Subcontinental Drift: Home Alone

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.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]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.
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