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September 29, 2002
REVIEWS: Afghanistan’s two fronts
The bulk of the book under review has been written before September 11, with an epilogue added after the terrorist attacks. Its aim, according to the author, is to make the American public aware of the plight of the impoverished and tyrannized Afghan population, struggling under American sanctions and Taliban rule at the beginning of the 21st century. The author, at present a scholar of law and diplomacy at Tufts University, fought in the internal Afghan resistance for many years and was political advisor to Ismail Khan of Herat.
An interesting point is made by Nujomi in the first chapter, in which he gives the historical background to the political turmoil of the seventies in Afghanistan. In the section “Political elements of Afghan society”, which he considers to be nationalism, Islam and modernization, he states that whenever Afghan rulers have attempted to emphasize any one at the expense of the others, they have led the country into crisis.
The truth of this assertion is borne out by both the failure of King Amanullah’s attempts to impose radical reforms in 1919 and of his successor, Habibullah, to reverse the process by a religious revival in the 1920s. Subsequently, as if to demonstrate that one never learns from history, the Afghan Communist Party repeated the mistakes of the former in 1978, while the Taliban followed in the footstep of the latter.
The fact that they, the Taliban, lasted longer than others did, owes less to their popularity than to their initial restoration of a semblance of order to a broken-down society and to strong external support.
In the second chapter, Nujomi expounds what he calls his “theory of mass mobilization” by comparing the Afghan peoples’ spontaneous response to the communist takeover in Afghanistan to the organized revolution in China led by Mao and to the resistance in India to British colonial rule under Gandhi.
While it is true to say that the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA)’s brand of imported socialism could not have succeeded anyway in Afghanistan, what Nujomi could have added is the broader regional dimension: the Iranian revolution and Saudi efforts to counteract the Shia influence created an atmosphere of increased religious awareness that doomed any communist or socialist takeover in a Muslim country to immediate failure.
Further, it is probably the author’s concern, from his point of view as a member of the internal Afghan resistance, that the “Mujahideen” should take credit for defeating both the DRA and the Soviets. Thus, he only mentions American assistance to the anti-DRA Afghan resistance before the Soviet intervention in the epilogue, written after September 2001, whereas the existence of such aid had been known for a fact since 1979.
Providing a good example of the dangers of intelligence agencies’ involvement in a state’s major policy decisions is the case of the KGB taking the bait and pushing through the military move on Afghanistan. This resulted in a humiliating defeat for the Soviets at the hands of the American Stinger missiles ten years later — again a subject on which Nujomi is silent.
A serious drawback in Nojumi’s theory is that it does not account for the foreign hijacking, even perversion, of the internal Afghan resistance by the cold war and other regional interests. This is one of the important differences between the cases of Afghanistan on the one hand and India and China on the other.
How the Afghan revolt would have developed if left to its own devices remains a matter of speculation. The truth is that Afghanistan was cynically used as the venue for conducting an unnecessarily long ten-year proxy war by the Americans and the Soviets with the help of their regional allies.
In view of the consequent social, political and economic devastation of the region, it is a bitter irony that what made the Soviet system collapse in the final analysis was its domestic unpopularity. Nujomi does not emphasize this point enough.
The style, somewhat pedantic and at times obfuscatory, is characteristic both of Afghan/Pushtoon authorship and some of the worst traditions of American scholarship. The book is also unnecessarily repetitive. Further, the author perpetuates in his descriptions the perception of “the Afghans” as vengeful, unpredictable, (but) hospitable, museum pieces with definite ideas about the “honour” of their women — thus essentially beyond the pale of normal civilization.
Also, his descriptions, both during the period of the Soviet occupation and the ensuing civil war, of internal conflict situations and the numerous Afghan groupings are too detailed and confusing to be of interest to the general readership.
One valuable contribution of the book is its emphasis on the existence of the “internal” and “external” fronts, with conflicting interests and different social backgrounds, which an American readership would be largely unaware of. It is no accident that the exile “Afghan mujahideen” praised by Thatcher and Reagan were either out of touch with common Afghans or motivated by foreign, radical versions of Islam, whose interests clashed directly with those acting within Afghanistan.
Pakistan comes in for its undoubtedly deserved share of criticism. A certain unwillingness to tell the whole truth becomes evident, however, when Nujomi mentions Bhutto’s support for Hikmatyar and Masood against Daud in the ‘seventies, without giving the reason: Daud’s encouragement of separatist tendencies in Pakistan.
This leads to the false assumption that Pakistan both supported and supports Islamic fanatics as a matter of principle, not as a means to an end.
In his concluding analysis, Nujomi, in his roundabout way, does draw attention to the fact that years of conflict gradually brought players to the forefront in Afghanistan that had previously remained largely on the fringes, dominated by the Pashtoons. Indeed, the present uncertain political situation in Afghanistan has a great deal to do with this phenomenon.
Nevertheless, the phenomenon, which the author calls a “social revolution”, itself has more to do with the externalization of the Afghan conflict than with internal Afghan processes. Hence the weakness of his assertion that the Afghan variation of a social revolution disproves the Marxist argument that only class conflict brought about social revolution.
“Truth is the daughter of time”, as the saying goes, is in this case, one of the interesting by-products of September 11. That the value of the book is increased by the addition of the epilogue is indisputable. Hopefully Americans, the majority of whom are open to new ideas, will appreciate it, even at this difficult time.
The rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan: mass mobilization, civil war, and the future of the region
By Neamatollah Nojumi
Palgrave. Available at Mr Books, 10 D Super Market, Islamabad
Tel: 051-2278343. Fax: 051-2278825
ISBN 0312295847
260pp. Rs995
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