Brian M Downing
Much of the world is befuddled by the actions and ineptitude of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. It has led to speculation that he is manic depressive, an opium addict, or just singularly unskilled in politics. As with assessing a figure as “evil” or “insane,” this tends to close off investigation that might reveal an underlying craft.
Karzai’s apparent artlessness might be the dismissive conclusion of observers who think in terms of nation-states, central authorities, and legislative bodies. Afghanistan never was and likely will never be constituted in that manner.
Karzai is seeking two closely related objectives: to negotiate a settlement with the Taliban and construct a “rentier state,” one that uses revenue from foreign states or from domestic resources to cobble together a viable political and economic framework with the various tribes and peoples of Afghanistan.
He is seeking to achieve these two objectives through pacts with foreign countries, chiefly Pakistan, China, Iran, and Turkey. The powers will prevail upon the Taliban to confine their ambitions to the south and east and accept a settlement with Karzai at the helm, use their influence with reluctant Afghan peoples to accept the same settlement, and then cooperate in the exploitation of Afghanistan’s resources.
The Afghan State, Optimally
Despite its ethnic heterogeneity and unattractive geopolitical position amid ambitious states and empires, Afghanistan has known periods of peace and prosperity. The state was never powerful and never enjoyed a deep presence in the localities as, say, the French state did long ago. The Afghan state and its officials were never respected or trusted. Local officials were seen as potential meddlers and their purview was circumscribed by custom.
The ruler in Kabul – emir, king, or president – dealt with the disparate tribes and peoples, not through a parliamentary body, but through an array of deals with local elders and notables. The ruler allocated sums of money to local figures, who used the funds largely as they saw fit. In return the localities offered a modicum of support for Kabul.
Too much central power would trigger opposition and if it persisted, to jolting rebellions. This took place in the late seventies when the state’s reform efforts violated local custom and the country rebelled, leading to breakdown, Soviet intervention, and decades of war and turmoil.
Too little central power breeds warlordism, foreign meddling, and banditry. This of course was the state of affairs in the early nineties when the Taliban rose to power by suppressing the chaos after the Soviet Union departed and its client in Kabul lost control.
Because Afghanistan had little wealth, the money used by Kabul to hold things together came from foreign coffers, alternately British or Russian ones, in exchange for the country’s support or neutrality in the two powers’ Great Game.
Afghanistan, then, was governed by a rentier state since the nineteenth century. Unappealing, counterintuitive, and seemingly unstable to outsiders, this quilt-work polity is the optimal arrangement in Afghanistan – one that resonates with local sensibilities and with memories of the country’s best years.
Who Will Pay The Rent?
A great game of sorts continues, but Afghan’s newly-found mineralogical resources add a more complex dimension to the one in Kipling’s day. Copper and iron, oil and gas, and the increasingly coveted rare earths are being discovered in Afghanistan in attractive quantities. States in and out of the region are seeking to forge partnerships to exploit them.
Furthermore, Afghanistan is a likely route for a pipeline connecting the oil and gas fields of Central Asia to ports on the Arabian Sea. Karzai knows this well and sees it as a sound basis for a long and prosperous rule.
Many countries are looking to exploit Afghan resources, including the US, Russia, and India. However, events are working against them. Russia had few friends when it left in 1989, and India, though respected in northern Afghanistan, is disliked elsewhere as the enemy of a strategic benefactor – Pakistan. The US has over the last nine years failed to bring the prosperity it promised and is now deemed another occupying power to be expelled. Its departure may be a prerequisite part of any settlement or at least an event that would have to come close on the heels of one.
A trio of powers are in better position to become Karzai’s business and state-building partners: Pakistan, China, and Iran. Each has economic interests that mesh well with geopolitical ones; each seeks to exploit Afghanistan after ousting the US.
Pakistan has the advantages of proximity, road systems into eastern and southern Afghanistan, and capacious port facilities. It has long tried to build commerce with Central Asia. Indeed, Pakistani intelligence (ISI) helped to build up the Taliban back in the nineties in order to suppress banditry, which was interfering with commercial traffic with the north. ISI allocated Pakistani troops to fight alongside the Tailban (and al Qaeda) against the Northern Alliance, prior to and during the US intervention in 2001.
Today, ISI supplies the Taliban and other insurgent groups and provides them safe havens across the Durand Line. In 2010, Pakistan demonstrated that it could round up Taliban leaders on short notice and impress upon them, and the US as well, that no negotiations can proceed without its say-so.
Crucially, ISI has a great deal of power over the Taliban and is the only entity that can force them to the negotiating table and perhaps even force them to sign a settlement and abide by it.
Pakistan’s collaboration with Karzai at the expense of the US will bring many benefits. Pakistan’s assistance to the US in Afghanistan has brought it into conflict with domestic militant groups such as the Tehrik-i Taliban (TTP), which is conducting a vicious bombing campaign – one that kills scores of Pakistanis every month.
Breaking with the US will mollify the TTP and redirect their talents toward the insurgency in Kashmir – the centerpiece of Pakistani foreign policy since the country’s inception. Pakistan also seeks to weaken India’s position in Afghanistan and press it for resolution to the Kashmir conflict.
Further, the wealth from exploiting Afghanistan will bolster Pakistan’s economy and military as well, and strengthen its partnership with a rising power in the region and the world – China.
China’s booming economy and need for commodities is well known and constitutes one of the principal dynamics in world affairs today. It has already skillfully placed itself well ahead of the other powers in the new Afghan game. China operates the world’s largest copper mine in eastern Afghanistan and is developing iron mines in the central region. China is also building a railroad connecting the promising oil and gas wealth of Kunduz province in the north to the Khyber Pass and Pakistan in the south.
China shares Pakistan’s wish to limit the presence of its long-term rival India. It is bolstering its military partnership with Pakistan by sending in thousands of “flood relief” workers and by building a naval facility on the Arabian Sea, which in conjunction with a presence in Afghanistan and its naval base in Sri Lanka, poses a formidable problem for New Delhi.
It will also take China a long way on its quest to become a global military power – one whose navy operates near the Persian Gulf, one that can challenge the US in a growing portion of the globe. Not since the Yuan dynasty of hundreds of years ago will China have wielded so much power and commanded so much respect.
China’s enterprises in Afghanistan offer an insight into an already lucrative and practical arrangement with Afghanistan and Pakistan. It obtained licenses by giving a sum of money to the appropriate figures in Kabul and then setting to work. It extracts huge amounts of ore then ships them south with little if any difficulty from Taliban, al Qaeda, and other insurgent bands that roam the area. Evidently, Pakistan, the insurgent groups, and China have already reached a working arrangement, which though preliminary augurs well for all parties to the arrangement.
Iran shares these same economic and geopolitical interests as Pakistan and China. Hurt by US-led sanctions, Iran seeks greater trade and geopolitical support.
Iran loathes the Taliban, which massacred thousands of Shias, killed several Iranian diplomats in Mazar-i Sharif back in 1998, and contributes mightily to the country’s drug problem. However, it would be a party to a settlement that contained the Taliban, opened economic opportunities, and expelled the US from the region.
Iran presently enjoys good relations with the northern peoples of Afghanistan (Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and others) as it long supported them against the Taliban and helped them (and the US) oust the Taliban in 2001. Today, Iran contributes to rebuilding western Afghanistan and revitalizing commerce between the two countries.
Iranian influence will be critical to any negotiated settlement. The northern peoples, though a slight majority of the population, feel increasingly marginalized in public life by Karzai and other Pashtuns in his coterie. Northerners have been ousted from key ministries (reversed somewhat in recent days, perhaps at Tehran’s insistence) and from high positions in the military.
Northerners look upon reports of negotiations with the Taliban as leading to a betrayal that will lead to further oppression. Iran can assuage such concerns and press Karzai, Pakistan, and China to ensure that the Taliban limits their ambitions to the south and east.
Iran, though hostile to the Taliban, has established limited influence with them. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps provides a limited amount of weaponry to the insurgents and trains them at a base near Zahedan in southeastern Iran, not far from the Afghan border. It does so to signal the US that any attack on Iran, by the US or Israel, would lead to greater support for the insurgents and of course to greater casualties for the US and ISAF. Surely Farsi has an equivalent of the old aphorism about the enemy of one’s enemy.
Turkey has sought to expand its influence in Central Asia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early nineties. It did so with the encouragement of the US, which sought a secular and democratic influence in the region to prevent that of Islamist and authoritarian Iran.
But Turkey is a confident rising power now. It seeks to assert its national interests and reduce the influence the US has had over it since the early days of the Cold War. Despite US hopes, it has developed a community of interest with Iran and together they are expanding their trade and geopolitical opportunities in Central Asia.
Turkey takes advantage of longstanding cultural ties among Turkic peoples who stretch across the region from the Mediterranean to western China. Among them are Afghanistan’s Uzbeks and Turkmen – approximately ten percent of the population and chiefly in the north – who have respected Turkey on cultural and trade matters at least since the days of Ataturk’s missions there after World War One.
Turkey can work with Iran to convince northerners to work within the existing political framework in Kabul and to share in the promising development of national resources with the rising powers in the region.
Problems in the Game
The interests and dexterity of Afghanistan’s key partners are considerable, though pitfalls are clear to anyone not blinded by the glittering appeal of spectacular economic and geopolitical boons.
Iranian influence and Karzai’s recent courting notwithstanding, many northerners are hostile to Karzai and deeply concerned with any Taliban settlement. Though the northern militias are said to have been disbanded, this is unlikely, and in any case northerners compose a majority of the army’s rank and file who are more attentive to the appeals of northern leaders than they are to their haughty Pashtun officers. Partition is not inconceivable.
Historically, Afghans are suspicious of outside forces and the last thirty-two years of intermittent war have done little to reduce that outlook. The ouster of the US and ISAF, followed by the sudden and obvious expansion of Pakistani and Chinese and Iranian personnel, might well end an old insurgency but sow the seeds of a new one. Presumably, Kabul will insist on the use of Afghans wherever possible, but few will be deceived as to where the real power lies, where the traffic is headed, and where the riches are accumulating.
China’s economic and geopolitical coup at the expense of India could have destabilizing consequences as New Delhi will feel not only outmaneuvered but also endangered. New Delhi and Washington have recently drawn closer with trade agreements, including the sale of armaments, which could lead to a jarring realignment, the outcome of which cannot be predicted.
Perhaps most importantly, the trio’s arrangement relies on a stable Pakistan for the transportation of Afghan resources to world markets. Pakistan may be able to mollify domestic militant groups by ousting the US from Afghanistan, but formidable problems will remain. It faces desperate poverty, separatist movements in Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province, ominous early signs of an insurgency in the Punjab, and a barely-functioning political system that lurches from military rule to civilian rule with little political development along the way.
China and to a lesser extent Iran may find themselves in the unenviable and perhaps endless position of expending resources to hold Pakistan together. Alternately, Pakistan could find itself reduced in importance as the senior partners shift to Iranian land routes and port facilities.
Karzai’s Role
What if anything does Karzai bring to this arrangement? A look at the forces at work might readily suggest that he is a meaningless figurehead and that he can be manipulated – and if need be, brushed aside.
Though largely unremarked upon amid predilection with corruption, he has built a measure of support in the south and east from Pashtun tribes that mistrust or even loathe the Taliban from long experience. The Shinwari, Wardak, Popalzai, and many other Pashtun tribes support Karzai, giving him some leverage in even the most contested provinces.
Karzai, it bears repeating, will be a critical force in holding together – through the rentier-largesse from lucrative foreign deals – the disparate and often warring peoples of Afghanistan, Pashtun and non-Pashtun alike. Without a viable central figure, foreign powers will have to deal with a welter of competing and perhaps hostile regional leaders, warlords, and bandits to get the resources out of the ground and into foreign ports.
For all his many faults, Karzai is a better face for foreign businesses to deal with than any other contender for power. Few if any foreign leaders wish to be seen inking a trade deal with as volatile and reviled figure as Mullah Omar or any of the principal warlords.
Karzai can perform one other part in this new game. He alone can one day, with or without the approval or foreknowledge of any world body, ask the United States to leave his country.
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The groundwork for an arrangement among Afghanistan, China, Pakistan, and Iran has already been established. Karzai in recent weeks has become increasingly antagonistic toward the US and other ISAF forces. He turned a barely-noticed burning of the Koran in a tiny American church into a national cause that incited violence against outsiders, American and others. Had he not secured the support of other powers, he would not dare to incur the wrath of what seems the only force keeping him in power.
Pakistan choked off US/ISAF supply routes through the Khyber Pass for a few weeks last year and more recently ordered the curtailment of drone strikes inside Pakistan. Pakistan and the US are heading for a serious break – one that the former would not move toward had it not already established a secure if incomplete arrangement with the Taliban and the other powers.
Karzai has reached out to northerners by ousting a Pashtun defense minister, one thought too close to the US, and replacing him with a northerner supported by the Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. The finance minister, too, has been sacked – another figure deemed pro-US. Though a successor hasn’t been named, it will likely be a figure less attuned to the US and more acceptable to northerners.
All this is taking place as the US faces, for the first time in its history, the realization that it is militarily overextended around the world and racing toward a profound and protracted fiscal calamity.
©2011 Brian M Downing