Foreigners and Stability

The Afghans have little to gain, and much to fear, from letting the Russians enter their country…If the Afghans, as a nation, were determined to resist the invaders, the difficulties of the march would be rendered will nigh insurmountable. They would fight to the last drop of blood, harassing the Russian columns incessantly from their mountain strongholds, destroying food supplies and cutting off the invader’s lines of communication and retreat.

Thus spake Sir Arthur Connolly, shortly after his first journey through Afghanistan, which gained him great fame throughout the British Empire in 1834. He later traveled to Bokhara in an attempt to free his fellow British soldier Charles Stoddart, but they were both beheaded by Emir Nasrullah Khan in 1842.

Reading the above quotation sparked some thinking on exactly what the nature of the rebels in Afghanistan is. The last time a real power had to contend with it was the 1980s. Though Russia still has an outstanding debt issue to settle with Afghanistan, it seemed to have mostly learnt its lesson then, which is that nothing unifies the Afghans into a deadly fighting force quite like a foreign invader, especially one as familiar as Russia. (There are, of course, other reasons why the invasion of ’79 was such a disaster, not least of which was the involvement of Pakistan, the U.S., and Saudi Arabia on the side of the mujahideen.)

This is perhaps the dark secret behind the Taliban.

As a group of mostly Pashtuns, despite traveling across the Durand line from Pakistan they were not always seen as foreigners. Indeed, when they initially passed through Kabul, there was an initial sigh of relief that the horrendous civil war may have at last died off. Things under the Taliban quickly removed that relief, and it is now clear that the Taliban were really just the latest and most clever foreign invaders of Afghanistan (the fundamental silliness of demanding a complete return to the Prophet’s time while wielding kalashnikovs and driving ISI-funded pickup trucks was lost on them it seems).

Indeed, it is partially because of that “year zero” mentality that I find particularly disturbing parallels between the Taliban and the Khmer Rouge, though that is a discussion for another time.

Regardless, fracture in Afghanistan is of a different character now. It is hardly a battle between which foreigners control the land, as it was in the 19th century. Nor is it a battle of which domestic movement or ethnic group gets to rule the country, as it was in the 90′s. No, I see the fighting in Afghanistan now as synecdoche for the battle within Islam itself—whether it will become the backward, year-zero fantasy the Prophet Mohammed never created in Arabia, or the thriving intellectual communities of 14th century al-Andalusia. I firmly believe Hamid Karzai to want the more open, tolerant version of Islam, just as we know Mullah Dadullah wants the more backward, intolerant variety. At this point, it now seems to come down to which can be achieved at the lowest cost. And sadly, we can’t figure out how to tip the scales all the way in our favor.

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust