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Tue, 11 Sep 2001 11:11:51 -0700
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PAS : KE ARAH PEMERINTAHAN ISLAM YANG ADIL
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ANALYSIS-"Great Game" to
control Afghanistan never ends
By Jack Redden
ISLAMABAD, Sept 11 (Reuters) - It has been one of the
world's poorest areas for centuries, an arid,
mountainous land with a dearth of natural resources
and a climate that swings from baking heat to subzero
winters. But, just as the British and Russians in the
nineteenth century played out their "Great Game" for
control, a new group of countries are vying for
influence in Afghanistan. The same accidents of
geography that contribute to their poverty have placed
Afghans at the crossroads of Central Asia.
In the new version of the Great Game, outside forces
have lined up on opposite sides in the campaign by the
hardline Islamic Taliban movement to win total
control.
The Sunday attack on key opposition leader Ahmad Shah
Masood, which appears to have left him seriously
wounded -- some say dead -- must have pleased those
outside forces backing the Taliban and alarmed those
trying to halt them.
"One of the key factors in the Afghan issue is
everyone wants to get in the kitchen yet everyone
should stay out," said S. Frederick Starr of the Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in
Washington.
"If there's anything that we should've learned from
the last two centuries it is that outsiders screwing
around in Afghan politics always come out badly," said
Starr, who is chairman of the school's Central
Asia-Caucasus Institute.
Despite Pakistan's continual denial of a role in the
fighting -- unlike the 1980s when it was openly the
base for attacks on the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul
-- it finds few believers.
The Taliban sprang from religious schools in Pakistan
near the Afghan border and, with almost no military
experience, swept from obscurity to their 1996 capture
of the capital in only two years.
"They are there and they are a reality. Since we have
common borders with them we cannot have any other
policy than engaging with whoever is in charge in
Afghanistan," Pakistani military leader General Pervez
Musharraf justified his country's backing during an
interview in July.
Beyond Pakistan, the Taliban have few friends. Saudi
Arabia and United Arab Emirates are the only other
countries to recognise the Taliban as the legal
government, but they have not joined Pakistan in
maintaining embassies in Kabul.
Turkmenistan, which still dreams of exporting its vast
natural gas reserves to the teeming subcontinent via a
pipeline across Afghanistan, has been the only Central
Asian neighbour to keep firmly neutral in the civil
war.
ARAB MONEY
But the Taliban have private supporters who may have
deep pockets similar to Osama bin Laden, the
multi-millionaire Saudi militant who the Taliban
refuse to turn over to face charges of blowing up two
U.S. embassies.
This year the United Nations has reported a marked
increase in the number of Arabs in the capital, often
taking residences in the best areas. Links to the Gulf
are underlined by the decision of Qatar's Al Jazeera
television, with Taliban blessing, to open a bureau
with their own transmission facilities in Afghanistan.
On the opposite side, the Northern Alliance -- which
is united mainly by antipathy to the Taliban -- is
backed financially and militarily by several
countries.
Shi'ite Iran threatened to mass troops on the border
in one confrontation with the Taliban, who regard
their particular Sunni brand of Islam as the only
legitimate religion.
Tajikistan and Uzbekistan both fear the export of
Taliban radicalism. That is also a fear for China,
which has tried to suppress unrest in its remote
western regions which touch Afghanistan.
Russian not only wants to keep Taliban ideas out of
their former empire in Central Asia, but is angered
that Chechen rebels battling their continued rule in
Chechnya are being trained inside Afghanistan.
India, which is joining Russia, Iran, Turkmenistan and
Uzbekistan at a meeting expected soon in the Tajik
capital, is likely most interested in diverting
Pakistan from their conflict over Kashmir to the
protracted struggle in Afghanistan.
U.S. INTERESTS
The United States may have a more complicated agenda.
It sees opportunities in Central Asia, with vast oil
and gas deposits, and a longer-term rival is not the
Taliban but the old colonial power in the Kremlin.
In the mid-1990s, even as the Taliban expanded, a U.S.
company explored the idea of building a pipeline
across Afghanistan. The U.S. commercial need for a
stable government controlling Afghanistan mirrored
Pakistan's interest in securing a safe trade route
into Central Asia.
"The first step is not trade but the second one is,"
Starr told Reuters.
However, even U.S. officials will admit that U.S.
policy on Afghanistan has become hostage to bin Laden.
By protecting a man who Washington has described as
their greatest enemy, the Taliban have made their own
image little better.
"It's not just bin Laden but as Afghanistan has
drifted into chaos it has become a hiding place for
every terrorist group known to man," said one senior
diplomat in Pakistan.
Officially, Washington's position is to call for a
broad-based government in Afghanistan to end the
fighting that has gone on since even before the Soviet
invasion of 1979.
Diplomats covering Afghanistan are convinced the
Taliban cannot impose their rule throughout the
country; if the current opposition collapsed over
something like the death of Masood, new unrest would
appear in a country where large minorities come from
different tribes than the Taliban.
But equally, no one expects the current opposition
nominally led by President Burhannudin Rabbani to roll
back the Taliban. Rabbani's period of rule in Kabul,
with Masood as his defence minister, was as brutal and
chaotic as the rest of the past two decades.
"I don't see any way in which there will be an absence
of conflict unless there is a way of representing all
of the national and ethnic groups," said Roy Allison
of Britain's Royal Institute for International
Affairs.
Unlike the United Nations, which recognises the
government of Rabbani, Washington has never recognised
any faction as the legal rulers.
That has reinforced the belief of diplomats in
Islamabad that Washington, in its longer-term
interests in Central Asia, would deal with the Taliban
if they hand over bin Laden and cease to train
militants who could target the interests of the United
States or its allies like Israel.
Unfortunately for those looking for Taliban moderation
to allow a shift in policy by other countries,
everything this year has pointed in the opposite
direction.
They have outraged world opinion by destroying the
pre-Islamic sculpture of the country, engaged in
repeated confrontions with U.N. humanitarian
organisations and are now trying eight foreign aid
workers on charges of spreading Christianity.
There are many among the Taliban -- probably including
its reclusive one-eyed leader Mullah Mohammad Omar,
who reputedly has met only two non-Muslims in his life
-- who would like to seal off the pure Islamic state
from the outside world.
That, as history and geography shows, is very unlikely
to happen. The Great Game continues.
(Additional reporting by Sonya Hepinstall, Washington,
and Mike Collett-White, London)
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