AN STYLE="font-size: 75%; color:#990000; font-weight:bold">Wednesday, November 21, 2001 The speed with which events are unfolding in Afghanistan and the direction in
which they are going must fill General Pervez Musharraf with dread. The
Pakistani dictator's hope that the Northern Alliance would stop short of
entering Kabul has been dashed -- and now that they are in control of the
capital, the Alliance's fighters are unlikely to walk away.
This is what Musharraf feared the most. Last week, as the Taliban began to
crumble, he warned that chaos and carnage would break out in Kabul if the
Alliance marched in. This sudden concern about the wellbeing of "innocent
civilians" was surprising -- after all, the Pakistani military had lost no sleep
over the slaughter of Kabulis in the mid-1990s when the Taliban was doing the
slaughtering. But it soon became clear the general's real worry was that the
Alliance, by virtue of possessing the capital, would end up calling the shots in
any future Afghan government.
And that looks likely to happen. No matter what kind of "broad-based" government
the United Nations might cobble together, it's clear the Alliance will be a
major component. At the very least, the Alliance will demand that its fighters
be turned into Afghanistan's standing army (perhaps incorporating a token
Pashtun regiment or two) which will take over from a U.N. peacekeeping force in
short order.
This would be disastrous for Musharraf. The ethnic and tribal factions that make
up the Alliance may bicker amongst themselves over a lot of things, but they are
united in a deep hatred of Pakistan -- in particular, the Pakistani military,
which sponsored their mortal enemies, the Taliban.
A hostile Afghanistan would leave Pakistan practically friendless in its
neighborhood: remember, it already has difficult relations with India and Iran.
Oddly, Pakistan has deep historic and cultural ties with these countries; it
shares religions, languages, cuisines and art forms with them. It differs from
them primarily in politics, which in Pakistan has long been dictated by military
strongmen.
Of the four countries with which it shares borders, Pakistan is now friendly
with the one that shares none of its values: China. That friendship is based on
convenience, rather than on deep cultural ties. And such relationships, as
Pakistan should have learned from its previous experience with the United States
(see last week's column), are inherently unreliable.
South Asian of the Year
It's that time of the year again, folks. Please send in your nominations for the
South Asian of the Year -- the individual who has had the greatest impact, for
better or worse, on the subcontinent in 2001. Each submission must be
accompanied with a 200-word essay explaining your nomination. As ever, the best
submissions will be published in these columns.
Send your submission to TIME >>
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