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 hat
happened last week in Jalalabad (and other Taliban strongholds)
is a good indication of the next act in the Afghan drama.
Muddled news
reports claimed a lethal power struggle between the geriatric, fundamentalist
mullah Maulavi Muhammad Younis Khalis, and pro-Northern Alliance
commander, Haji Abdul Qadir, former governor of the Eastern province
of Nangarhar of which Jalalabad is the capitol. Only Tim Weiner
of the New York Times got it right, reporting the handover
of power as a picnic complete with guards dressed in slightly ludicrous,
Ruritanian uniforms that had been in mothballs since the abdication
of the king 30 years before.
Post-Taliban
Nangarhar, strategically situated on the main road between Pakistan,
the Khyber Pass, and Kabul, fell in a classic example of how tribalism
can short-circuit war in Afghanistan and hasten the end of the conflict
elsewhere.
Haji Qadir,
the moderate, pro-Western, and fiercly anti-drug governor of Nangarhar
until ejected by the Taliban in 1996, comes from an important local
family that ran the province as country squires since the mid-19th
Century. Maulavi Khalis, once head of the mujahideen party
to which Qadir belonged, is the family's old preacher who presided
at the weddings of Qadir and his brothers. The commanders united
under them are all either relatives, relatives by marriage, or in
some other ways allied.
In 1996, Taliban
outsiders from Kandahar armed and funded local fundamentalist upstarts,
driving Qadir from the province and forcing him to take sanctuary
with his own war-time enemies, Ahmed Shah Massood's Northern Alliance.
Meanwhile the then-75-year-old Khalis, a conservative cleric of
unimpeachable honesty, was to old to be a threat and too respected
to attack.
With his flaming
red, henna-dyed beard and worry beads made of bullets, Khalis is
something of the Judge Roy Bean of Afghanistan. He stalled a White
House meeting with President Reagan for five minutes discussing
the etiquette of removing one's sandals before entering the Oval
Office, and dissolved his resistance party when the Soviet regime
collapsed, insisting that only elected people should run his country.
Then 18 months
ago he wrote at least one provocative letter to Osama bin Laden,
explaining that if he really understood Islam then Osama would personally
welcome American troops in Saudi Arabia as invited guests. While
Qadir was temporarily driven off, Khalis remained an untouchable
irritant to the Taliban and an amusement to the rest of the province.
Khalis and
other supporters represented moderacy in Qadir's absence, and as
Taliban leadership began to crumble, tribal elders throughout the
province saw the wisdom in backing the Old Guard. More accurately,
they saw an opportunity to bring back the ancien regime that
had not been possible since the Taliban armed and paid off local
disgruntled, pro-Pakistani elements in 1996.
Pushtun tribal
assemblies were held informally, the worst of the Talib factions
were sent packing, and alliances shifted almost overnight and almost
bloodlessly.
Power transferred
in a similar fashion when the Communist regime collapsed in 1991.
Within days, Pashtuns used their unique tribal structure to shift
support to the mujahideen, leaving the Communists who were
also ethnic minorities stranded far from home. The pro-Communist
Pashtuns seemed to evaporate. Similarly, last week a tiny handful
of local Pashtuns who were too closely tied to the Taliban were
forced to retreat from the province along with the pro-Taliban Pakistani
and Arab volunteers. Behind, and still in power, remained either
the neutral local people or locals whose Taliban backgrounds could
be whitewashed with a Nixonian degree of "plausible deniability."
This is how
conservative, traditionalist Pashtun tribal society always survives
the ebb and flow of empires and ideologies. Similar negotiations
are now underway in Kandahar, between the Taliban there and the
well-organized southwestern tribes led, in part, by the urbane and
charismatic Hamid Kharzai. There, as in Jalalabad, plenty of former
Taliban supporters will be reabsorbed into the tribes to which they
have belonged all along. The only problems will be determining how
many Pashtuns will "take the fall" along with the ghastly
Mullah Omar, and of course where to drive the irritating clique
of Arab terrorists and Pakistani cannon fodder accumulated by the
Taliban.
After that,
Russian premier Vladimir Putin's strategy will likely be shattered
by the same phenomenon. Backers of Ahmed Shah Massoud and the Northern
Alliance since the early 1980s, the Russians demand that there be
no Taliban representation in any postwar government, hoping either
that their ethnic-minority allies get to run the entire country
or that Afghanistan be divided into a northern, non-Pashtun half
and a southern Pashtun section guaranteed to destabilize Pakistan.
Now, once the
Taliban disappear, nobody will be able to find them apart from the
remains of Mullah Omar and a few of his unlucky henchmen. The rest
will play their other tribal roles as local elders or commanders
or leaders. As a Jalalabad resident told Tim Weiner: "they
are still here…they just cut their hair and trimmed their beards."
It may not be what the Pentagon expected, but it is a workable recipe
for peace.
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