Modern Islamist Movements: History, Religion, and Politics (39 page)

eventual political leadership in such a way that this leadership would be favorable toward Pakistan’s interests; (3) Zia wanted Pakistan’s strategic depth in Afghanistan to provide him with increased political leverage in his confrontations with India; and (4) presciently, Zia believed that the Soviet Union would collapse or withdraw from Central Asia, and in the wake of this hoped-for waning of Soviet influence in Central Asia, Zia hoped that Pakistan could use its presence in Afghanistan as a stepping-stone for influence in Central Asia.7 Over time, it appears that Zia’s policies may not have had a positive impact on Pakistan, its regional influence, or its relationship with its neighbors. Quite the opposite, these policies may have served to undercut Pakistan’s interests in the sense that several of the significant Islamist outgrowths of the mujahideen, such as the Taliban, al-Qaida, Lashkar-i Taiba, and similar groups, have made significant territorial and other gains in their efforts to weaken and topple subsequent Pakistani regimes; although the extent to which Pakistan will be able to use the Taliban effectively as its proxy in Afghanistan remains to be seen.8

A History of Pakistan’s Involvement in Afghanistan

While Zia’s and subsequent Pakistani Presidents’ support of Islamist groups such as the mujahideen, the Taliban, and Lashkar-i Taiba has had, at best, mixed results for Pakistan, Pakistan’s attempted use of Islamist groups as proxies for its own perceived benefit is not new. For example, when a coup d’état restored the Afghan Prince Daud to power in 1973, five years before Zia became Pakistan’s President, Pakistan gave refuge to Afghan Islamists who utilized armed resistance against the largely secularist Afghan regime.9 These Afghan Islamists, who were trained by the Pakistani military and accompanied by members of Pakistan’s Jama(at-i Islami, launched an unsuccessful revolt against the secularist Afghan regime in 1975 and then withdrew to Peshawar in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, where they resided until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 gave them another opportunity to make incursions into Afghanistan with the hope of eventually installing an Islamist regime.10

Thus, there came into existence a network of Islamically-based opponents to Afghanistan’s secularist regimes, which used Pakistan and the majority- Pashtun Afghanistan-Pakistan border region as its base. This network was comprised in part of traditional members of the ulema, who after Pakistani independence in 1947 refused to finish their Islamic education in India, as had been the usual practice among Afghan students studying Islam until that time. One reason that many Afghan students did not receive their Islamic education in Afghanistan was because for a significant length of time there were no top-notch Islamic schools or madrasahs in Afghanistan.

Hence, they attended madrasahs in Pakistan that were independent of their parent schools in India. In the period after Pakistani independence, many ethnic Pashtuns living in Afghanistan and Pakistan (15 percent of Pakistan’s and 42 percent of Afghanistan’s population is ethnically Pashtun) who sought education in madrasahs did so in Pakistan.11

The students who received their education at these schools and then became members of the ulema returned to Afghanistan and established madrasahs in that country which were patterned after the madrasahs in Pakistan that they had attended. In this way, a network of madrasahs, which were strongly Islamist in their content, practice, and approach, emerged in the majority-Pashtun areas which exist in and near the Afghan-Pakistan border. These madrasah-based Islamic educational networks, which operated outside of the control of any government, became stronger during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan because the Afghan madrasahs, which were usually either destroyed or converted into military bases, were no longer effective in providing their students with an Islamic education. There were also teachers at these madrasahs who had been trained outside of Pakistan – usually in the Middle East – and had come to the madrasahs to teach students in order to enable them to resist the Soviets in one way or another.12

Madrasahs, the Mujahideen’s War against the Soviets, and the Taliban’s Rise

During the war against the Soviets, some of the members of the mujahideen who were students in these regional madrasahs used part of their time to engage in the war against the Soviets and the rest of their time to study in the madrasahs. Much in the same way that Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries supplied finances and other forms of support to the mujahideen in their war effort, these countries also provided substantial subsidies to these madrasahs, whose teachings were strictly Islamist in nature. Within these madrasahs, the students who were illiterate could, in some cases, become a bit more literate. They and their fellow students would also receive food, shelter, and camaraderie with other Muslim men. In addition to reinforcing one another’s religious and political beliefs through conversations and fellowship inside and outside the classroom, they would pray regularly and follow what they believed to be all the tenets and practices of Islam. These experiences in the madrasahs enabled the student-mujahideen who were in them to form strong religious, political, and social bonds in such a way that afforded them some of the psychological and physical strength that enabled them to fight the Soviets, whom they believed were atheistic members of a jahili society that sought to destroy Islam.13

The madrasahs’ teachers, both inside and outside the classroom, taught the students that their physical jihad against the Soviets was similar to the physical jihad which Muhammad and the seventh-century Muslims had to wage in and near Medina as they attempted to protect Islam from the destruction which its enemies sought to bring. This was one of several religio-political ideologies that motivated the mujahideen who were students in the madrasahs to wage their decade-long war against the Soviets. The teachers of these schools came from various parts of the majority-Muslim world, including Pakistan and Egypt, and brought with them the Islamist ideas and pedagogical techniques of their home countries. For example, teachers from Egypt who had been members of or influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood brought those ideas with them, while members of Pakistan’s Jama(at-i Islami brought their ideas and techniques with them. Those and other Islamists hoped that the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan would be an opportunity to put their Islamist ideas into practice in such a way that would enable them to mold Afghanistan into an ideal Islamic state that would be an example for other majority-Muslim countries to follow. These Islamists viewed the Soviets’ invasion and occupation of Afghanistan as part of a divinely-inspired plan for Muslims to Islamize Afghanistan and eventually the world. Thus, the madrasahs which the mujahideen attended served the purposes of providing an Islamic education, strengthening the mujahideen for warfare, while opening the gates for a broader expansion of Islamism.14 Indeed, the word talib, in several languages which are spoken in South Asia and the majority-Muslim world, means student, and the word Taliban is a plural form of that word. Thus, the Taliban, as that group of Islamists in Pakistan and Afghanistan were later to be called, emerged initially as students from the madrasahs within the predominantly Pashtun border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In the midst of and as a key part of these activities, the Pakistani government had at least two entities, which it perceived to be its proxies, operating within Afghanistan: first, the Islamists, largely represented by the Jama(at-i Islami, who through various periods of Zia’s regime were more or less allied with his government, and second, Pakistan’s ISI which served directly as an arm of Pakistan’s government within Afghanistan. Zia also attempted to manipulate the United States and its support of the Afghan opposition in such a way that he believed would serve Pakistan’s interests. One of Pakistan’s Afghan allies, which was fighting against the Soviets, was the ethnic Pashtun Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Pashtun-dominated Islamist organization, Hizb-i Islami (Party of Islam), which was strongly allied with the ISI and the Jama(at. Both of these organizations were comprised overwhelmingly of Pashtuns with Islamist sympathies. Zia succeeded in channeling significant amounts of American aid to the Hizb-i Islami and the Jama(at in Afghanistan, in such a way that bolstered these organizations and

his relationships with them. The Pakistani government also encouraged Islamists who were members of Islamist groups whose bases were outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan to come to Afghanistan and Pakistan for the purpose of teaching in madrasahs in those countries, while supporting the mujahideen in other ways also. As volunteers from a variety of Islamist groups from several parts of the majority-Muslim world came to Pakistan and Afghanistan, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan all encouraged this process, motivated simultaneously by some interests that overlapped and others that did not. In this process, Pakistan was one important arena where these Islamist volunteers were trained and sent into action within Afghanistan.15

More broadly, one way that Pakistan took advantage of the road between Gilgit, which is in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, and Kashgar, which is in the Chinese province of Xinjiang and contains a large Muslim population, was by encouraging Muslim Uighurs from that province to stay in the Jama(at-i Islami’s guesthouses in Lahore and Karachi on their way to Mecca for the hajj. Significant numbers of these Uighurs attended madrasahs in Pakistan and fought against the Soviets alongside of the mujahideen. These and other cooperative military strategies that Pakistan and its allies implemented were key factors that led to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989.16

The Aftermath of the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, it descended into a turbulent and violent multi-sided civil war. Regional, ethnic, clan, and religious differences within Afghanistan, which had existed over a wide expanse of history, became even more obvious after the Soviet withdrawal than before, with warfare taking place between Afghan militias which were attached to various warlord fiefdoms. These militias engaged in battles, changed alliances, and then battled each other again. This pattern was repeated frequently. These ever-changing battles took place in the midst of continually shifting alliances, betrayals, and cloak-and-dagger maneuvers where one or more warlords or militias sought the advantage over their immediate enemies who could later become their allies against other enemies.17

During this immediate post-Soviet-occupation civil-war period in Afghanistan, different warlords had influence over different parts of Afghan- istan. The government of Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani had a modicum of influence over Kabul, which is Afghanistan’s capital, the area surrounding it, and portions of northeastern Afghanistan. At the same

time, Ismael Khan controlled the city of Herat and three provinces in the western part of Afghanistan. A council (or Shura) of mujahideen from the period of the Afghan resistance against the Soviet occupation controlled Jalalabad and three majority-Pashtun provinces in the eastern part of Afghanistan. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar controlled a small area southeast of Kabul. In the northern part of Afghanistan, Rashid Dostum had influence over six provinces and in January 1994 he withdrew his support from Rabbani’s government and allied himself with Hekmatyar to attack Kabul. In central Afghanistan, the members of the Hazara ethnic group, most of whom are Shiite Muslims, controlled the Afghan province of Bamiyan. A large number of ex-mujahideen warlords had divided control of southern Afghanistan among themselves and took advantage of the population in that area at will, as various individuals, tribes, and factions violently battled each other.18

The situation was so chaotic after the Soviets withdrew, that members of some international aid organizations were afraid of working in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, for example, because the city itself was divided among various groups who were at war with each other. The warlords and other leaders in Kandahar sold as many of the city’s assets as they could to Pakistani traders in order to turn profits for themselves. For instance, these Afghan leaders sold telephone poles and wires, electric transformers, factories, machinery, road maintenance equipment, trees, and bushes to various businesspeople and scrap merchants.19 The Afghan political leaders in this and other regions exploited members of the population at will, kidnapping people for ransom, stealing from various merchants, and clashing in the streets. Instead of Afghan refugees returning from Pakistan, large numbers of Afghan refugees left Kandahar and surrounding towns for Pakistani cities such as Quetta, which is near the Pakistan–Afghanistan border.20

In the midst of this tumultuous post-Soviet Afghan civil war, teachers and students from a variety of madrasahs in the majority-Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan enunciated the Taliban’s goals, which were based on their strict interpretation of Islam’s teachings. They wanted to restore peace to the region, disarm the members of Afghanistan’s population who were not members of the Taliban, and enforce the strictest possible form of Islamic law on Afghanistan’s population. These ideas were strongly influenced by the Wahhabi Islamist teachings which the Saudi government had spent huge amounts of money to spread in the madrasahs of Pakistan and Afghanistan, particularly the ones in the border regions of those two countries. The central point where these ideas coalesced and solidified was in Kandahar in 1994.21

Most of the members of the Taliban, during this and later periods, were Afghan and Pakistani Pashtun Sunni Muslims who had fought as mujahideen against the Soviets and were deeply frustrated with the factionalism and