by Ahmed Rashid
With the USA now preoccupied with capturing Bin Laden, it seemed for the moment that one phase of the Great Game was now over. It was clear that no US company could build an Afghan pipeline with issues such as the Taliban's gender policy, Bin Laden and the continuing fighting. That should have been clearer to Unocal much earlier on, but it never was as the Taliban and Pakistan kept promising them a quick victory. Bridas remained in the running but kept a low profile during the following difficult months. Even though the project was all but over, Pakistan persisted in trying to keep it alive. In April 1999, at a meeting in Islamabad, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and the Taliban tried to revive the project and said they would look for a new sponsor for CentGas, but by now nobody wanted to touch Afghanistan and the Taliban and foreign investors were staying clear of Pakistan.
US strategy in Central Asia was ‘a cluster of confusions’ according to Paul Starobin and ‘arrogant, muddled, naive and dangerous’ according to Martha Brill Olcott. Author Robert Kaplan described the region as a ‘frontier of anarchy’.13 Yet the USA, now fervently rooting for the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline despite crashing oil prices and a refusal by oil companies to invest, persisted in the belief that pipelines could be built without a strategic vision or conflict resolution in the region.
After providing billions of dollars’ worth of arms and ammunition to the Mujaheddin, the USA began to walk away from the Afghan issue after Soviet troops completed their withdrawal in 1989. That walk became a run in 1992 after the fall of Kabul. Washington allowed its allies in the region, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, free rein to sort out the ensuing Afghan civil war. For ordinary Afghans the US withdrawal from the scene constituted a major betrayal, while Washington's refusal to harness international pressure to help broker a settlement between the warlords was considered a double betrayal. Other Afghans were furious at the USA for allowing Pakistan a free hand in Afghanistan. The US strategic absence allowed all the regional powers, including the newly independent CARs, to prop up competing warlords, thereby intensifying the civil war and guaranteeing its prolongation. The pipeline of US military aid to the Mujaheddin was never replaced by a pipeline of international humanitarian aid that could have been an inducement for the warlords to make peace and rebuild the country.
After the end of the Cold War, Washington's policy to the Afghanistan-Pakistan-Iran-Central Asia region was stymied by the lack of a strategic framework. The USA dealt with issues as they came up, in a haphazard, piecemeal fashion, rather than applying a coherent, strategic vision to the region. There are several distinct phases of US policy towards the Taliban, which were driven by domestic American politics or attempted quick-fix solutions rather than a strategic policy.
Between 1994 and 1996 the USA supported the Taliban politically through its allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, essentially because Washington viewed the Taliban as anti-Iranian, anti-Shia and pro-Western. The USA conveniently ignored the Taliban's own Islamic fundamentalist agenda, its supression of women and the consternation they created in Central Asia largely because Washington was not interested in the larger picture. Between 1995 and 1997 US support was even more driven because of its backing for the Unocal project – even though at the time the USA had no strategic plan towards accessing Central Asian energy and thought that pipelines could be built without resolutions to regional civil wars.
The US policy turnaround from late 1997 to today was first driven exclusively by the effective campaign of American feminists against the Taliban. As always with the Clinton agenda, domestic political concerns outweighed foreign policy-making and the wishes of allies. Clinton only woke up to the Afghanistan problem when American women knocked on his door. President and Mrs Clinton had relied heavily on the American female vote in the 1996 elections and on female support during the Monica Lewinsky saga. They could not afford to annoy liberal American women. Moreover, once Hollywood got involved – its liberal stars were key financiers and supporters of the Clinton campaign and Vice-President Albert Gore was anxious to retain their support for his own election bid-there was no way the US could be seen as soft on the Taliban.
In 1998 and 1999 the Taliban's support for Bin Laden, their refusal to endorse the Unocal project or compromise with their opponents and the new moderate government in Iran provided additional reasons for the USA to get tough with the Taliban. In 1999 ‘getting Bin Laden’ was Washington's primary policy objective, even as it ignored the new Islamic radicalism Afghanistan was fostering, which would in time only throw up dozens more Bin Ladens. Nevertheless, late as it was, for the first time the USA was genuinely on the peace train and gave full support to UN mediation efforts to end the war.
US policy has been too preoccupied with wrong assumptions. When I first spoke to diplomats at the US Embassy in Islamabad after the Taliban emerged in 1994, they were enthusiastic. The Taliban had told the stream of US diplomats who visited Kandahar that they disliked Iran, that they would curb poppy cultivation and heroin production, that they were opposed to all outsiders remaining in Afghanistan including the Arab-Afghans and they had no desire to seize power or rule the country. Some US diplomats saw them as messianic do-gooders – like born-again Christians from the American Bible Belt. US diplomats believed that the Taliban would meet essential US aims in Afghanistan – ‘eliminating drugs and thugs’, one diplomat said. It was a patently naive hope given the Taliban's social base and because they themselves did not know what they represented nor whether they wanted state power.
There was not a word of US criticism after the Taliban captured Herat in 1995 and threw out thousands of girls from schools. In fact the USA, along with Pakistan's ISI, considered Herat's fall as a help to Unocal and tightening the noose around Iran. Washington's aim of using the Taliban to blockade Iran was equally shortsighted, because it was to pitch Iran against Pakistan, Sunni against Shia and Pashtun against non-Pashtun. ‘Whatever the merits of the isolation policy towards Iran in the fight against terrorism, they incapacitate the US in Afghanistan,’ wrote Barnett Rubin.14 Iran, already paranoid about CIA plots to undermine it, went into overdrive to demonstrate CIA support for the Taliban while stepping up its own arming of the anti-Taliban alliance. ‘US policy is forcing us to join Russia and the anti-Taliban alliance against Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the Taliban,’ an Iranian diplomat said.15
Some US diplomats, concerned with the lack of direction in Washington on Afghanistan, have admitted that there was no coherent US policy, except to go along with what Pakistan and Saudi Arabia wanted. In a confidential 1996 State Department memo written just before the Taliban captured Kabul, parts of which I read, analysts wrote that, if the Taliban expanded, Russia, India and Iran would support the anti-Taliban alliance and the war would continue; that the USA would be torn between supporting its old ally Pakistan and trying to prevent antagonizing India and Russia with whom the USA was trying to improve relations. In such a situation, the State Department surmised, the USA could not hope to have a coherent policy towards Afghanistan. In a US election year a coherent Afghan policy was not particularly necessary either.
There was another problem. Few in Washington were interested in Afghanistan. Robin Raphel, the US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia and the key policy maker for Washington's Afghan policy at the time, privately admitted that there was little interest in her initiatives on Afghanistan higher up the chain of command in Washington. Secretary of State Warren Christopher never mentioned Afghanistan once during his entire tenure. Raphel's attempts to float the idea of an international arms embargo on Afghanistan through the UN Security Council drew little support from the White House. In May 1996 she managed to push through a debate on Afghanistan in the UN Security Council – the first in six years. And in June, Senator Hank Brown, with support from Raphel, held Senate Hearings on Afghanistan and conducted a three-day conference in Washington between leaders of the Afghan factions and US legislators, which Unocal helped fund.16
Raphel recognized the dangers emanating from Afghanistan. In May 1
996 she told the US Senate, ‘Afghanistan has become a conduit for drugs, crime and terrorism that can undermine Pakistan, the neighbouring Central Asian states and have an impact beyond Europe and Russia.’ She said extremist training camps in Afghanistan were exporting terrorism.17But Raphel's perserverance turned into patchwork diplomacy, because it was not underpinned by a serious US commitment towards the region.
When the Taliban captured Kabul in September 1996, the CIA, again encouraged by ISI analysis, considered that a Taliban conquest of the country was now possible and that the Unocal project could reach fruition. The USA was silent on the Taliban's repression of Kabul's women and the dramatic escalation in fighting and in November Raphael urged all states to engage the Taliban and not isolate them. ‘The Taliban control more than two-thirds of the country, they are Afghan, they are indigenous, they have demonstrated staying power. The real source of their success has been the willingness of many Afghans, particularly Pashtuns, to tacitly trade unending fighting and chaos for a measure of peace and security, even with severe social restrictions,’ said Raphel. ‘It is not in the interests of Afghanistan or any of us here that the Taliban be isolated,’ she added.18
Several concerned American commentators noted the inconsistency of US policy at the time. ‘The US, although vocal against the ongoing human rights violations, has not spelled out a clear policy towards the country and has not taken a strong and forthright public stand against the interference in Afghanistan by its friends and erstwhile allies – Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, whose aid – financial and otherwise – enabled the Taliban to capture Kabul.’19
The US and Unocal wanted to believe that the Taliban would win and went along with Pakistan's analysis that they would. The most naive US policy-makers hoped that the Taliban would emulate US–Saudi Arabia relations in the 1920s. ‘The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that,’ said one US diplomat.20 Given their suspicions, it was not unexpected that the anti-Taliban alliance, Iran and Russia, should view the Unocal project as an arm of US-CIA foreign policy and as the key to US support for the Taliban. Unocal's links with the US government became a subject of massive speculation. US commentator Richard Mackenzie wrote that Unocal was being regularly briefed by the CIA and the ISI.21
Unocal neither admitted nor denied receiving State Department support, as any US company would have in a foreign country, but it denied links with the CIA. ‘Since Unocal was the only US company involved in the CentGas consortium, State Department support for that route became, de facto, support for CentGas and Unocal. At the same time, Unocal's policy of political neutrality was well known to the US Government,’ Unocal President John Imle told me.22 Unocal's failure was that it never developed a relationship with the Afghan factions, which were independent of the US and Pakistan governments.
There was a bigger problem. Until July 1997 when Strobe Talbott made his speech in Washington, the USA had no strategic plan for accessing Central Asia's energy. US oil companies were faced with what they could not do, rather than what they could do since they were forbidden to build pipelines through Iran and Russia. When Washington finally articulated its policy of ‘a transport corridor’ from the Caspian to Turkey (avoiding Russia and Iran), the oil companies were reluctant to oblige given the costs and the turbulence in the region. The essential issue which the USA declined to tackle was peace-making in the region. Until there was an end to the civil wars in Central Asia and the Caspian (Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Georgia, Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh, the Kurdish issue) and there was a broad consensus with Iran and Russia, pipelines would neither be safe to build nor commercially feasible, as every step of the way Iran and Russia would block or even sabotage them.
It was in the interests of Iran and Russia to keep the region unstable by arming the anti-Taliban alliance, so that US pipeline plans could never succeed. Even today the USA is muddled on the critical question of whether it wants to save Central Asia's depressed economies by letting them export energy any way they like or to keep Iran and Russia under blockade as far as pipelines are concerned.
The USA and Unocal were essentially faced with a simple question in Afghanistan. Was it preferable to rely on Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to deliver the Taliban and obtain a temporary Afghan concensus in the old-fashioned way by reconquering the country? Or was it preferable for the USA to engage in peacemaking and bring the Afghan ethnic groups and factions together to form a broad-based government, which might ensure lasting stability? Although Washington's broad-brush policy was to support a widely based, multi-ethnic government in Kabul, the USA for a time believed in the Taliban and when it ceased to do so, it was not willing to rein in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
Although there was no CIA budget for providing arms and ammunition to the Taliban and Unocal did not channel military support to the Taliban, the USA did support the Taliban through its traditional allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, accepting their provision of arms and funding to the Taliban. ‘The US acquiesced in supporting the Taliban because of our links to the Pakistan and Saudi governments who backed them. But we no longer do so and we have told them categorically that we need a settlement,’ the highest ranking US diplomat dealing with Afghanistan said in 1998.23 In Washington it was perhaps not so much a covert policy as no policy. A covert policy involves planning, funding and taking decisions, but there was no such process taking place at the highest levels in Washington on Afghanistan.
Washington's change of heart over the Taliban in late 1997 also arose because of the deteriorating political and economic crisis in Pakistan. US officials began to voice fears that the drugs, terrorism and Islamic fundamentalist threat which the Taliban posed could overwhelm its old and now decidedly fragile ally Pakistan. The USA warned Pakistan of the increasing dangers it faced, but became frustrated with the ISI's refusal to pressurize the Taliban to be more flexible on the political and gender fronts.
The first public expression of the US change was made by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright when she visited Islamabad in November 1997. On the steps of Pakistan's Foreign Office she called the Taliban ‘despicable’ for their gender policies. Inside, she warned Pakistani officials that Pakistan was becoming isolated in Central Asia – which weakened US leverage in the region. But the Sharif regime remained at odds with itself, wanting to become an energy conduit for Central Asia, wanting peace in Afghanistan but insisting this would best be achieved by a Taliban victory. Pakistan could not have a Taliban victory, access to Central Asia, friendship with Iran and an end to Bin Laden-style terrorism, all at the same time. It was a self-defeating, deluded and contradictory policy which Pakistan refused even to acknowledge.
The shift in US policy was also because of major changes in Washington. The dour, hapless Warren Christopher was replaced by Albright as Secretary of State in early 1997. Her own experiences as a child in Central Europe ensured that human rights would figure prominently on her agenda. A new team of US diplomats began to deal with Afghanistan in both Washington and Islamabad and the new US Assistant Secretary for South Asia, Karl Inderfurth, knew Afghanistan as a former journalist and was much closer to Albright than Raphel was to Christopher.
Albright's private criticism of Pakistan's policies and public criticism of the Taliban was followed up by the visit of the US Ambassador to the UN, Bill Richardson, to Islamabad and Kabul in April 1998. But with Pakistan exerting no real pressure on the Taliban, except advising them to give Richardson full protocol, the trip turned into little more than a public relations exercise. Richardson's agreements with the Taliban were rescinded hours later by Mullah Omar. The only positive spin from the trip was that it convinced Iran that the USA now saw Tehran as a dialogue partner in future Afghan peace talks, thereby reducing US–Iranian tensions over Afghanistan.
As with Raphel's initiatives in 1996, the USA appeared to be dipping its fingers into the Afghan quagmire, but wanted no real responsibili
ty. The USA wished to avoid taking sides or getting involved in the nuts and bolts of peace-making. The Pakistanis realized this weakness and tried to negate US pressure. Foreign Minister Gohar Ayub blasted the Americans just before Richardson arrived. ‘The Americans are thinking of putting puppets there [in Kabul]. These are people who hover around in Pakistan from one cocktail party to the other, they do not cut much ice because they have no support in Afghanistan,’ Ayub said on a visit to Tokyo.24
US tensions with Pakistan increased substantially after Bin Laden's attacks against US Embassies in Africa in August 1998. The fact that the ISI had helped introduce Bin Laden to the Taliban in 1996 and had maintained contacts with him, but now declined to help the Americans catch him, created major difficulties in the relationship. The American tone became much harsher. ‘There appears to be a pervasive and dangerous interplay between the politics of Pakistan and the turmoil inside Afghanistan. With the emergence of the Taliban there is growing reason to fear that militant extremism, obscurantism and sectarianism will infect surrounding countries. None of those countries has more to lose than Pakistan if “Talibanization” were to spread further,’ said US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott in Janury 1999.25
But the Americans were not prepared to publicly criticize Saudi support to the Taliban publicly, even though they privately urged Saudi Arabia to use its influence on the Taliban to deliver Bin Laden. Even US Congressmen were now raising the self-defeating contradictions in US policy. ‘I have called into question whether or not this administration has a covert policy that has empowered the Taliban and enabled this brutal movement to hold on to power,’ said Congressman Dana Rohrabacher in April 1999. ‘The US has a very close relationship with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, but unfortunately, instead of providing leadership, we are letting them lead our policy,’ he said.26
