Steve Coll Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Another important theme in your book is the consequences of external intervention, but most importantly, the way these interventions affected the balance of power among the Islamic groups and the mixing of Arabs with Afghans, and so on, as part of this effort. The reason I raise this is because as I read your book, I see one possible heroic figure in that book, and it's the head of the Northern Alliance, Massoud, who basically loses out because he can't get the support at the right time and in the right amount from the external actors who are playing this great game. Talk a little about that.
He was the most effective indigenous guerilla leader during the anti-Soviet years and then during the 1990s, as well, and he continued to be an effective military commander. He was a charismatic figure; he was a very successful military tactician. Uunlike many other radical leaders in the Afghan resistance who were clients of the Pakistan Intelligence Service, Massoud was able to build a broader, and more diverse, and more deeply rooted political coalition in the north, and he was able to acquire power by sharing it. He worked to build up sustainable political organizations on the ground in Afghanistan. That made him differ from most of the other warlords and fighters.
But as the Soviets prepared to leave, he found himself engaged in a war within the war against the Pakistani Intelligence Service and its principle client, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was a close ally of Osama bin Laden. Massoud struggled to convince the Americans -- anyone who would listen to him -- that this conflict that was unfolding between his organization and Hekmatyar and the Pakistani Intelligence Service was not just an internecine dispute or a grab for power, that it was a battle for the character of post-war Afghanistan, post-Soviet Afghanistan, and that the United States ought to recognize that Massoud didn't want to be dictator of all the land, he wanted partners around the country, but he could not co-exist with the radical clients that Pakistani Intelligence was supporting.
He was right. Pakistani Intelligence was hostile to him and was seeking his destruction. They supported Hekmatiar in this war within the war in the early nineties. And as you say, the United States, as much out of passivity as out of deliberation, endorsed this program of the Pakistani Intelligence Service, and by both direct and indirect action essentially endorsed the policy of promoting Hekmatiar as the instrument and the vehicle for post-Soviet Afghanistan. And that was never a decision that any Cabinet of the United States would have sat around and made deliberately, but it was a consequence of this hands-off approach and this alliance with the Pakistan army that he built up during the eighties.
As you look back at this history -- and I heartily recommend that everybody watching this program actually read the book, because you can't put it down -- is there one or two turning points, do you think, that would have made a difference? You orchestrate an analysis that shows us the personality, shows us the intelligence agency, shows us the domestic politics of these places with their global implications. Are there any one or two key turning points where things might not have gone where they went?
I'd identify two. One was the decision to disengage from Afghanistan after the Soviets left, and the failure of the United States to take the risks and make the uncertain investments that would have been required to attempt to build a moderate, sustainable, centrist Afghan politics in the post-Soviet rubble that would have been more consonant with American interests in the regions, but also would have completed the moral participation of the United States with the Afghan resistance to try to help them finish their project. In effect, what was being discussed at that time was an alliance of the northern groups led by Massoud, moderate Pashtun royalists like the Karzai family, and exiled intellectuals. It was the same group that was put together in Bonn in November of 2001, when the world desperately needed a centrist Afghan government and had to figure out how to cobble one together. They put together the same group that was being discussed in '92 and '93.
The United States essentially decided, "We don't want to get involved in that project, we're not sure it's going to work." It might not have worked, to be fair, but we didn't really attempt it. We weren't prepared to make the investments or to take the political and diplomatic risks that would have been necessary to try to build that kind of a center. So, that was a missed opportunity. If it had succeeded, Afghanistan would never have been ruled by the Taliban, bin Laden would never have found sanctuary there, and he might not have ever been able to develop the global ambitions that he did.
The second turning point perhaps comes a little bit later, in '96, '97, as the Taliban rises to power in Afghanistan and starts to make these claims on national power in Afghanistan, as essentially a totalitarian organization that is an expression of the ambitions of the Pakistan army to control Afghanistan. The United States might have challenged the Taliban more directly and more robustly than it did. I don't mean invade Afghanistan but simply recognize that the Taliban was unacceptable as an instrument of governance in Afghanistan and work with international partners to isolate, weaken and essentially push it out of the throne. Instead, we passively accepted the Taliban and through a variety of policies, including support for an oil pipeline project that was never likely to succeed but which dominated policy debate and degraded American policy in the region. We accepted the Taliban and helped to give them the space that they needed to consolidate their grip and to build the alliance with bin Laden and al Qaeda that made both of them such formidable partners by the end of the 1990s.
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