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Chaos theory
Descent into Chaos: How the war against Islamic extremism is being
lost
By Ahmed Rashid
Allen Lane, 2008, £25
Reviewed by Sean Figg
IN 2003 the World Bank described 17 states as
‘failing’. This figure rose to 26 in 2008. In Descent into Chaos, Ahmed
Rashid looks at the events and processes that have taken Pakistan,
Afghanistan and ex-Soviet Central Asia to the point of collapse. Across
the region, the rise of right-wing political Islam has introduced an
explosive new factor into society. Rashid’s book is a detailed study of
a complicated area of the world, blending history, current affairs and
political analysis in the region since 9/11.
Despite being published a few months before the
November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Rashid gives valuable insight
into the background of the atrocity. The attacks escalated tensions
between Pakistan and India. Initially, many Indian authorities alleged
Pakistani military involvement. Whether this was based on any evidence
or was merely for domestic propaganda purposes is unclear at this stage,
but the Pakistani military has a long history of collusion with
right-wing Islamic groups. Rashid describes this ‘military-mullah
alliance’ in detail. It makes for terrifying reading. The secretive
Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), described as ‘a
state within a state’, has frequently used right-wing Islamist groups as
proxies in pursuit of foreign policy objectives. Historically, this
regional strategy has included the destabilisation of India in order to
extend control over Kashmir.
The conflict between India and Pakistan traces its
roots to the partition of the countries in 1947 by the retreating
British empire. Which country Kashmir should be part of was left
unresolved. Recent years have seen no abatement in this conflict.
Pakistan’s former president, Pervez Musharraf, shortly before coming to
power in 1999, led a military incursion into Indian-controlled Kashmir
seeking to occupy strategic hilltops. Later in 1999, ISI-backed Kashmiri
Islamists hijacked an Indian passenger airliner using the crew and
passengers as hostages to barter for the release of imprisoned fighters
in India. In 2001-02, over 800 people lost their lives during
parliamentary elections in Kashmir in car bombings and shootings carried
out by ISI-backed Islamic groups. Although Musharraf officially banned
these Kashmiri groups in 2002, the ISI quietly reorganised them under
different names. Rashid describes how "Musharraf… followed a continuous
policy of brinkmanship by using extremists in the belief that they could
force India to the negotiating table".
However, Rashid describes how India followed a
similar policy, effectively "a non-stop proxy war, funding and arming
dissidents in each other’s territory". In Pakistan, Rashid accuses the
ISI of letting "the Islamic genie out of the bottle", now threatening
the very existence of Pakistan. The ISI’s intention was to use Islamist
groups as pawns in pursuit of Pakistani state interests. But, once in
existence, these groups formed links between themselves and developed
their own regional strategy. Details are given of how al Qaeda would
train ISI-backed Kashmiri groups in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border
areas before sending them back to Kashmir with a new outlook of ‘global
jihad’, including the overthrow of the ‘apostate’ Musharraf.
In the 2002 election in Pakistan, the ISI and
military, through intimidation and rigging, allowed a six-party alliance
of Islamic fundamentalists to sweep to power in Balochistan and the
North West Frontier Province, two provinces bordering Afghanistan. The
leading party in this alliance, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), had helped
launch the Afghan Taliban in 1994. Following the US invasion of
Afghanistan, these parties allowed the Taliban and al Qaeda to regroup
and use the provinces they administered as a base of operations. In
Rashid’s words, the area became the world’s ‘terrorism central’.
Rashid says that "some of these [ISI] officers,
deeply religious and vociferously anti-American, considered themselves
more Taliban than the Taliban… an organisation that had trained and
motivated hundreds of its officers to support extremist Islamic factions
in Afghanistan and Kashmir for two decades could not be expected to
change its views overnight".
Despite trying to play all sides, Musharraf was the
victim of several assassination attempts by Islamic groups in 2007 and
2008. Rashid argues that these attempts had to have had military
collusion at some level. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto was a
further striking example of the growing confidence of Pakistani
Islamists. "It was clear that the ISI no longer controlled the monster
of extremism it had created, while the army’s rank and file was becoming
susceptible to the extremist propaganda and recruitment, threatening the
very institution that laid claim to be the guardian of the country".
A crucial turning point Rashid describes came with
the Red Mosque crisis in 2008. (The ‘Red Mosque’ is actually an area
covering dozens of city blocks.) Although backed by the ISI since 1984
as a training ground for fundamentalists, one group used the area to
launch an uprising in Islamabad demanding the implementation of sharia
law in Pakistan. This led to a siege that lasted days before being
bloodily put down by the army. Rashid argues that "the government’s
inept handling of the crisis was a turning point for al Qaeda, Pakistani
Taliban, and other extremist groups, who now joined together and vowed
to topple the government and create an Islamic state… al Qaeda’s forces
also shifted from Afghanistan to Pakistan, where it saw a demoralised
army, a terrified citizenry, and an opportunity to destabilise the
state".
Socialists give no support to the reactionary aims
of right-wing political Islam. Rashid quotes Akram Durrani of JUI: "we
believe that God pre-arranged food and clothing for every man or woman
he created. If we give up the ways of God and devise our own solutions
to perceived problems we may land in trouble". The anti-working class,
right-wing political agenda is clear even if it is garbed in religious
phraseology.
Rashid does not hide his own politics. He is
scathing of the US role in the region, particularly in Afghanistan.
However, this is not from an anti-imperialist standpoint, quite the
opposite. Rashid’s main complaint is that the US has not done enough to
mould the region through an adequate policy of ‘nation building’. Pages
of his book detail the double-dealing of US covert operations, support
for military dictators and Islamic fundamentalists in pursuit of US
interests, and at the expense of the masses of the region.
Despite knowing this, Rashid seems outraged that,
since its ‘re-engagement’ with the region after 9/11, the US is not
living up to its own rhetoric of spreading ‘freedom and democracy’. What
did he expect? Rashid calls on US and NATO forces to do more. When
lambasting the US strategy in Afghanistan, Rashid outlines alternative
strategies he feels imperialism should have adopted. These would have
included deploying tens of thousands more troops on the ground earlier
and maintaining them there until ‘stability’ was achieved. Rashid does
not consider that an occupation army could itself be a destabilising
factor and part of the problem, not the solution.
A major criticism Rashid makes of the Afghan
government under Hamid Karzai is that he refused to set up a political
party to build up his own power base, leading to what Rashid sees as a
weak government. Rashid’s remarks are very telling of his politics. He
says: "I constantly berated Karzai for his failure to understand the
usefulness of political parties and that a parliament without parties
was not democracy".
What would the programme of this party be? It’s
constituency? Rashid does not even raise these as issues for
consideration. For Rashid, a political party is a top-down project about
building personal patronage. One suspects these views have something to
do with his class background. For Rashid, the only forces for change in
the region could be the US and local elites. On many occasions he
describes his friendships and acquaintances with figures such as Karzai
and Bhutto. His, now lost, hope was that "Bhutto and Karzai, working
together, would have formed a team committed to combat extremism".
The key to a stable future in the region lies with
another force that is potentially more powerful than US imperialism and
right-wing political Islam. That force is the working class, united
across borders, with its own regional strategy. The working class of
countries such as Iran, Pakistan and India are potentially enormously
powerful. That is not to say that the development of strong workers’
parties in these countries would be easy. Repressive military
governments, terrorism, intimidation, poverty and suffering all make
working-class organisation a dangerous and difficult task. Even though
Rashid is blind to these possibilities, the book is still immensely
informative, detailed and well researched and will give anyone an
excellent knowledge of the complicated processes at work in this region
of the world.
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