Taliban has upped the ante

The assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, leader of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council and former President, is a grim reminder of the fact that a negotiated settlement in Afghanistan remains elusive. In particular, it should serve as a wakeup call to Western officials and analysts who have lately been rather optimistic about the prospects of the peace process. Their dominant response to the killing of Rabbani has been predictably trite: the assassination was aimed at derailing the quest for a settlement and that aim should not be allowed to succeed. But the assassination yet again underscores the need to secure the right background conditions for any serious attempt at a negotiated settlement.

Rabbani may not have been irreplaceable as the leader of the High Peace Council. He was, however, an inspired choice on the part of President Hamid Karzai. Born in 1940 in the northern Afghan province of Badakshan, Rabbani was an ethnic Tajik. As a young student of Islamic law and theology in Kabul University in the early 1960s, he was already spoken of as a rising intellectual of the incipient Islamist movement. He soon became an important member of the Jamiat-e-Islami — a party that was inspired by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and by the Jamiat-e-Islami of Pakistan. Rabbani’s early career reflected the intellectual and organisational currents of political Islam that were circulating in West Asia and would come to the fore in the late 1970s.
Following an abortive attempt at fomenting an uprising against the Afghan government in 1973, Rabbani was amongst the Islamist leaders who fled to Pakistan. To his surprise, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was quite happy to offer them shelter and support their efforts to destabilise the government of Afghanistan. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Jamiat-e-Islami became one of the key organisations waging “jihad” against the Red Army. Over the next decade, Rabbani worked closely with the Pakistani authorities and emerged as a prominent figure in the Tanzeemat, the umbrella organisation of the various Afghan jihadi groups.
Yet the Pakistan Army’s favourite Afghan was a Ghilzai Pashtun, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Hekmatyar and his Hezb-e-Islami were strongly backed by the ISI. In consequence, the Tanzeemat was unable to organise a peaceful transition of power after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In June 1992, Rabbani took over as the President of Afghanistan. But his government soon succumbed to factional fighting along ethnic lines. Although his term in office was scheduled to end in December 1994, the ongoing civil war enabled Rabbani to stay on. This was only a reprieve, for the Taliban soon rose as the major force in Afghanistan. Despite fleeing Kabul in 1996, Rabbani remained the internationally recognised head of the state and lobbied the major powers to support the Northern Alliance, against the Taliban. It was during these years that Rabbani cultivated ties with India.
Nevertheless, after the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001, he did not emerge as the favoured candidate to lead the new Afghan government. In the following years, the Jamiat-i-Islami established itself as one of the principal Opposition parties in the country. In choosing Rabbani to lead the High Peace Council, President Karzai roped in for the peace process one of his prominent political opponents as well as an old adversary of the Taliban, a recognised leader of the largest ethnic minority as well as a respected, elder Islamist. Rabbani did not enjoy the same political standing that he earlier did, but here was a figure whose life mirrored the turbulent contemporary history of Afghanistan. For all his limitations and flaws, Rabbani — like his fellow Tajik, Ahmad Shah Massoud — will be seen by posterity as an Afghan patriot.
Rabbani’s death is certainly a blow to Mr Karzai’s quest for a negotiated solution. Not least because it will harden the position of ethnic minority groups who already believe that the Taliban has little interest in a peace settlement. Recent developments indicate that their concerns are not unfounded. In the past few months, the Taliban has assassinated a number of senior Afghan officials as well as mounted audacious attacks on high-profile targets, including most recently on the US embassy in Kabul. American officials have publicly stated that this attack was orchestrated by the Haqqani network and that the latter had links with the Pakistan government. Alongside these attacks, the Taliban has also expressed its willingness to negotiate — provided all Western forces leave Afghanistan. In short, the Taliban is upping the ante.
The success of any effort to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table without preconditions will depend on two key factors. First, the insurgent fighters and their leaders on the ground will have to feel the operational pressure. As of now, this happens only sporadically. Unless the Afghan security forces are capable of stepping up operationally, sustained pressure cannot be brought to bear on the insurgents. Second, Pakistan must be coaxed or compelled to turn the heat on the Quetta Shura led by Mullah Omar and the Haqqanis. This is not at all easy. In the wake of the embassy attack, Washington has reportedly asked the Pakistan Army to get its act together. But there is no reason to assume that the Pakistanis will oblige. Peace in Afghanistan seems as distant an objective as ever.

Srinath Raghavan is a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi