Afghanistan: A People Adrift, A Country Aground

By M. M. Ali

Trained in warfare and equipped with modern weaponry, but untutored and unprepared for modern statecraft and governance, where do guerrilla fighters go when their war is won? If they are Afghans, they go right on fighting. If they are Muslims, the world forgets them. Such is the present-day picture of the Islamic nation that played such a key role in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

Afghanistan is a rugged, landlocked country north of Pakistan and south of Tajikistan, bordered in the west by Iran and, in the east, not too far from the edge of China. Many of Rudyard Kipling's descriptions still are applicable to its strongly religious tribal society, where time appears to have halted a century ago.

Afghanistan lurks in the lowest brackets of the United Nations Development Program's 1993 Human Resource Development report, which records Afghan life expectancy at little more than 43 years and literacy well below 20 percent. Unsanitary conditions and the absence of basic health facilities are not solely responsible for the high death rate. So is the war that Afghans fought for 14 years to drive out the occupying Soviet forces, using U.S.-supplied and Saudi-financed arms and Pakistani bases and training.

The toll on the Afghans is almost incomprehensible. Of a population of 16 million more than 6 million fled to Pakistan or Iran, and another 1 million were killed. A third of the country was physically destroyed. Hardly a household does not include the orphans, widows, and maimed victims of the generation of fighting. During the Soviet occupation, the capital city of Kabul was comparatively safe, while the surrounding countryside was being ravaged. Now the rolls are reversed. As refugees trickle back to the countryside, Kabul is the arena for major battles involving nine contending tribal factions.

The Tajiks of the north are led by Ahmed Shah Masoud. The Pashtoons in the south are led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. After the Soviets had left and the Soviet installed communist government of Najibullah finally was about to fall, Masoud struck a deal with Najibullah's Uzbek deputy, Gen. Abdul Rasheed Dostam, and rolled his forces into Kabul before Hekmatyar's Mujahedeen troops could get there. Ever since March 1992 there has been stalemate, with Masoud's Tajiks and Dostam's Uzbeks inside Kabul under military attack from the capital's outskirts by Hekmatyar's Pashtoons. During this "post-liberation" period, an estimated 5,000 people have died and several thousand have been injured.

On April 28, 1992, Pakistan helped broker a deal whereby a moderate tribal chief, Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, was appointed as the interim president of Afghanistan to form a government incorporating all of the contending factions. However, Hekmatyar declined to take the prime minister's post as long as Masoud held the defense portfolio and Dostam remained in Kabul. In December 1992, Pakistan again brought about a compromise when Burhanuddin Rabbani, a right-wing religious leader, was elected by the tribal chiefs to succeed Mojaddedi as the president. After weeks of negotiations, Hekmatyar agreed to assume the office of prime minister at a meeting in Islamabad last March. Masoud did not attend the meeting.

Signed But Not Implemented

What was signed was not carried out. Ahmed Shah Masoud remains entrenched in northeast and central Afghanistan. Hekmatyar controls the south. Hizb-eWahdat, a Shi'i group, holds parts of southwestern Afghanistan. Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a right-winger backed by the Saudis, occupies parts of western Kabul. Dostam rules the northeastern region with his strong Uzbek militia. With all of these groups contending for a share of control in and around Kabul, missile attacks, air raids and house-to-house gun battles are common. Major artillery exchanges continue between Hekmatyar's and Masoud's forces.

The deadly battles result from the large stocks of weapons supplied by the U. S. to the guerrillas and those that fell into the hands of the defenders when the former Kabul regime collapsed. Edward Gargan reported in the May 18 New York Times: "Kabul's population, which bulged to more than 1.5 million during the 14 years of war, has been cut in half in the last year as residents fleeing warfare have escaped to the east, to the relative safety of Jalalabad, and others to the northern territories."

The irony of the Afghan situation is that the 6 million refugees who spent more than a decade living in tents finally are able to return home. The U.N. estimates that more than 1.5 million refugees returned to Afghanistan in 1992, and another 2 million are expected to return this year. Most find the houses they left behind are either devastated or occupied by someone else.

Some of the returnees have been killed by the ongoing cross fire. Others die when they step on the tens of thousands of mines that still lie concealed all over the country. Quoting an unidentified Pakistani intelligence official, Bob Drogin wrote in the Los Angeles Times of April 27, 1993 that "This region is going to remain destabilized for the next 15, 20 or 25 years." Drogin reports that "With their country in ruins, many Afghans are going back to cultivate a crop that needs little water or fertilizer—poppies . "

In late April and early May of this year, clashes between Hekmatyar's and Masoud's forces flared up, with more than 700 people reported killed and more than 3,500 wounded. The ferocity of the clashes caused representatives of the feuding groups to hold several meetings in Jalalabad to reach a compromise. President Rabbani announced on May 20 that Ahmed Shah Masoud would step down as defense minister, that a commission would run the ministry for the next two months, and then commanders from all the 29 provinces of Afghanistan would meet in Kabul to elect a permanent defense minister. A new cabinet encompassing members of all factions except the Dostam group was announced, with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar as prime minister.

Despite sporadic gunfire, the agreement appears to be holding. Abdul Rasheed )ostam has said several times that he will old on to the territory that he now occupies, even if it means breaking up the country. Whether that opens up the possibility of yet another war in Afghanistan, only time will tell.

Continued instability across the borders in Tajikistan is another factor that could have a negative impact on Afghanistan. Already more than 60,000 Tajik refugees from the former Soviet Union have entered Afghan areas controlled by Masoud's Tajik army. With the country's territorial integrity in the balance, it is a time when the Afghans military prowess must now also display their statesmanship.