Afghanistan : The First Fault-line War

Contents: Prologue : the tragedy of short-term agendas. 1. Land bridge to Central Asia. 2. Patterns of historical change. 3. Soviet occupation and Afghan resistance. 4. Post-Soviet fragmentation on ethnic fault-lines. 5. Mono ethnic solutions: the Taliban's cheque book campaign autumn 1998. 6. Paradigm shift in the inner Asian geopolitical context: Afghanistan as a land bridge to Central Asia. 7. The systems approach: dynamics of regional and extra-regional powers interaction. 8. India: the quest for strategic frontiers. 9. End-game: an analysis. 10. Game strategies and rentier states. Epilogue: the model of rentier state collapse. Bibliography.

"The dominant paradigm of conflict today is based upon a clash of civilizations. These clashes are said to occur along the faultlines between the great civilizations. The world's first such faultline war, says Huntington, was the conflict in Afghanistan. It was the first clash of civilizations between a resurgent Islam and a Soviet Union in historical decline. Historically the "Rentier State" in Afghanistan has lacked an indigenous resource base for nation state formation. From the 15th century onwards, these have been extracted as loot from the neighbouring Indo-Gangetic Plains and Iran. In 1947-48 an Afghan Lashkar (led by Pakistani Army Officers in mufti) invaded the valley of Kashmir. In 1995-96 Pakistan raised another tribal Lashkar - the Taliban, this time for the conquest of Afghanistan itself. This attempted conquest of Afghanistan by the Jihad mafia in Pakistan, represents a significant shift in the subcontinental power paradigm. The ongoing faultline war in Afghanistan, however, has an even greater significance that goes beyond the South Asian region. It has a massive ripple effect in Central Asia (which is now a critical reservoir of oil and natural gas). The author contends that Afghanistan provides a horrific model of a rentier state collapse which could serve as a dangerous contagion for the Rentier Sheikhdoms of the middle east. The impact of this faultline war is now radiating outward to the West and the USA. In a typical boomerang effect, Osama Bin Laden and his middle eastern warriors of the Afghan Jihad blew up the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in Oct 98. A few days later the American Tomahawk missiles struck his Zahawar Killi bases in Afghanistan. Over 10.7 billion dollars worth of weapons have been pumped in this 'shatter zone' of collapse. The Jihad ideology radiating outwards from here threatens the very basic concept of Sovereign Nation states, coupled with narcotics, it is the most explosive commodity of export from a land laid waste by two decades of war. The boomerang effect may soon usher in the 'Talibanistan' of Pakistan itself. Pakistan today is a state hovering on the brink of an economic collapse. That, for the first time, could create the chilling possibility of nuclear weapons in the hands of non-state actors like Osama Bin Laden." (jacket)

[Col. G.D. Bakshi is an Alumni of the National Defence Academy and the Defence Services Staff College. His books include An Indian Military Revival, Mahabharata : A Military Analysis, War in the 21st Century and Soldiers in the Sun and Snow.]