Afghanistan Imperiled (Page 3)

Lahore

Extremist forces are making a comeback in the Pashtun belt by coalescing around Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. An ethnic Pashtun, career warlord and former Afghan prime minister, Hekmatyar is now one of the biggest threats to Afghan stability. Afghan officials and Western diplomats in Kabul say there is clear evidence that Hekmatyar--who killed thousands of civilians in a vain bid to capture the city during the country's early 1990s civil war--has joined forces with Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants to destabilize the fledgling Karzai government.

The Pashtuns--the majority ethnic group--have serious grievances against the government. Because of the support of many Pashtuns for the Taliban, they feel they are being victimized by both the Americans and the Tajiks of the Northern Alliance, who dominate the army, police and intelligence apparatus in Kabul. Many Pashtuns consider Karzai, himself a Pashtun, to be a hostage to Tajik and US power and policies. Pashtun civilians have been the victims of US bombing raids, and the central government hasn't initiated a single reconstruction project in the Pashtun belt.

Hekmatyar is believed to have established contact with several disgruntled warlords, including Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, Afghanistan's leading proponent of Wahhabi Islam; former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, once the head of the Northern Alliance; and Ismail Khan, the governor of Herat in the west. Karzai is too weak to take action against any of them.

Significantly, in the early 1980s these leaders (and Hekmatyar) belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood, which emerged out of the Arab world and was the precursor to today's more extreme Islamist movements. Hekmatyar is now trying to revive those connections and the Brotherhood's ideology, which is stridently anti-Western and antidemocratic. He says "all true Muslim Afghans who want an Islamic government in their country must know it is possible only when the United States and allied soldiers are forced out."

Hekmatyar is also trying to whip up Pashtun nationalism. In tapes sent to journalists he accuses the United States and the Kabul government of beginning "a genocide of Pashtuns." He has a considerable network of supporters in Pakistan, including retired officers of that country's Inter-Services Intelligence. After the 1979 Soviet invasion, the ISI promoted Hekmatyar ruthlessly, until he was dumped in favor of the Taliban in 1995.

Clearly, President Bush's recent pledge that the United States, Saudi Arabia and Japan will provide $180 million to rebuild the key Kabul-Kandahar-Herat road, which cuts through the Pashtun belt, reflects Washington's awareness of the unrest in the south. Roads are certainly important, but the urgent need is for the United States to demonstrate that it wants to re-establish a central government with institutions, economic resources and military and political power that can give a sense of nationhood and a functioning state back to the Afghans. Only then can Al Qaeda and its allies be truly deprived of their former base for terrorism.

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