Unholy alliance

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Unholy alliance

West's new allies include vitriolic anti-Americans, human-rights violators,
former allies of Osama bin Laden and more ...

The Toronto Star, Oct.7, 2001
Thomas Walkom, STAFF REPORTER



THE WEST'S new Afghan friends in the war against terrorism and the Taliban are
a curious lot. They include Islamic fundamentalists, vitriolic anti-Americans,
human-rights violators, one-time allies of Osama bin Laden and soldiers of the
former communist regime.

Officially, they are known as the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of
Afghanistan. Unofficially, they call themselves the Northern Alliance.

The terror attacks on the United States have given them a boost in their five-
year-old war against the Taliban, the hard-line Islamic regime that rules
almost all of Afghanistan.

Already, U.S officials are hinting they'll provide weapons to the alliance's
estimated 15,000 troops, on top of the non-military aid Washington has been
giving since 1998.

Western journalists, too, have rediscovered the alliance and are busy reporting
on what some are already calling Afghanistan's new freedom fighters.

But the history of the key players in the Northern Alliance suggests they may
prove difficult allies in the U.S.-led war against terror. An uneasy coalition,
bound as much by mutual hatred as by dislike of the ruling Taliban, their
relations with one another over the past decade have been marked by treachery,
backstabbing and a level of deviousness so profound that the word Byzantine
cannot do it justice.

"They may not be perfect," acknowledges Mike Vickers, a former officer with the
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and now director of strategic studies for the
Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgeting Assessments. "But the
Northern Alliance does have some good elements."

At times, those good elements are hard to find.

Senior members of the alliance, including former Afghan president Burhanuddin
Rabbani and northern warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, a key ally of the Soviet
Union during that country's attempt to occupy Afghanistan, have been cited by
the U.S. for human-rights abuses.

Deputy-premier Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the alliance's number two political figure,
is a hard-line, vehemently anti-American Islamic fundamentalist who is so
strict on the subject of separation of the sexes that, according to one
Associated Press report, he won't even speak to women.

Yet another figure in the alliance, eastern warlord Haji Abdul Qadir, was Osama
bin Laden's first sponsor in Afghanistan when the Saudi millionaire — already
wanted at the time by the U.S. for his alleged involvement in anti-American
terrorist attacks — fled to that country in 1996. At different times, both
Rabbani and Dostum have found themselves in informal alliances with the Taliban
and occasionally against each other.

At other times, the various factions have cheerfully massacred one another. In
1993, according to the non-governmental organization, Human Rights Watch,
Rabbani's Society of Islam killed 70 to 100 members of the Hazara minority
linked to the rival Party of Islamic Unity, another member of the Northern
Alliance.

Two years later, according to the U.S. State Department, Rabbani forces — under
the command of Ahmed Shah Massood (celebrated by Western journalists as
the "Lion of the Panjshir" until his untimely assassination last month) — went
on another anti-Hazara rampage "systematically looting whole streets and raping
women."

As for the shifting loyalties of the Northern Alliance members, these are so
numerous as to make the head ache.

In 1994, Rabbani's Society of Islam was informally allied to the Taliban in an
effort to defeat the rival Party of Islam of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Islamic
fundamentalist who, during the decade-long war against the Soviet Union, had
been sponsored by the CIA.

A year later, Rabbani and Hekmatyar allied with each other to fight the
Taliban.

And now Hekmatyar, in exile in Iran, is opposed to both Rabbani and the
Taliban.

Dostum's career is even more complicated. From 1979 to 1992, he was allied with
the communist government in Kabul. As that government was about to fall, Dostum
switched loyalties to join the anti-communist mujahideen "freedom fighters."

When the various mujahideen factions had a falling out, he first allied himself
with Rabbani to fight Hekmatyar. Later, he joined Hekmatyar to fight Rabbani.

By 1995, he was supporting the Taliban against both Hekmatyar and Rabbani. By
1996, he was allied with his two former enemies against the Taliban.

Up to now, the U.S. and other Western countries have kept a respectable
distance from the Northern Alliance.

The United Nations recognizes Rabbani's Islamic State of Afghanistan as the
legitimate government of the country. But except for India, Iran, Russia and a
few Central Asian states, almost no one else does.

Neither Canada nor the U.S. has recognized any government in Afghanistan since
1979.

Then, there is the drug question. Until last year, about three-quarters of the
world's heroin came from Afghanistan. Both the Taliban and the Northern
Alliance used profits from opium production and drug smuggling to finance their
war against each another.

Last July, in a move to win acceptance from the U.S., the Taliban banned opium
production in the 95 per cent of Afghanistan it controls. While the U.S. was
initially skeptical, it finally acknowledged this year that the Taliban
proscription was working.

Much to the embarrassment of those who would support Rabbani's forces, however,
the Northern Alliance merrily continues in the heroin trade.

According to the U.S. State Department, virtually the entire Afghan opium crop
this year — about 77 tonnes — was grown in territories controlled by the
alliance. Russian media report that the heroin manufactured from that opium is
smuggled to Europe and America through neighbouring states such as Tajikistan.

To the outsider, the convoluted interrelations of the Northern Alliance might
seem pure pathology.

But those who know Afghanistan say the alliance's history — and indeed the
history of the Taliban — can be understood only in light of the country's
tribal, ethnic and social divisions.

Afghanistan is a melange of peoples. The largest group, the Pashtun, who
inhabit the southern parts of the country near Pakistan, are thought to
comprise anywhere from 40 to 60 per cent of the population.

Tajiks, who tend to live in the northeast, form the next largest group. Smaller
minorities include the Hazara of the west (roughly 15 to 20 per cent) and the
Uzbeks of the northwest.

Unlike most Afghanis (who are Sunni Muslims), the Hazara tend to be Shi'ite,
with links to Iran. Traditionally, the Hazara have also faced more
discrimination than the other groups.

For more than 100 years, a Pashtun clan, the Muhammadzai, dominated the country
and provided the kings, including the current exiled monarch, Mohammed Zahir
Shah.

The Muhammadzai also provided the governing elite, which made efforts, often
bitterly opposed by religious conservatives, to make Afghanistan more closely
resemble the West.

(In 1926, one king who tried to follow Turkey's lead by requiring women to give
up the burqa, or head-to-toe veil, was forced to flee the country).

"The government in Afghanistan was like a club for the Muhammadzais," noted
Barnett Rubin, an expert on the region and head of New York University's Center
on International Co-operation, in an interview with the U.S.-based Asia Society
this year.

"This is why so many other newly educated elites who were not Muhammadzais
resented them and became Islamists or radical nationalists or communists or
Maoists.