These two articles from Pakistan -- the first from Peshawar, the second from Islamabad -- help put today's events in recent historical perspective.

[The Observer (U.K.) - September 30, 2001] : She can remember the cinemas and the picnics in the sun. She can remember the packed cafes and the student parties and the libraries with their shelves heaving with books and the clean, modern hospitals with the calm, competent doctors that made her decide she wanted to be a doctor herself.

'They were the good times,' she says. 'When the Soviet Union was in control. Since then everything has been a long dark night.'

The Pakistani noonday sun, harsh despite the coming autumn and the thin curtains on the windows, reflects in the smooth glossy red of Saira Noorani's fingernails. She is holding them up to the light and laughing.

'I have painted my nails,' she says softly, smiles a long slow smile and then laughs again. It has been five years and three days since Saira, a 29-year-old surgeon, could paint her fingernails. Five years and three days since the Taliban militia came running through Kabul's wide, tree-lined streets and Saira, newly qualified as a doctor, watched in horror as they began to impose their harsh brand of Islamic law.

Last week Saira finally left Kabul for the relative safety, and very relative liberalism, of Pakistan. Here she will not be harangued, or worse, if a soldier spots her make-up.

'It was hell,' she says quietly. 'It got worse every day. After being used to freedom it was just so much humiliation and frustration.'

Saira is one of the last of the Afghan middle class to leave. Her father, once an important official in the state airline, left two years ago. Saira had hung on in the hope that things might get better. They didn't.

Afghanistan has been stripped of its middle class. All those with capital, qualifications or initiative have left. Some have made homes in Pakistan, the lucky ones have made it to the West.

Only the poor remain. Saira's story explains much about the turmoil in the country - and the twisted logic underpinning the ideology of the Taliban regime which governs more than 90 per cent of it.

She was born in 1972, in the year King Zahir Shah was deposed by his cousin Mohamed Daoud. The king had tried to modernise his isolated and conservative country. Though the pace of change was too fast for the conservative religious and tribal leaders in the rural areas, it was not fast enough for the Soviet-sponsored republican clique that succeeded him. When they tried to impose a radical reform programme there was a rural revolt that threatened the regime's existence. Moscow sent in the tanks to prop it up.

For the next decade rural Afghanistan was racked by war. But, while in the provinces villages were burnt, helicopters dropped mines to kill children and Russian soldiers were staked out in the sun to die, Kabul prospered.

'Life was good under the Soviets,' Saira said. 'Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go wherever we wanted and wear what we liked. A lot of my friends wore miniskirts but I liked my long summer dress which was more comfortable. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian films on a Friday night and listen to the latest Hindi music. I can remember having picnics with my friends after school when it was hot.'

Partly for ideological reasons, partly for practical ones, the Soviet Union subsidised schools and hospitals, built a vast bureaucracy with well-paid jobs for Kabulis and constructed a new city centre with open streets and parks. Saira was one of 1,000 medical students at the University of Kabul. She specialised in surgery and obstetrics. But soon after she qualified things began to change.

'It all started to go wrong when the Mujahideen started winning. They were uneducated peasants. They used to kill teachers and burn schools,' she said.

With massive US support, the Afghan resistance groups finally forced the Soviet Union out of their country in 1979. Three years later they had defeated the stooge government the Russians had left behind and marched into Kabul. Saira watched them entering her city on the television because it was not safe to walk the streets.

'We were terrified. When we saw them they were horrible. With their beards and turbans and their smell they were like wild animals. It was funny and sad to think these were the people the West had supported.'

To the Mujahideen - and to the Taliban who followed them - Kabul was a city of collaborators who had led good lives while they had suffered to liberate their country. Everything was a target - property, women, whole areas of the city.

When the Mujahideen factions started fighting they thought nothing of rocketing civilian areas. Whole parts of the city were levelled, including the Nooranis' house. The family fled, returning to Kabul in early 1996 when fighting died down. But the worst regime was to come.

When the Taliban seized Kabul they were determined to purge what they saw as a satanic den of iniquity and set about imposing their fanatical rule. Music and television were forbidden. Women were banned from schools and universities, and from leaving their homes without a male relative. They were made to wear the burqa - the head-to-toe veil and gown customary throughout rural Afghanistan. It was a visible symbol of the revenge of the countryside on the city.

Saira started work again in one of the main hospitals in Kabul. Supplies were hard to come by and she had to wear the burqa in the streets and a headscarf and veil while operating.

'It was very hard and very difficult to work as a doctor in those conditions. We were not even allowed to talk to the male doctors,' she said. 'I had grown used to so many freedoms and suddenly we could not cut our hair the way we wanted. They made rules about which clothes we could wear even in our homes and banned nail varnish and make-up.

'When the Taliban first came we were happy because the Mujahideen were raping and robbing and we couldn't leave our homes, and at the beginning the Taliban did bring us security, but they just got worse and worse.'

Finally, after Saira had refused to operate on a senior Taliban's relative instead of a seriously ill child, she was banned from her hospital. Her wage - £15 a month - had not been paid for six months anyway. She went to stay with friends in the eastern city of Jalalabad and spent a week illegally watching the television.

On Thursday last week she took an overcrowded bus to the Pakistani border, fought her way through the seething crowds waiting on the Afghan side and bribed her way across. She is now staying, with her young son, in a relative's overcrowded home in the frontier city of Peshawar.

'I do not know what I will do now,' she said. 'I cannot stay here for ever. Unless there is a strong and good government in Kabul I cannot go there. 'But where else is there? Afghans are not welcome anywhere in the world.'

[Islamabad, 2 October 2001]: Pakistan and the United States seem keen to prevent any perception of possible cleavage in the anti-terrorism coalition given their competing interests over Afghanistan. The key areas of divergence revolve around the role of the Northern Alliance in the anti-Osama campaign, and, equally important, were the Taleban regime to unravel in the process, what sort of new political dispensation should replace it?

Ironies abound for the United States and Pakistan as they try to cover their tracks while recovering from the consequences of policies they pushed and promoted in the past.

Take the case of the press conference on September 25 of Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar who obliquely warned Washington: “We must not make the blunder of trying to foist a government on the people of Afghanistan. We fear that any such decision on the part of foreign powers to give assistance to one side or the other in Afghanistan is a recipe for great disaster for the people of Afghanistan”.

But is that not what Pakistan has tried to do for the last 25 years in Afghanistan, starting with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto providing a sanctuary in 1974 to Gulbadin Hekmatyar and Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani, and then training their men to destabilise the Daoud regime in Kabul, in a tit-for-tat exercise since Kabul was then a haven for Pakistani dissidents? That we didn’t meet with success is another thing. However, after dumping these two long-time ‘friends’ 20 years later, did we not proudly proclaim that the Taleban were ‘our boys’ following their first victory in Kandahar in November 1994?

The Clinton administration concurred with Pakistan’s policy because it saw Afghanistan as a pressure point on Iran, changing its view only after Osama bin Laden landed in Afghanistan in 1996. Afghanistan apart, the Bush administration was reluctant to even remove nuclear-related sanctions against Pakistan concurrently with India. Now it has promptly waived sanctions imposed under American law regarding democracy because, President Bush cites it as being in US ‘national security interests’, which is fine since sanctions as punitive policy is wrong. But it does show that all these sanctions that the United States had imposed on Pakistan had nothing to do with principles either of nuclear or missile proliferation or of promoting democracy, but these were inextricably linked to politics and policies based on American interests. This should be a good lesson to our policy-makers as well that in the real world, interests are paramount and that is how we should learn to operate.

Even on terrorism, the American approach is instructive. It is now clear that all 19 terrorists who blew themselves up along with the planes, passengers and thousands of innocent citizens were Arabs, who had no connection with Afghanistan and probably never visited that country. But why is it that there is a conspiracy of silence? Neither the United States nor Israel nor the American media have tried to establish even a remote connection of that act of terrorism with the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Palestine issue. Even the date of the crime, September 11, 2001, tallies with September 12, 1970, when Palestinian hijackers, including Leila Khaled, hijacked four planes and then blew these up, introducing hijacking as a weapon in the Palestinian armoury.

Why is the accusing finger pointed only at Afghanistan? Because any reference to Palestine would invariably invite uncomfortable questions regarding American unstinted support for Israel and Israeli policies towards Palestinians.

It is rather late in the day for Pakistan to voice its fears regarding Afghanistan’s future regime. President Bush publicly sought ‘the cooperation of citizens within Afghanistan who may be tired of having the Taleban in place’, although he added a caveat ‘we’re not into nation building, we’re focused on justice’.

However, the problem is that Pakistan’s concerns on this count are not shared by even its friends in the region. Turkey, for instance, has publicly proclaimed its support for the Northern Alliance. Iran, which rejects any role in support of the United States but supports anti-terrorism under the United Nations umbrella by saying ‘we are neither with the Americans nor with the terrorists’, would not shed any tears for the Taleban’s demise nor would China, whose intelligence and anti-terrorism experts held a meeting in Washington on September 25 for sharing information regarding Afghanistan with their American counterparts, the first such intelligence cooperation between the two countries since the Afghanistan war in the 1980s.

A peep into the American game plan for Afghanistan was provided in an article in The New York Times on September 29: “In Afghanistan, the United States military faces two of the most difficult tasks it has ever confronted. It must track down an enemy leader and his fellow terrorists on their home turf. And it must try to remove the foreign regime that shelters him.”

Pakistan needs to understand three realities in the present situation. First, the United Nations Security Council unanimous resolution mandating use of force against terrorism can put Pakistan’s Kashmir policy at risk, since at least one Kashmiri jehadi organisation has already been banned by the US for alleged links with Osama. An imaginative approach and deft diplomacy would be required to preserve important segments of our stand on Kashmir, since its legitimacy is derived from UN resolutions. In a change of Western policy, Russia’s has been rewarded for its support with a green light to hammer Chechnya’s fighters.

Second, we should no longer continue to delude ourselves. The hard fact is that our Afghan policy lies buried in the debris of the World Trade Centre.

Third, after the candid comments of Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on September 26 regarding the ‘superiority of Western civilization over the Islamic civilization’ and his optimism that that the West will ‘conquer’ Islam just as it ‘conquered Communism’, there should be little doubt about the targets in the campaign against terrorism. This is mainly confined to Muslims, since terrorism of the Tamils, IRA and the Basque is excluded, and there are those in the West straining at the leash for a ‘clash of civilizations’. Pakistan and the Muslim countries should heed the Italian leader’s remarks as a wake-up call.

The United States, which is leading this coalition, needs to listen to saner and sober elements rather than be swayed by those who would like to convert a war against terrorism into a nation-destroying exercise, widening the chasm between the US and the Muslim World. President Megawati Sukarnoputri, leader of the world’s biggest Muslim state who was the first to meet President Bush after the carnage of September 11, urged him to “pay attention to the feelings of the Islamic world as well as not mixing up terrorism with Islam”.

Writing in The Los Angeles Times on September 30, Chalmers Johnson, called his thoughtful piece ‘Blowback’ referring to the unintended negative consequences of policies. He wrote: “President Bush has formed the largest air armada since World War II and brought it into position to bomb Afghanistan. He has deployed at least 630 US military aircraft, three times as many as were deployed in the Gulf War. If this armada is used against the hapless and impoverished people of Afghanistan, there is no doubt that it will produce a general crisis throughout the Islamic World.” And he concludes with advice that deserves to be heeded by policy-makers in Washington: “We must recognise that the terrorism of September 11 was not directed against America but against American foreign policy. We should listen to the grievances of the Islamic peoples (and) …if the United States only response to terrorism is more terrorism, it will have discredited itself.”

Regrettably, in a crisis involving Muslims, the Organization of Islamic Conference is a virtual white elephant, a non-factor and all it has done is to call an ‘emergency’ meeting of Foreign Ministers on October 9, almost a month after the event. This will be one of the umpteen ‘emergency’ meetings convened by Arab and Muslim leaders after the Intifidah began on September 28, 2000, but the results of all these meetings remain a well-guarded secret! It is thus no accident that Western leaders can now boast of ‘conquering Islam’ or openly talk of the Muslim world with a contempt that is unfortunately well-deserved given the abysmal track record of Muslim countries and leaders and their abject failure to promote and protect the interests of Islam.

*Mushahid Hussein is a graduate of Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and former Minister of Information of Pakistan.

Mid-East Realities

www.middleeast.org

Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2001/10/436.htm