An Almighty Mess

Ronald Reagan's ascent to the presidency was the CIA's final payback to Jimmy Carter. Carter had doomed his presidency by having the temerity to suggest that they act within the boundaries set by Congress and the White House.

If Carter was naive, Reagan was a Hollywood rube. The extent of his understanding of the intelligence services amounted to what he'd seen in the movies. Nevertheless Reagan pledged to untie the agency's hands and appointed his campaign manager Bill Casey as director. Casey shared the view of his hero Wild Bill Donovan that the CIA's mission was to be devious, global and totalitarian. Unfortunately it appears Casey did not also stress that it should be prudent or intelligent.

Nowhere has the legacy of the Reagan caused more damage than in Central Asia. No today we learn that the Pashtun under the banner of the reconstituted "Taleban" are poised to takeover Islamabad. I do not need to elaborate on the gravity for Pakistan should the fighters succeed.

For years Pakistani officials have been urging Nato to accept the Taliban in Afghanistan and work towards building a new coalition government in Kabul that would exclude Hamid Karzai. To appreciate the wisdom of that proposition it is vital to understand that there is a rift in the Pashtuns vis a vis the Taliban who have come to realize how they have been cynically exploited by both Pakistan and the Anglo/Americans.

The Pakistan-based Taliban represents that new movement, but its roots are old. These roots can be found in the isolation of the tribal areas and in the rupture of tradition caused by the import of a new Islamist ideology in the 1980s when Reagan allowed the Saudis to arm and indoctrinate the tribesmen in waging jihad against the Soviets.

According to Pashtun nationalist, Afrasiab Khattak, as many as 500,000 young men were thus socialized during the Afghan wars. Overwhelmingly Pashtun, they were bound by tribal codes of honor, loyalty and revenge. But, uprooted from their villages, they were also susceptible to new idioms of Islam, whether the Deobandi strain peddled by the Pakistani madrassas or the austere Wahhabism of the Saudi Arabians and other “Afghan Arabs” who had come to fight the Soviets.

For the first 50 years of Pakistan’s existence, the government’s policy toward the FATA was the same as that of the British Raj. Tribal leaders, or maliks, were granted semi-autonomous powers in exchange for fealty to the crown or, post-independence, the regime. In return for recognizing the British-drawn Durand Line as Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, the maliks were granted access to their tribal lands.

For the last 30 years, FATA’s isolation has served another purpose: The state has used the region as the launching pad for Pakistan-inspired insurgencies in Afghanistan, with the first coming after the communist coup in Kabul in 1978.

Fueled by CIA and Saudi money, but engineered by Pakistan’s premier Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) directorate, the militias incubated in the tribal areas became national, regional and ultimately global Islamist movements, of which al-Qaeda is only the most notorious. Amidst penury grew a war economy driven by opium, guns and God, while jihad was first taught, then waged, by generations of young men, dislocated and orphaned in Afghan refugee camps, but schooled in madrassas allied to one or another of Pakistan’s Islamist parties or sponsored by states like Saudi Arabia.

Pakistan’s original motive for planting this “volcano on both sides of the border” was as simple as it was myopic, says Khattak. Regionally, the regime of Gen. Zia ul Haq viewed the tribal areas as Pakistan’s bridge to a client state in Afghanistan, supplying the “strategic depth” necessary for resisting India, the “external” enemy to the east. Domestically, the socialization of so many in political Islam would produce an endless stream of foot soldiers for jihad. They, in turn, could be mobilized against the demand for Pashtunistan, the “internal” enemy.

What Zia and Reagan did not foresee was that once the Russians withdrew, some fighters would hand back their power but others like Mullah Omar, would not. They said, ‘We are the ones who defeated the Russians, not the earls.’ (This is why many Pashtun elders deserted the Taliban when it came to power and supported the American invasion -- it was seen as a restoration of the old tribal order.)

This is what is happening now on the Pakistan side of the border. The younger tribesmen ask: "why was it jihad to resist the Russians, but now it is terrorism to resist the Americans?’ Why not indeed when they have made such an almighty mess.