Islamabad, which used fundamentalism as part of its policy, has come a cropper.The Taliban were the propeller of that policy and they stand rejected. The genii of religious fervour the Pakistan government released, refuses to go back to the bottle despite hard measures and behind-the-scenes pleas for restraint. This is a point for concern.

Whether General Zia-ul-Haq initiated the cult of the Taliban or whether President Pervez Musharraf merely sustained it, the society has not remained immune to what extremism has brought in its train. If any evidence was required, the gathering of around 10 lakh people at Raiwind, near Lahore, earlier in the month, should have been sufficient. The call had been given by the Tablighi Jamaat. Probably, it all began when the military considered fundamentalism a way to divert people’s attention from the democratic governance.

But what does the nation do when the rulers have no intention to renounce their hold? It may be a truism that the army in a Third World country never goes back to the barracks once it has tasted power. Even in the advanced Turkey, the army returns when it feels that democracy has gone off the rails. Pervez wants such a provision in his country’s Constitution.

The intelligentsia in Pakistan feels happy that the military is fixing up the fundamentalists — a job the political parties could not do. But in the process the men in khaki may earn legitimacy which none in Pakistan has. Ousting it even in October, 2002, when the elections are supposed to be held, may be difficult. Pervez may be hated by the extremists but he has come to be accepted by the opinion makers. Washington too has come to have a vested interest in him. As long as he stays there is no likelihood of sovereignty returning to voters.

If ever the challenge to Musharraf develops it will be from the Taliban who have become part and parcel of the local population. Even before their exodus from Afghanistan, they had destabilized the Pakistan society. They will be a force to reckon with now when their number is in lakhs. That the extremists in Pakistan act as their arm is all the more ominous.

Islamabad was on the top of the world as long as the Taliban could reach distant Kashmir. It was like Washington feeling gratified over the Taliban’s role in Chechnya. But it never struck either of them, particularly the former, that fundamentalists would one day go beyond the short leash on which they had been kept. That they would break loose and occupy in Pakistan the space which belongs to its nationals.

Pervez is a prisoner of his own policies. He has justified in the name of freedom the violence which some of them have committed when they singled out Hindus and Sikhs in buses, playgrounds or elsewhere and the killings in Kashmir. If the reports of Pakistan using the Taliban in Kashmir are correct, Pervez may be more influenced by them than before.

The significant factor is that Washington is getting to know more and more about the nexus between Islamabad and the Taliban. One retired ISI officer has spilled the beans:operations were facilitated by Pakistan’s embassy in Kabul and its consulates in Kandahar and Herat. The consulates were headed by ISI operatives-turned-diplomats, who donned Taliban’s Kandahari clothes and wore turbans. Pakistani trainers and military advisers also grew beards and rubbed shoulders with the Arab operatives of Osama bin Laden, the chief financier of training camps in Afghanistan.

Whatever the situation, the Taliban cannot be wished away because their number is large. Nearly 20,000 madressas, according to Islamabad’s interior ministry, operate in Pakistan. They belch out every year 30 lakh students, aged four and above. At the current rate of growth, the number of madressas in the next decade will be equal to the government-run-primary and secondary schools in the country. The instruction is a dose of extremism dinned into each student to evoke blind obedience and the arrogance of faith.

Seminary students are being used all over. They are the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen in Kashmir and Sunni Tehrik, Jamait-i-Tulaba, Sawad-i-Azam, Jamiat-i-Ahl-i-Sunnat and Majlis-i-Tahaffuz-i-Khatm-i-Nabuwwat in Pakistan. The defeat of Taliban does not mean their end. Mullah Mohammed Omar, the spiritual head of the Taliban movement, has said: “We have enough weapons to fight an uninterrupted war for 60 years”. The ISI, which is a close collaborator of the Taliban, says that ‘they would not need to import weapons, thanks to the Soviet Union and the western allies who left behind huge arms dumps in Afghanistan’.

The Taliban have themselves announced that they will retire to mountains and carry on guerilla warfare. US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld has said that it is difficult to differentiate the Taliban from the rest. His argument is that they can renounce fighting, mix with the local population and take up arms when they find the time opportune. The madressas are still churning out the mujahideen. Their numbers apart, their attitude, their philosophy, their thinking, all have to be changed.

What the international community has to realize is that it has to eliminate the cult of Talibanism, which has spread in Afghanistan, Pakistan and beyond and which does not arouse the abhorrence it should. In fact there is reverence for it. The manner in which most Muslims in the world have shown admiration for Osama bin Laden, who has justified violence in the name of religion, indicates that.

Still more disconcerting part is that Talibanization seems to be affecting other religions too. How to retrieve the different communities from the communal frenzy is posing a big challenge to humanity. All over the world, religion is gaining adherents. More and more people are going to temples, churches, mosques and gurudwaras. Religion is taking over, pushing secular thinking to a corner.

Another aspect of the problem is the wide gap which can open between the original teaching of a religion’s founder and what that faith has become after centuries of being worked over and interpreted by the founder’s followers. Within each religion, wide variations have grown. Circumstances and situations have affected the profile of religion.

Every great religion has noble teachings and lofty moral goals. Yet in each religion these high standards are often far removed from what that religion seems to be in the actual thought and practice of most of its followers.

Many seem to imagine that a principle can only be stoutly defended by violence and by condemning those who do not accept it. It is not the approach of tolerance, of feeling that perhaps others might also have some share of the truth.

We have to develop a spirit of tolerance. Even White Americans, after so many years of democratic values, picked on the Sikhs after the September 11 incidents. In response to my articles, India’s Ambassador at Washington has written to me that the government of India has been able to normalize the situation.

Afghanistan has taught us that the combative approach which the Taliban adopted does not fit into the world hankering after peace and harmony. The original purpose of war was to eliminate terrorism wherever it was. We have to go back to it. The Taliban are the symptom, not the disease. The disease is intolerance, the effort to impose your ideas or way of thinking on others.

THOUGH the moves to establish a broad-based multi-ethnic political dispensation in Afghanistan have barely started, preliminary consultations have been initiated to chalk out plans for the reconstruction of a country that has undergone worse devastation than any other since the Second World War.

In 1989, the beneficiaries of the heroic struggle of the Afghans against the Soviet occupation had walked away, leaving a wasteland created by that superpower, and not even bothering to facilitate the creation of a stable political order, that might have averted the civil war and further devastation that followed. This shortsightedness boomeranged as international terrorists found a haven there. After the trauma of September 11, the West has committed itself to the reconstruction of this unfortunate land, so that a firm foundation can be laid for a durable peace.

The moves to discuss economic reconstruction almost simultaneously with the quest for political stability make sense in several ways. The purpose of the current meeting in Bonn is to establish an interim set-up, and an estimated two years may pass before a democratically constituted government that is representative of all major ethnic groups can be constituted. The economic problems are however of an urgent nature. Afghanistan was close to a famine owing to years of drought when the US-led attacks started on October 7, 2001. That is why some of the US aircraft were dropping food packages over remote areas even as warplanes were conducting the heaviest bombardment since the Second World War on the Taliban and the suspected terrorist hideouts.

The seriousness of the commitment of the international community to the task of reconstruction can be gauged from the number of meetings planned both to identify the tasks and to mobilize resources. A three-day meeting was held at Islamabad from November 26 under the sponsorship of the UN, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank, that was attended by some 200 participants. This was concerned mainly with identifying goals and priorities. A conference of developed countries is planned in Berlin on December 5, with a follow-up meeting in January in Tokyo when actual mobilization of funds will come up.

The magnitude of the tasks before the world community is of daunting proportions. Afghanistan was one of the poorest countries even before the cycle of violence and conflict engulfed it. The decade of Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1989 saw it become the scene of the last proxy conflict of the cold war between the two superpowers, with the US, under President Reagan, going all out to inflict the maximum damage on the “evil empire”. The seeds of the religious extremism, now blamed for fomenting terrorism, were planted by the CIA, which pumped funds generously into the mobilization of thousands of jehadist volunteers from all over the Islamic world to wage war against the Godless power that had invaded an Islamic land. Osama bin Laden was, in that period, a valued ally of the West.

The Soviet occupation lasted ten years, killed over a million Afghans, and destroyed much of the countryside, driving away a third of the population of Afghanistan who sought refugee in foreign lands, mostly in Pakistan and Iran. The impact of the present US-led war against terrorism, whose targets were Osama and the Al Qaeda network, and the Taliban regime that refused to surrender them, has been more awesome.

The order in which the work has to be done suggests itself, on the basis of the ground realities. Most urgent is the provision of food to the drought-affected population scattered over a large country where the communication infrastructure has been destroyed by conflict and lack of maintenance. Given the breakdown of normal administration, this will need the involvement of tribal elders as well as of the staff of the UN agencies and the NGOs in order to ensure that the food does get to those who need it most, notably the women, children and the elderly. Since there has been extensive internal dislocation of the population, the task of rehabilitation of refugees must include not only the refugees in Pakistan and Iran (totalling perhaps four million) but also the IDPs (internally displaced persons), whose numbers may be larger.

As housing has been hit hard by the conflict, shelter in the form of tents, as well as blankets are as urgently needed as food. Medical supplies, together with doctors, nurses, and other paramedical staff should also be provided, through the involvement of the UN agencies, such as UNICEF, as the lives of a lot of children, and of pregnant women are at stake. The Edhi Foundation had sent supplies to Jalalabad and Kandahar after the October 7 attacks began, and should be enabled to do more as the conflict abates. There is scope for work by many charitable trusts in Pakistan, as well as for the abundant manpower that includes doctors, engineers and all kinds of artisans.

There is considerable work falling into the second stage of rehabilitation and reconstruction. The first stage of providing emergency relief has to merge into tasks that would facilitate the return of uprooted Afghans to their homes. Demining operations must be speeded up, and the rehabilitation of agriculture facilitated by repairing existing canals and dams, and starting the construction of new ones. Given the tribal nature of society, and the ethnic divides, there has to be a decentralization of execution once the policies have been agreed, and the resources allocated. However, too much decentralization might affect the unity of a country that has been experiencing lack of cohesion for over two decades. It will need teamwork between the donor countries, UN bodies and the new political dispensation to arrive at the right mix.

The reconstruction would consist of rebuilding cities, providing new housing, repairing the road network that had been constructed through aid from the superpowers during the earlier period of cold war rivalry. Educational and health facilities were rudimentary at the best of times before the period of turmoil. The human resources of Afghanistan have been degraded and many of the technocrats and experts have migrated to western countries. Some of them must be mobilized in order to assist in the daunting tasks that are already estimated to cost $10 billion over the next few years.

After the task of rehabilitation, and even before it is completed, the third component, that of development, needs to be planned and initiated. Afghanistan was one of the least developed countries, before the period of external intervention and internal conflict reduced it to a wasteland. The goal before the world community should be to enable Afghanistan to catch up with other developing countries that have taken off. Apart from the injection of resources from abroad, this would also require careful coordination with neighbours, particularly as Afghanistan is a land-locked country.

Cooperation with neighbours can take place bilaterally or multilaterally. Afghanistan is already a member of ECO that links it with all its immediate neighbours except China. ECO’s progress in implementing its programmes and projects has been impeded by the instability in Afghanistan. Assuming that peace will come to Afghanistan after the current phase, the prospects for the various action plans of ECO would improve, and Afghanistan would be a principal beneficiary. Another forum for multilateral cooperation could be the OIC, whose affluent members could contribute materially to the reconstruction plans for Afghanistan.

The nature of bilateral cooperation with individual neighbours would depend upon the type of relationship that develops with each of them. Pakistan is the neighbour with the longest border, as well as the most convenient lines of communications to provide transit facilities to Afghanistan. Indeed, in any comprehensive blueprint for the reconstruction of Afghanistan, Pakistan would be expected to play a significant role. Having joined the international coalition against terrorism, Pakistan would be ready to establish a friendly equation with whatever political dispensation emerges in Afghanistan as a result of the efforts being made under the aegis of the UN.

Pakistan has provided the traditional route from the sea to Afghanistan and has been the principal conduit for humanitarian assistance to Afghan refugees on its soil, as well as for the IDPs inside Afghanistan. With its surplus wheat, and potential to meet the needs for construction materials, notably cement, Pakistan is well placed to participate actively in the task of reconstruction. There is great sympathy and support for the brotherly people of Afghanistan, which is likely to be reflected in substantial private sector contributions for this task. Additionally, there exist bright prospects for cooperation between Pakistan and Afghanistan as neighbours, and as members of ECO, as well as OIC.

After the immediate challenges of emergency humanitarian assistance, and of repairing the damage done to Afghanistan by two decades of conflict are met, the two countries can work together in the succeeding stage of developmental activity. Oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia can pass through Afghanistan for the large and growing market in South Asia. Experts are identifying different areas for joint ventures that could benefit both countries. Writing in the New York Times, an expatriate Afghan economist, Prof. Ishaq Nadri of the New York University, suggested that a steel industry could be established, using Afghan iron ore and coal from deposits discovered in Pakistan.

The scope for cooperation with other neighbours, which include Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China, is also enormous. It is both appropriate and timely to begin making plans, as well as preparations for the reconstruction of Afghanistan, which will serve to reinforce peace and political stability in this war-ravaged land, but also enable it to contribute to the progress and prosperity of its region.