Hindu Vivek Kendra
A RESOURCE CENTER FOR THE PROMOTION OF HINDUTVA
   
 
 
«« Back
HVK Archives: Taliban's pedigree

Taliban's pedigree - The Observer

Nikhil Chakravartty ()
9 October 1996

Title : Taliban's pedigree
Author : Nikhil Chakravartty
Publication : The Observer
Date : October 9, 1996

The lightening occupation of greater part of Afghanistan
by the new Muslim fanatic army of the Talibans has not
only come as a surprise for political observers but has
thrown a serious challenge to the stability of the entire
region. The Taliban is known to have been reared, armed
and funded by the hard core of the Pakistani army, namely
the ISI which is under the control of the Pentagon. In
other words, the Taliban militia is the product of the US
military strategists who operate via Pakistan.

This has been the route of the US strategic expansionists
since the early days of this century. Earlier the Cen-
tral Asian region was one of the major theatres of opera-
tion for the imperial strategists of Britain when it was
at the zenith of its power between the two World Wars.
The political department of the British government in
Delhi guided and controlled all the operations, overt and
covert, in Central Asia. One of the star operators in
this business was Sir Olaf Caroe, who master-minded many
of the operations in the region as part of the so-called
Great Game that the Czarist and the British empires
fought out for grabbing Central Asia.

In Afghanistan itself, when in the 20s King Amanullah
initiated far-reaching reforms for modernising his coun-
try, the British imperial power was scared because its
was afraid that Afghanistan might pass out of its control
as the reforms in Afghanistan might infect the neighbour-
ing region in the north-west frontier. What the political
department of the British Indian Government managed to do
was to stir up a tribal revolt against Amanullah, which
engulfed Afghanistan in a bloody civil war which over-
threw the regime of reforms and brought the country back
into the fold of tribal fanaticism. That was a classic
example of a great power using backward-looking fanatics
to overturn a regime which had taken to the path of
modernism. So much for the so-called modernisation
mission of British imperialist system about which some of
our scholars are still so much excited about.

About the same time, the British imperialist operators
like Olaf Caroe were busy in Central Asia. The Czarist
power having collapsed, the new Bolshevik regime in
Moscow was spreading revolutionary reforms in all parts
of the Czarist Empire. In Central Asia, this Bolshevik
drive took the form of land reforms and destruction of
feudal and tribal domination and onrush of social modern-
ism, such as the drive for literacy and the emancipation
of women. Inevitably, this was sought to be resisted by
the conservative forces, and in the civil war that ensued
in the 20s in Central Asia, Olaf Caroe and his operators
backed the tribal forces with arms and finance. One such
case was revolt of the Basmachi tribal chiefs, a Moslem
fanatic tribal group whom the British agents helped for
nearly ten years until the Basmachi revolt was quelled in
the 30s by the Soviet authorities.

By the time the Second World War ended, the British
imperial designs in the Central Asian region had to face
new problems. One of these was the rise of the forces of
liberation in the Indian empire led by the Indian Nation-

al Congress. Realising that the old imperial system
could no longer be maintained in the same form as before,
the Think Tanks of British imperial power started with
the idea of partitioning India, with the hope that at
least the main base of their imperial operation in Cen-
tral Asia, could be kept safe and away from the rest of
India which was destined to go under the control of the
Congress. The first maps of partitioning India and
keeping the north west away from the hands of the nation-
alist forces, appeared in 1944, and the author of this
partition design was a well-known Professor of Colonial
history, Coupland (who incidentally had later been as-
signed the job of drawing up the partition map of Pales-
tine to make room for Israel).

The British design behind the partitioning of the Indian
subcontinent was to have in the strategically sensitive
north western region, a regime which would be politically
pliable for the purpose of its own imperial operations
beyond its borders. The British plans however could not
materialise because by the end of the war, the British
imperial power had lost its hegemony, having to yield
place to the USA.

It is worth noting that Olaf Caroe who was the chief
British operator in the region, actually went to Washing-
ton to hand over all the sensitive papers for operations
in this region extending from Peshawar to Tashkent.
Incidentally, he dedicated his well known book on the
Pathans to Iskandar Mirza who pioneered the overthrow of
civilian rule in Pakistan, ushering in military dictator-
ship. It is about this time that the Generals of Pakis-
tan led by Ayub Khan struck the long range deal with the
Pentagon, by which not only did Pakistan chose to join
the US military alliance network but let Pakistan be one
of the key operation theatres of the Cold War. As part
of this deal, the US set up its huge military base at
Peshawar.

When in the 70s, there were internal convulsions within
Afghanistan, the US-Pakistan military complex was already
alert and helped to intensify the conflict. When in
1979, the Soviet troops in a foolhardy bid pushed into
Afghanistan, the US came out openly to send arms and
finances to the Afghan guerrilla bands trained in Pakis-
tan. This was the beginning of the operations which
helped at the outset the Afghan mujahideen groups par-
ticularly Hekmatyar, the Pathan leader. On the Pakistan
side, the operation became the exclusive charge of the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which has the closest
links with the Pentagon, quite autonomous of whoever may
be ruling in Islamabad. The ISI manages all the overt
and covert operations in the region extending from Kash-
mir to Kabul.

After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the mujahi-
deen groups insisted on bringing down the Najibullah
government in Kabul. However, the ISI and its masters
were not satisfied with the coalition of mujahideen
groups in Kabul, and they set up the aggressive fanatics
of the Talibans. These have been generously helped with
finance and arms - even heavy and sophisticated arms -
which ISI could only secure with the clearance from
Pentagon.

The menacing spectre of Taliban is the gift of the Penta-

gon-backed ISI to the entire region. It is palpably
bigoted, trying to set up a political system reminiscent
of the days of tribal rule. It is indeed revealing that
the official Washington comment on the capture of Kabul
by Taliban has been that the Taliban might bring stabili-
ty to Afghanistan. In other words, Washington with its
flamboyant rhetoric in defence of human rights, has no
compunction in backing an upstart regime of political
gangsters and barbaric fanatics to destroy all possibili-
ties of normal political development in Afghanistan.
Such is the measure of the commitment of US Administra-
tion to fundamentalism for its global strategic impera-
tives.



Back                          Top

«« Back
 
 
 
  Search Articles
 
  Special Annoucements