Volume 2, No. 12, December 2001

The US is confronting a complex situation in Afghanistan. Bitten by the Vietnam syndrome it fears any large-scale deaths of American soldiers on foreign lands as it has the potential of triggering massive protests from the American people. No sooner has the US war started on Afghanistan that protests began to shake the US administration. This is despite the fact that the US imperialists have tried hard to prepare the minds of the US people to get ready for sacrifices so that ‘the global war against terrorism is won.’ The US knew that the war in Afghanistan couldn’t be won without committing ground forces to the war. From the very beginning of its preparations for war, the US imperialists were forced to seek channels and forces who could do the bulk of the ground fighting, win war on their behalf and spare the deaths of US soldiers to the maximum.

As a replacement of the Taliban, the US has considered as the best bet the ex-king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah. But he has no army. The other force left which can be exploited is that of the Northern Alliance warlords who have been fighting the Taliban ever since the latter drove them out of Kabul in 1996 after the former had ‘ruled’ Afghanistan for four years. Now, the US wants to use the Northern Alliance in spite of its past record of infighting, betrayals and bloodthirstiness, rape and loot. The US defence minister Rumsfeld says, "These folks [Northern Alliance], they know the lay of the land ... They know, in some cases, some targets that are useful; they have ideas about how to deal with the Taliban. I think that one has to say that they can be useful in a variety of ways." Rumsfeld wants to utilize the Northern Alliance to defeat the Taliban.

Many in the West have warned the US about the Northern Alliance, as the latter has been an atrocious alliance with a bad record not less horrible than the Taliban itself. The Northern Alliance is a combination of diverse ethnic forces and religious sects. These are:

The ethnic Tajik Jamiat-e-Islami, is nowled by Masood’s successor, General Mohammed Fahim Khan. In the west central Ghor and Herat provinces, Ismael Khan, a former Herat governer, is also a key figure.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the non-Pashtun militias in the north centered in the city of Mazar-i Sharif, constituted themselves into a new organization, the Junbish-i Milli-yi Islami (National Islamic Movement), founded by General Abdul Rashid Dostum, whose base of support lies primarily among the Sunni Muslim Uzbeks. He had formed an alliance with G. Hikmatyar in 1994 and was part of the alliance formed against B. Rabbani, of the ‘Supreme Coordination Council’.

(3) The third main element is the ethnic Hazara Shia groupings of the Hizb-i Wahdat led by Karim Khalili and Mohaqiq. This group has borne the brunt of the Taliban regime as the Wahabbi and Deobandi Schools of Suuni Muslims do not recognise Shias as Muslims. Wahadat has been regularly supported by the Iranian Government right from the times of the Russian invasion.

The alliance has drawn criticism because it includes people accused of murder, rape and other atrocities during its fight for power in the late 1980s and throughout its bloody 1992-1996 rule in Kabul before the Taliban forced them to retreat to the north.

One of the alliance’s main components is led by Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum has gained the reputation of a ruthless tyrant from the time he had fought for the Soviet Union during its 1979-1989 occupation of Afghanistan. But Gen. Dostum has rejected as "propaganda" that his Uzbeks tortured U.S.-backed, anti-communist guerrillas during the 1980s, raped women, executed civilians and committed other crimes.

Another is Rasoul Sayaf, a Pashtun whose militia reportedly tortured women as sex slaves in the mid-1990s.

From 1992 to 1993, Tajikistan was wrecked by civil war, during which fighters of the United Tajik Opposition (UTO) established military bases and training camps in ethnically Tajik regions of northeastern Afghanistan. Cross-border raids into Tajikistan from Afghanistan were commonplace.

Tajik government forces emerged victorious in the civil war and engaged in reprisals against elements of the civilian population suspected of sympathizing with the opposition. The Tajiks accused the then government of Rabbani in Afghanistan of fomenting trouble by supporting the fundamentalist elements.

Similarly, the Uzbek government accused hard-core Islamists supported by the Taliban of conspiring to kill President Karimov and instigating trouble in the Uzbek republic. The ex-revisionist ruler Karimov is notorious for ruthlessly suppressing opposition of all kinds including by the poor people of Uzbekistan. Almost all the Central Asian republics of the ex-Soviet Union have complained, at one or the other time, of extreme Muslim forces being abbeted by the regimes of Rabbani and the Taliban in Kabul.

In Newsday.com, Oct 14, 2001, William Douglas writes that:

From 1992 to 1995 factions that later formed the Northern Alliance indiscriminately bombed Kabul’s neighborhoods, killing thousands of people. "Unfortunately, some of their top commanders were warlords who excelled in running rampant in Kabul and elsewhere, massacring and raping people," said Joost Hiltermann, executive director of the arms division of Human Rights Watch.On Feb. 11,1993, Tajik and Pashtun factions joined forces and went on a murder and rape spree in West Kabul, killing about 100 people and causing countless ethnic Hazara civilians to "disappear," a Human Rights Watch report added.

Two years later, Tajik alliance troops under the command of Ahmad Shah Massoud — a ‘charismatic’ leader who was assassinated just before the Sept.11 attack — went on a raping and looting rampage after capturing a predominantly Hazara neighborhood in Kabul.

"Everybody likes to make them [alliance members] look like Robin Hoods," said Milt Bearden, who was a CIA station chief in Pakistan, handling the agency’s aid to anti-Soviet rebels in Afghanistan.

"Some of the Taliban troops were taken to the desert and shot, while others were thrown down wells and then blown up with grenades," according to a Human Rights Watch report.

During the Clinton years,while State Department reports on human rights abuses in Afghanistan centered mostly on the Taliban, Koh, a former Clinton administration human rights expert said, White House officials were equally disturbed by what they were hearing about the Northern Alliance.

In its 1999 report on human rights practices around the world, the Clinton State Department wrote that "armed units of the Northern Alliance, local commanders, and rogue individuals were responsible for political killings, abductions, kidnappings for ransom, torture, rape, arbitrary detention and looting."

Amnesty International, though a pro-imperialist institution itself, has said, "the Northern Alliance presently consists of several groups, including various ethnic minorities, which oppose the Taleban. During their rule in Kabul from 1992 to 1996, the Northern Alliance was responsible for numerous human rights abuses committed with total impunity against Afghan civilians. Violations included extra-judicial executions, torture, and rape, as well as long-term detention of prisoners of conscience. Northern Alliance forces also were responsible for mass killings of civilians." It also says, "an estimated 400,000 children have been killed in war and thousands more have died from war-related injuries; many were victims of indiscriminate bombing and shelling of their homes, schools, and playgrounds."

But now the US administration is all set to justify its criminal war in alliance with these enemies of the people of Afghanistan.

An adviser, who requested anonymity, to the present US administration, said, "There’s a direct threat to the United States. Six thousand Americans died, and [the Northern Alliance] is willing to help." "Sometimes the only way to catch terrorists and murderers is to associate with terrorists and murderers."

Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, said the U.S. military needs to become more of an air force for the Northern Alliance to ease its way back into Kabul. He further said that relying on the alliance "is not a pretty concept,… it’s not an enjoyable image to create. But I think it’s inevitable if we really want to be confident that they can seize control of Kabul and then expand control throughout the rest of the country."

The US, in fact, is looking for its foot soldiers. It wants to pave way for a future Government in Afghanistan, probably under the means of UN and with the king as a titular head. The US president says, "a useful function for the United Nations to take over the so-called nation-building, I would call it the stabilization of a future government, after our military mission is complete."

Mullah Mohammad Zaeef, the Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan has denounced the Northern Alliance as "a handful of American slaves." Other Afghans perceive the opposition group as a puppet of Russia, Iran, Tajikistan and India, because those nations have aided it against the Taliban. The Northern Alliance has been supported by Russia, India and Iran for years against the Taliban. It is a strange coincidence that the forces comprising the Northern Alliance have, at one time, fought against Russia and despised India as the latter was a supporter of the 1979 Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Another equally interesting thing is that the Taliban has been created and trained by Pakistani Government with Saudi and US money and CIA provided armaments, just like many forces of the present Northern Alliance were trained and financed during war against the Russians. Uzbek warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum who is again set to overrun Mazar-e-Sharif has been particularly notorious. He sided with the Russians at first, then switched over to Mujahideen forces, when the latter were about to take the Najibullah government in Kabul in 1992. Here a 1999 quote from the statement from RAWA, Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan, is worth attention. The statement was released when talks for a compromise between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance were to be held for the third time. It says:

"The United Nations and countries such as Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United States and others who every now and then remind the world that Taliban and Jihadi bigwigs are important Afghan leaders and beneficently bring them to the talking table to sit down and talk with each other, are no friends of the people of Afghanistan. This is because they all disdainfully ignore the aspiration of our people for democracy and human rights (and women’s rights in particular) and seek nothing but their own political dividends. These countries have contributed and continue to contribute to the human rights disaster in Afghanistan by funding and supporting the most anti-popular forces in Afghanistan. They therefore can in no way be expected to write off their political investments in Afghanistan so easily and agree on an acceptable solution to the Afghan conundrum."

About the Alliance and Talibani crimes against women, RAWA has brought out very grim details. Many of its activists were killed by these forces. The founder of this organisation, Meena, herself became a victim of repression by the Russians. She had laid the foundation of RAWA in 1977. According to a biography put out by RAWA, "This organization was meant to give voice to the deprived and silenced women of Afghanistan. She started a campaign against the Russian forces and their puppet regime in 1979. Her active social work and effective advocacy against the views of the fundamentalists and the puppet regime provoked the wrath of the Russians and the fundamentalist forces alike and she was assassinated by agents of KHAD (Afghanistan branch of KGB) …on February 4,1987."

Presently, Russia, India and Iran say, "Any solution to the Afghan problem that leaves out Northern Alliance is unacceptable." India wants to put up an anti-Pakistan regime in Kabul and Iran wants the hands of Shia rebels in Afghanistan strengthened. Russia supports its ex-enemies to prevent the further US forays into Central Asia through the strengthening of the NA.

Pakistan says, "Any solution that gives the Northern Alliance any leverage in a future Afghan Government will not be allowed by Pakistan. Moderates from the Taliban and Pushtuns should make the pivot of future arrangements for Afghanistan." Pakistan fears its own Pushtun and Baluch regions may rebel to form an anti-Pakistan Afghanistan.

The Northern Alliance says it is "willing to help the US in its war against terrorism and to dislodge the Taliban from seat of power."

The US say, "We cannot export all the Pushtuns from Afghanistan. All forces have to be included in stabilising Afghanistan." The stability US needs is nothing less than a subservient government in Afghanistan, chances for which seem remote.

The concern for the US is to use whosoever can be used to further its own imperialist interests in the region using every means whether it be threats, doles, or a combination of the both. For it, its imperialist interests are the main thing, everything else is subordinate to this concern. It is using one country against the other, one faction of warlords against the other, one section of the Afghan people against the other, and has no concern at all for the Afghan or the American people in whose name it is carrying on its ruthless war of aggression against the people of Afghanistan.

It is as if only the foreigners are to decide the fate of the poor Afghan people and not the Afghans themselves. Everyone wants to force his own agenda and expect benefits from the outcome of the war. The Afghan people, their fate, their sovereignty and their liberation from local and foreign reactionaries and vested interests are under serious threat. This all started when the Russians wanted to impose their will through the palace coups of 1979. Ever since the Afghans are becoming cannon fodder of foreign conspiracies and intrigues.

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