The other battle for Kabul

By Pran Chopra

IN THE past few days, a play about Afghanistan has been on view in and out of Kabul. It is a miniature version of two much bigger dramas which were acted out in 1944-45. A common theme runs through the three, that large scale political calculations can displace military calculations.

In the closing phase of the Second World War in Europe, the Red Army broke through the German border and raced on to Berlin. This worried the Allied armies which were at that time busy in western and southern Germany, and they also wheeled round to head for Hitler's capital, because each side wanted to make sure it would not be left out of the city which had become the citadel of Europe. The first shots were then fired in what soon became ``The Struggle for Europe'', to quote the title of Chester Wilmot's fascinating book, published in 1951. That struggle is only now dying down (if it is) half a century later.

On the other side of the globe, American armies had practically brought Japan to its knees by that time, and according to many historians of that war complete victory could have been achieved with a few more weeks of conventional war. But a political task had to be accomplished first: to make a field trial of the ultimate weapon so that all future contenders for power could also be warned off. So a million Japanese lives and the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had to be sacrificed, and one particular contender was later named by Churchill quite clearly in his Fulton speech when he said ``matters must be brought to a head with the Soviet Union before they too have the nuclear bomb''.

What has all that to do with tiny little Kabul? A lot, because the implications of the Kabul drama ripple out into the politics of Pakistan and Central Asia, into the role of the United Nations, into the honeymoon between America and Russia, and into the future oil map of the world. All the strands of this drama go round and round Kabul, tying up the military battle for Kabul with the political calculations of other battles for it.

Since one of America's top aims has been to see the Taliban Government thrown out of Kabul, it should have been happy when the Northern Alliance swept down from the mountains and got ready to do just that. But America directed it not to enter Kabul. Why? An answer for a time was that the directive was only a sop for Pakistan, which was nervous about the anti-Taliban Alliance ruling a next door neighbour.

But that answer faded when America initiated serious moves in the U.N. to block the formation of a Government by the Alliance. Its probable reason: America has invested in new-found friends in Uzbekistan, while the fighting arm of the Alliance is inspired by the charisma of the quintessential Tajik, the late Ahmad Shah Masood. The Uzbeks have drawn closer to America because lately they have been suspicious of Russia, while the Tajik force is backed by Russia (and behind that by India.)

America would also have calculated that once the victorious Alliance came to power in Kabul it would take the bit between its teeth, or else the same tribal disorder would recur as had forced the American oil giant, Unocol to write off the millions of dollars it had invested in a pipeline through Afghanistan to the new oil wealth discovered in Central Asia. So why not opt immediately for a pliable Government under the aging Pashtun king, Zahir Shah, strengthen it with European and American backing, and give it legitimacy by putting it in the Afghan seat in the U.N. General Assembly?

But these calculations have run straight into some political realities, local, national, international. The present occupant of the U.N. seat has been there for two decades, representing a country which is a full-fledged member of the U.N., and recognised to be so by many countries. He continued to occupy it when his Government had lost most of the country and its capital, Kabul. How is he to be replaced now when his Government has regained most of the country and the capital, and when an assertive, vigilant and veto-wielding Russia has already declared that the Alliance is the legitimate Government, and the Alliance has questioned the right of any country to send troops into Afghanistan without its permission?

If a tussle ensues now between Russia and America within the U.N. on this issue, it will only further heat up a very large and friction-prone issue which has already cropped up, involving competing Russian and U.S. interests in the Afghanistan region. This concerns the vast new sources of oil which have been lately discovered in Central Asia. The sources themselves come under clearly defined national jurisdictions about which there is no dispute. But American and other Western companies have quickly built financial stakes around them, and are now being advised to fence out Russia and Iran.

They are planning and building a system of pipelines in an East- West land corridor which runs north of Iran, south of Russia, mostly through Central Asian states, across the Caspian Sea and Black Sea, and thus into the lucrative oil markets of Turkey and Europe. There should be nothing wrong with that, except that one of the aims of system is being clearly stated to be what is bound to arouse tempers in Moscow, Teheran and Riyadh. This aim has been only mildly stated by the Caspian Studies Programme at Harvard, which says America should loosen ``OPEC tentacles'' and resist ``political blackmail'' by Saudi Arabia by getting more Caspian oil, and also to ``by-pass Russia and Iran'' through the new pipelines.

But a study at the Woodrow Wilson Centre is much more explicit, and offensive towards Moscow and Teheran. In a report published in September it says ``the United States has important political and strategic stakes in the Caspian region'' but the countries of the region would ``remain vulnerable to Russia's hegemonic impulses'' and therefore they must build ``close, substantive relations with the West... independent of their huge neighbours to the north and south'', that is Russia and Iran. Their ``dependence on Russian pipelines would be dangerous''.

Similarly, it says ``Kazhakstan would be ill-advised to entrust its energy security to Iran''. To reinforce the point it adds ``a major role for American companies'' had ``contained Iran's regional influence at a time when that country's policies were particularly anti-American''.

These rivalries, of course, are not new. They antedate the jostling for power which is now going on in Kabul for control over Afghanistan, and they began separately and from different causes. But they interact very closely with the long term interests of Russia and America in this region, and are therefore very relevant to the latest Afghan drama. In what manner and how far they will influence the power balance in the Caspian corridor or to the south or the north of it may not be known as yet. But they are fuelling and are being fuelled by the current military and political battle for Afghanistan.

The battle against the Taliban has given America a promising military presence right next to Afghanistan, in Uzbekistan, which it is seeking to enlarge and prolong. On the political plane, the hope of the Northern Alliance, now re-named United Front, that it will become the new ruler of Afghanistan, has now been matched by moves for a ``provisional authority'' to take over the country under the U.N. flag and in the name of law and order. If the Alliance could not be stopped at the gates of Kabul, why not confine it within Kabul?

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