A piece of the ‘great game’
IT was an open secret when the US invaded Afghanistan 20 years ago that there was more to it than just the ‘war on terror’. After all, 15 out of the 19 hijackers of 9/11 were Saudi Arabian citizens. Osama had denied any connection to the attack, and the US never formally indicted him. Even at that time, the Taliban had offered to hand Bin Laden over to a third country to avoid being bombed by the US. The war, therefore, had two objectives. The first was to pander to the average American’s thirst for revenge. The second had to do with the geopolitical economy.
Big American oil, construction, armaments and security companies have made billions of dollars in the past 20 years.
Afghanistan has never been a destination for great powers; it has been a road. Even historians and scholars have treated it like a board on which a ‘great game’ was being played out for two centuries. Afghanistan’s geographical position makes it a bridge between Central Asia, the Gulf and South Asia. It is a land-locked country sharing a long border with Pakistan to its south, Iran to its West, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to its North and a 76 km border with China in the north-east.
This has made Afghanistan extremely valuable as a trade and transport route, and also as a buffer zone. The British wanted control over it to keep the Indian colony out of the hands of other competing empires, including Tsarist Russia. Through several ‘Anglo-Afghan’ wars, the British systematically destroyed Afghan cities and towns, broke the backbone of its economy and impoverished its elite. Over 40 years, from 1879 till the ‘Afghan War of Independence’ in 1919, the British carved up the Pashto-speaking regions of Afghanistan, taking over key Afghan cities. Even though Afghanistan was to remain independent for another 60 years, the Durand Line of 1893 split the majority Pashtun people into two empires.
Despite violent political upheavals, most of Afghanistan’s rulers – Amanullah Khan, Zahir Shah, Daud Khan, Muhammad Taraki, Hafizullah Amin — were all ‘modernisers’. Yet, much of their attempts to build a modern nation and economy were hampered by the absence of a ‘middle class’. Years of war by the British, their role in promoting the conservative elements in various tribes, ensured that Afghanistan could not develop an indigenous modernising movement from below.
And then, the world woke up to oil and controlling the Middle East became even more important for the big powers. From the 1960s, the US and USSR took different routes to influence Afghanistan. The USSR, which had historically found support amongst the newly independent colonies, backed the modernising forces, while the US began financing Islamic fundamentalists and tribal warlords. When Soviet soldiers invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the CIA was already operating behind the lines. The net result of the 10-year war was that tyrannical warlords, many with an anti-modern agenda, took control of the country.
The western press and Hollywood portrayed the Mujahideen as fierce, but friendly heroes, who were fighting a battle of independence against the evil Soviet empire. But for the people of Afghanistan, they were nothing, but oppressors. Even the powerful trucking mafia of Pakistan, which smuggled goods and drugs into Central Asia and back, were not spared. Illegal tolls were collected all along the trading routes by local warlords, who often kidnapped, and even killed truckers.
As Ahmed Rashid has demonstrated in his classic work Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, the Taliban was created and funded by this trucking mafia, along with the Pakistani government — initially Benazir Bhutto and then ISI — to ensure a secure trading route through Afghanistan. Later, the Taliban was seen as the best bet to lay a trans-Afghanistan pipeline by oil major Unocal (along with its rival Bridas of Argentina). Circumstantial evidence suggests that the US government was backing Unocal and began clandestine funding of the Taliban. One US diplomat told Ahmed Rashid, ‘the Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco (Saudi oil company originally developed as a consortium of US oil majors), pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.’
It was only when the US realised that the Taliban was not likely to get full control over the northern regions that it began new pipeline plans, bypassing Afghanistan altogether. Needless to say, that also meant that it temporarily lost interest in the country it had controlled for so many years. Its attitude became hostile as the Taliban began sheltering Laden, who had carried out terror strikes on US properties across the globe. The Afghan economy now depended on handouts by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the three countries that recognised the Taliban as a legitimate government.
By the time the US invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, the latter had become one of the world’s poorest countries. The US promised reconstruction, but an overwhelming majority of the international aid that went to Afghanistan after 2001, was spent on the military, private security contractors, high salaries to American administrators and western NGOs. An estimate made in the early years showed that only 3 per cent of the total aid to Afghanistan was going towards rebuilding it. In the meantime, big American oil, construction, armaments and security companies have made billions of dollars in the past 20 years.
Today, Afghanistan has been turned into a narco-state, which provides 90 per cent of the world’s opium. It has a great wealth of minerals, including lithium, but very little is excavated and sold. If the Americans have withdrawn, it is partly because of the rise of China as a new imperialist force. Twenty years ago, George W Bush bullied Pakistan into submission. Today, Pakistan is sitting firmly in China’s lap. The US probably needs to woo Pakistan back by allowing its candidate in Afghanistan, the Taliban, to seize power. It is probably a small concession to prepare for the cold war with China.
The author is a senior economic analyst
