|
Page 1 of 2
Taliban Upsurge Brings Big Powers Together!  The world seems rightly preoccupied with ongoing events in Pakistan, but this is only part of a larger drama unfolding in north-west of Pakistan, an ingress through which the whole of Hindustan awaits Asani Sanket (imminent danger!).
History reveals that the Roman-Persian rivalry led to a series of wars between the Greco-Roman world and two successive Iranian empires. After contacts between Parthia and the Roman Republic in 92 BC, began the wars that continued through the Roman and Sassanid empires. The resources expended during the Roman-Persian Wars ultimately proved catastrophic for both empires.
The prolonged and escalating warfare of the sixth and seventh centuries left them exhausted and vulnerable to the sudden emergence of Bedouin warriors from the Arabian desert and expansion of the their Caliphates, whose forces invaded both empires only a few years after the end of the last Roman-Persian war. Taking advantage of their weakened condition, the Arab Muslim armies swiftly conquered the entire Sassanid Empire, and deprived the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) of its territories in the Middle East, the Caucasus, Egypt, and the rest of North Africa. Over the following centuries, most of the Byzantine Empire came under Muslim rule. (The first Seljuk Turkish state in Konya-Byzantine Iconium – after the Turks had broken through the Byzantine defenses near Lake Van in the eleventh century – was called the Rumi Sultanate. The castle on Bosphorus on the European side is still called Rumeli Hissari (Hissar is fort in Turkish), and the desert valley between Jordan and Saudi Arabia where Lawrence of Arabia was filmed is called Vadi Rum).
The Arabian Desert peninsula with little resources then, was not the objective of the wars between the two empires. The unwashed Arab tribes along the borders and in the two empires were looked upon with contempt, the kind of contempt most Arabs and Muslims face now from the West and others after the Muslim Ottoman empire was rolled back from the gates of Vienna beginning 16th century, Muslim lands colonized and exploited, and Turkic lands in Central Asia conquered by the Russians.
The situation in central south Asia in the 21st century is somewhat similar. By the end of the 20th century, USSR collapsed having been forced by the Cold War to spend beyond its means to defend itself against the US-led West after losing a proxy war in Afghanistan in 1980s. Now with the US military overreach, defense outlay it cannot afford but which continues to mount, a lost war in Iraq, a likely quagmire in Afghanistan, Washington stares a fate similar to Moscow in the 1990s, made more acute by the rushing financial collapse.
It is not that Americans have become peace-loving, but the ground realities despite noises by neo-conservatives and professional war-mongers, have forced Washington to change its policies in the region. With a virtual tacit truce with Iran in Iraq, US and NATO forces’ supplies being constricted by Taliban militias, US-led West has been forced to stall NATO’s onward march into Russia’s near abroad, i.e., Ukraine and Georgia (where a last throw of dice last year was rebuffed), and would coordinate with Shanghai Cooperation Organization to jointly cope with the resurgent Sunni Taliban bursting out from mountain sanctuaries along the Pak-Afghan borders towards Kabul and Islamabad. China, whose Turkic Uighurs in Xinjian could not follow in the footsteps of kinsmen Kyrgyz and Kazakhs and others coming adrift from Moscow’ s yoke in the 1990s, is very much worried.
Moscow and Afghanistan
With the Obama administration facing a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, Russia is on way to becoming an important player in the region. Moscow has agreed to the transit of non-lethal NATO supplies for Afghanistan through its territory. (But at its behest Kyrgyzstan is closing the US base at Manas). Moscow must be chuckling at Washington’s quandary in Afghanistan, remembering how US and others were responsible for creating a quagmire for the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Iran, part of the US declared ‘axis of evil’ and regularly threatened since 2003, could be another supply route. Shia Tehran, which suffered from Taliban and Al Qaeda depredations, and helped US operations against Al Qaeda and Taliban in 2001, would be willing to join but under some conditions.
Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s representative at NATO, said in a recent interview that US defeat in Afghanistan would be “a great catastrophe for Russia” as Islamists would immediately spread across Central Asia and the Caucasus. He added that the US presence in Afghanistan was in Russia’s best interests!! However, Rogozin doubted if the US would stay long enough to stabilize the situation. What now could emerge is a military force comprising of mostly Central Asian and other states, to help keep the Islamists at bay.
Moscow perhaps has a B plan drawn from the template adopted successfully in Chechnya. It involves establishing a sphere of influence in northern Afghanistan, where the major ethnic groups are Uzbeks and Tajiks, unlike the Pashtuns that dominate other parts of the country and support Taliban. Under the Northern Alliance led by the legendary Ahmad Shah Massoud, a pocket in the north held out against the Taliban during its years in power from 1996-2001. Since the breakup of the Russian and British empires, the buffer kingdom of Afghanistan has been splintered since 1980s.
China, Uighurs and Taliban
Because of its abiding strategic and economic relationship with Pakistan, the paramount of Chinese interests is largely accepted by all the major political players inside Pakistan and its sphere of influence in Afghanistan. Peter Lee wrote recently in Asia Times:“However, in a development that Beijing undoubtedly finds very disturbing, China is getting sucked into the security crisis in the Pashtun border areas of Pakistan. China regards security issues in the Muslim lands of Central and South Asia through the lens of its fraught relations with the Uyghur Muslim population of its northwestern province of Xinjiang. Chinese rule over Xinjiang is not popular, there is a Xinjiang independence movement, and Uyghur militants have claimed responsibility for several bloody actions, both in the province and in the Han areas of China. “China is very concerned that Xinjiang separatism enjoys a favorable regional environment thanks to the collapse of political order in Afghanistan and western Pakistan - a collapse that China accelerated by pouring arms, training and some fighters into the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
[The Soviet-backed government in Kabul had estimated that during 1980s Afghanistan was flooded with $400 million worth of weapons provided by China. The Chinese government also provided 300 advisors and trainers for the mujahedeen in camps run by the ISI on the Pakistan side of the border. Reportedly, 55,000 fighters passed through these camps.] “After September 11, 2001, China aggressively played the Islamic terrorism card in stigmatizing the Uyghur self-determination movement and conflating it with the activities of the violently militant East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM). In 2002, the George W Bush administration acceded in listing ETIM as a terrorist organization, thus largely foreclosing to Uyghur activists the international affection and supports that has accrued to the Tibetan independence movement. “However, with the retreat of the central government from Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) bordering NWFP and the resurgence of militancy throughout the Pashtun homeland from the opium fields of Helmand in Afghanistan’s west all the way to the Swat Valley, 160 kilometers from Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad, an enormous haven for Islamic militants is coming into being. And the local allies, especially Pakistan, that China has traditionally relied on to police Uyghur militants on its behalf, are in danger of being marginalized by a powerful and assertive Taliban movement apparently less willing to defer to China.” In 2000, Stratford reported: [T]he Afghan ambassador to Pakistan guaranteed a Chinese delegation that no groups would be allowed to operate against China from Afghanistan. When the Taliban became international pariahs after 9/11, their opportunities for engagement with China decreased. However, on the occasion of one of the bloodier attacks against foreign interests - the massacre of 11 Chinese workers working on a World Bank road project in Afghanistan in 2004 - the traditional deference toward China required of clients of Pakistan and ISI was on full display. The Taliban, who had no qualms about claiming responsibility for the brutal massacre of five Medicine Sans Frontiers staff, quickly disclaimed responsibility and made their pro-Chinese sympathies known with alacrity. The Taliban militia denied responsibility for the killings. “We deny the accusation of killing the Chinese workers in Kunduz province of Afghanistan,” said Abdul Latif Hakimi, a Taliban representative. The Taliban even organized a demonstration of 3,000 people “to show their support for the Chinese.”
The kidnapping of two Chinese engineers inside Pakistan in the same year by renegade Taliban leader Abdullah Mehsud created a storm of criticism. The parties in Pakistan’s Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal six-party Islamist alliance demanded that the hostages be released. It was made known that the Pakistan Taliban itself suspected that Mehsud - a jihadi who was detained at Guantanamo for 25 months and then rather mysteriously released - was US double agent intent on sabotaging Sino-Pakistani relations. Still, Taliban and Pakistani relations with China have always been complicated by the presence of a few hundred Uyghur militants who trained and fought with some combination of the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the ISI. As early as 1992, almost two dozen Uyghurs died in an armed clash near Kashgar in Xinjiang and the Chinese government shut down its road links with Pakistan, including the Karakoram Highway, for several months to ostensibly stop the destabilizing flow of fighters, drugs, and AIDS but to express its annoyance. Before 9/11, there was a special training camp for Uyghurs at Tora Bora under al-Qaeda and Taliban auspices near the Pakistan border, and a safe house maintained in the Afghan provincial town of Jalalabad. According to one report, the Chinese claimed that 1,000 Uyghur militants had trained in al-Qaeda camps.
|
Commentary 
