America Loses

As a keen student of Afghan history, my fears regarding the fate of the US-engineered political dispensation in Afghanistan never waned away. Perhaps, in this connection, the Americans themselves were the least informed people with regard to the kind of country they had attempted to deal with and the history of its predatory tribes. The well-executed subjugation of the dusty and ragged country by the combined onslaught of the Anglo-American coalition forces followed by rather easy sublimation of its political setup, was received with extraordinary jubilation throughout the world in general and the US and Britain, in particular. It also visibly muted the voices of those of us who prognosticated that it was bound to fall.

Given the fairness of history, it was not difficult mathematics to foretell the coming days—another traditional and true to its history guerilla-style retribution by various Afghan factions, thereby turning the country into, what historically would have been for the US, a second Vietnam. Having successfully gotten rid of the Taliban regime and replacing it with one of their own, the newscasters at CNN and Fox were seen in jubilation. They seemed to be chuckling with excitement, as if saying they were often reminded of the fate of the British in the Anglo-Afghan wars, the treatment meted out to the imperial Russians, the Soviets who got their butts kicked……….. but see, in our case, it was so simple and smooth.

I doubt if they had the slightest idea of the history of this race of mountain dwellers. In fact, the Americans being an impatient race of people, were a little too early to jump to their conclusions.

This is not a geopolitical piece of writing, nor a current affairs analysis of the situation, or does it discuss the aftershocks in the region. This is a story of history, repeatedly narrated so many times. True to its history, Afghanistan stayed quiet and bided its time till it attained the right age before coming out with its true colours. It is a fact that no foreign power, either directly or indirectly, had ever been able to install a puppet government in Afghanistan.

The British in 1839 ousted the popular regime of Dost Muhammad and enthroned their puppet Shah Shuja ul Mulk (former ousted king) as the ruler of Afghanistan in the face of outright preponderance of modern military might. In Britain, people danced and cheered the victory. Newspapers wrote “simple and smooth” They established their garrisons and even took their families there. It remained all quiet for four years. Then the volcano erupted and the table was turned in a manner the British had never witnessed in the history of their island race.

Shah Shujah was murdered in cold blood in 1842 by his own troops while the destruction of the British Army was so complete that “only one Englishman was spared from the Kabul garrison to tell the tale” while, as per British historians, the hills of Gundamak (known in history as ‘The Last Stand’, on the eighth and last day of the retreat from Kabul to Gundamak, where the entire English force was cut down to pieces by the Ghilzai tribesmen) still glow in the dark nights from the phosphorous remains of their bones. From Shah Shujah to Najibullah and Haji Abdul Qadeer, a desultory research into the turbulent history of Afghanistan would show the long list of rulers slain in identical circumstances.

To understand this paradigm, one has to go deep into the roots of the Afghan people. This is as complex as their convoluted history and therein lies the answer to their etymology. The Afghans are a primitive society driven by its tribal instincts. Their religious proclivity is strong and cocooned from the national and international political strata. The political cultures transmitted from the various regimes, whether British, Russian or US-backed, are alien to them. D.S Richards, in his book ‘The Savage Frontier’, writes [“….”] But, as the British had discovered 140 years before, an attempt to install a puppet ruler in Kabul was the one act guaranteed to unite the different clans in a national revolt.

It has been two decades now since the war on terror was mounted. The poor country had a ragtag army with tattered equipment that did not even fit the proverbial ‘fly’, smashed by a sledgehammer. The country was soon occupied under a well thought-out plan by a coalition of superpowers.

A young student today would wonder whether it was worth it to bulldoze an entire country for the sins of a few. As for Osama Bin Laden, the man deserved every bit of the humiliation that came his way. The question is, would the US and Britain ever justify the killing of innocent citizens, mostly women and children, in pursuit of one man. They called it ‘Collateral Damage’ but does it absolve them of the blood of innocents. The murder of a human being remains a murder whether you bang an airplane into a building or purposefully bomb them to death. So was it worth 20 years, deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens, and complete destruction of Afghan cities? And, above all, a war that cost the US trillions of dollars in futility.

Seeing through hindsight, it requires no genius to understand that diplomatic words sounding magical as independence, democracy, freedom, sovereignty, struggle against evil, etc. have always been the British and later American covert weapon to play politics on the hoof. Making quick promises and sprinklng fixed assurances to allies of convenience in pursuit of avaricious objectives is not a new tactic. Promises are made of freedom, wealth prosperity, peace, security and everything the people of that region want to hear.

What difference does it make if it is an Indian soldier dying on European and African battlefields during the two great wars, the Arabs fighting the Ottoman Empire, the Afghans thwarting the Russian juggernaut or the promises to Russian Jews for a homeland in Palestine. Afghanistan is the only unfortunate country which has the longest tenure of fighting of others’ wars. To keep the Czarists at an arm’s length, the British promised them in return economic prosperity in the early 19th century in pursuit of their ‘Forward Policy’ that followed three Afghan wars. To fight the Marxists, Ronald Reagan assured them an economic oasis.

Nevertheless, with the Russians gone, the Americans did not even bother to clear the debris. Generations came and faded but nothing has changed. The American-led coalition decimating a poor and ragged country by spending trillions of dollars was not an expedition to hunt one man. It was for a bigger objective, which blurred in the smokescreen of time and tide, would disappear in the dust of history forever. To make this logical, I would like to reproduce an excerpt of John Pilger’s article ‘The Anglo American War on Terror Fraud’ published by ‘The Statesman’ on November 1 2001, right at the outset of the war. To me, it encapsulates the entire narrative [“…..”] Taliban itself is a creation of the Americans and the British. When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, Washington said nothing. Why? Because Taliban leaders were soon on their way to Houston, Texas, to be entertained by executives of the oil company Unocal.

With secret US government approval, the company offered them a generous cut of the profits of the oil and gas pumped through a pipeline that the Americans wanted to build from Soviet Central Asia through Afghanistan. A US diplomat said: ‘The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did and Afghanistan would become an American oil company; there would be huge profits for the West, no democracy and the legal persecution of women. We can live with that’.

What transpired in between? Was the plan changed? Roles switched? Is oil no more the thrust? Or was it a simple case of miscalculation on part of the Americans? Nobody would ever know. The stark reality is that America, in the course of 19 years, has failed to subdue the real forces of resistance and has lost the war –defeated at the hands of the Taliban. However, another reality is that the accursed people of Afghanistan, subdued and vanquished by sorrows and sufferings, are still in search of peace.

Given its history of inter-factional and tribal rivalries, a precise pattern of peaceful recovery for Afghanistan seems impossible to envisage in the long run. In the presence of a multiplicity of ethnic and tribal groups holding sway, it is difficult to believe that a genuine broad-based agenda acceptable to all Afghans can be formulated unanimously. The US spent 20 years to change the paradigm of the country, but the truth is that Afghanistan, as it has always been, will once again be treading the same beaten path. Whatever the outcome, at least one truth has been established. It transcends all theories and ideologies - the unswerving spirit of the Afghans to ensure freedom to conduct their affairs in the time honoured traditions of their forefathers.