An unlikely martyr

To say that the Taliban assassin who exploded a bomb packed in his turban blew away chances of a settlement in Afghanistan by killing Burhanuddin Rabbani is an understatement. Afghans wouldn’t see this is as a mere assassination of a man trying to broker peace. It was, more importantly, a Pashtun assassin who killed himself to eliminate the most widely respected leader among the Tajiks and the Hazaras — the large minorities in north and west Afghanistan who led the Northern Alliance’s war against the Pashtun-controlled Taliban.Thisnarrative will deal a sledgehammer blow to ethnic relations in Afghanistan whereno one trusts anyone. It will make it very difficult for President Hamid Karzainow to be seen as a leader of not just Pashtuns, but someone who can also betrusted by the Uzbeks and Tajiks.There were hundreds of people onthe street where Rabbani lived the day after he was killed. They were waving hispictures and chanting for peace, some perhaps even mourning his demise. During asimilar autumn, 15 years back, there were people on the streets of Kabul toowhen Rabbani was fleeing. But these people were welcoming the murderous mullahs,whose darting, kohl-lined eyes would be busy for the next five years, spottinganything un-Islamic to order its destruction. For all the eulogies that arepouring out now, Kabul had perhaps never been as unsafe as it was when Rabbanipresided for four years over a ragtag government of warlords who constantlychanged sides and switched loyalties. Yet, it was a time when he and the othermujahideen leaders were being lavishly rewarded by the West for defeating theSoviet invaders and overthrowing a pro-communist government.Roadmapsto peace in Afgha-nistan have met their end in the paper-shredder mostly becausesince the days of the Great Game, ethnic fault lines have been deepened bystrategic and geopolitical interests. No overarching central authority has hadtime to embed itself.Add to this cocktail the ISI and the Pakistanmilitary’s obsession with using jihadis in its battles, and you have aholy mess far removed from any blueprint that the US has for Afgha-nistan. Whilethe Taliban want to entrench this and reject any notion of a centralised modernstate, the minorities view any imposition of a foreign structure withsuspicion.The most high-profile assassination since the US-ledinvasion in 2001 also proves that the Taliban are loath to change theirmurderous ways, with the remote very much in the military HQ in Rawalpindi.Their worldview hasn’t changed since the mid-1990s when anything that camein the way of absolute Shariat-Pashtunwali rule was to be destroyed. There wasnever room for negotiation then and, it seems, there is none now.Thesoft-spoken Rabbani with his scholarly demeanour knew the Taliban weredangerous. After all, he has been a prime target since the weeks ahead of theSeptember 1996 storming of Kabul when his presidency ended. It was brave of himto come back into the political floodlights and agree to help Karzai negotiatewith the Taliban and head the High Peace Council last year. And even inKabul’s most secure area, he must have known he wasn’t safe afterlast week’s siege of the US embassy, barely a kilometreaway.Rabbani had been in seclusion mostly since Kabul fell. He hadfled in a cavalcade of tanks and armoured cars, organised by the NorthernAlliance’s top general Ahmad Shah Massoud, to the Tajik fighter’sstronghold about 30 km north of Kabul. From there, he had taken a chopper to thenon-descript town of Taloquan on the Afghan-Tajikistan border, close toBadakshan, his home pro-vince. Here he mostly lived since then, guarded by onlyhis most trusted guards in an anonymous high-walled compound.I wasallowed a visit after persuading Tajik commanders weeks after the Talibanconquest of Kabul and got what would be the first interview with him asex-president. Here he sat under an Afghan flag on a couch with armed guardsringing him, yet still spoke of negotiating with the Taliban if they snappedtheir links with Pakistan. "We want Taliban to have their own decision-makers,"he told me. He also displayed no rancour against Mohammad Najibullah, thepro-Russia president who was toppled by the mujahideen but allowed to live inKabul where the Taliban killed him. Rabbani described how he had asked thecommunist leader to flee with him, but the invitation was turned down.Najibullah was dragged out of the UN compound in Kabul, killed and his corpsehung from a post outside the presidential palace for two days.LikeNajibullah believed the Taliban wouldn’t kill him because he wasn’tpart of Rabbani’s interim government, did Rabbani also believe the Talibanwould reform? That a man claiming to carry a message from the Quetta Shura, theTaliban’s controlling body, was allowed in without frisking indicateseither a betrayal of trust or plain stupidity. Every Tajik guard knows howMassoud was killed by an assassin posing as a TV journalist with bombs packed inhis camera.On balance, the assassination proves again that theTaliban believe that in the post-9/11 invasion, they might have lost a battle,but politically they’re very much around fighting to control Afghanistanagain. And even 71-year-old wobbly politi-cians opposed to them must bemethodically eliminated.