As UN-sponsored talks near Bonn, Germany this week attempt to create an interim government for a stable Afghanistan, Eden Naby, a historian and expert on Afghanistan, told an audience at Tufts last night that the country should not exist.
At a panel entitled "Regional Politics and the Fallout of the War in Afghanistan and Pakistan," Naby explained that Afghanistan's diversity is problematic.
Afghanistan's 25 million people do not speak a common language and are divided into more than ten ethnic groups. US President George W. Bush said he wants that diversity to characterize Afghanistan's political future. At the White House yesterday, spokesman Ari Fleischer told the Associated Press that Bush wants "to make certain that there is a multiethnic group that governs Afghanistan, and that includes women."
But this diversity, Naby argues, is reason enough to allow the country to split along ethnic lines. Naby, who co-authored Afghanistan: Mullah, Marx, and Mujahid, explained that the country was a product of colonial Britain and czarist Russia's territorial ambitions. The countries expanded their holdings to the north and south, respectively, and created Afghanistan as a buffer.
With imposed borders and the forced migration of the Pashtuns - the most populous of the country's ethnic groups - Afghanistan lost the ethnic unity that once defined it. Conflict spurred between the different factions, and according to Naby, any solution that does not involve fragmentation would not solve Afghanistan's problems.
But many of the ethnic groups in Afghanistan straddle borders with other countries and groups like the Pashtuns are divided throughout the region. There are 7.5 million Pashtuns in Afghanistan and 14 million in Pakistan, and Naby doubts that any solution could overcome this division.
Naby was one of three panelists at last night's forum, the first in a series of discussions sponsored by Tufts' Institute for Global Leadership and the Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC) program.
She spoke alongside Thomas Simons, the former US ambassador to neighboring Pakistan. "I was as much a representative as we had in Afghanistan," Simons said. By the time he became ambassador in 1996, the US embassy in Kabul has been closed for seven years.
Thomas Barfield, the chair of Boston University's anthropology department, completed the panel. Barfield wrote The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan: Pastoral Nomadism in Transition.
Simons and Barfield expressed more mainstream opinions on Afghanistan's future.
"Even though ethnic and regional cleavages have become much larger, no one wants to join together with neighboring countries," Barfield said. "As much as they don't like each other, they recognized the benefit of staying together." He added that ethnic nationalism, to which Naby had alluded, never took root in Central Asia.
He explained that a central government would help Afghanistan receive the foreign aid it needs to rebuild itself. "There has to be a central government to cash the checks," he said. Simons added that a certain degree of centralization would prevent the country from succumbing to civil war.
Barfield explained that because ethnic groups have strong local holds throughout Afghanistan, a central government would need the cooperation of the country's regions. The government would also need to be less centered on Kabul, the Afghan capital, than was the Taliban.
With a system of governance in place, Barfield said rebuilding would begin when warlords who profited from Afghanistan's 23-year civil war recognize more lucrative opportunities in rebuilding the country that conflict destroyed.
The new government would begin by reconstructing what was lost during Afghanistan's years of conflict - like roads - and building other infrastructure, such as electric grids, from scratch. Less than 15 percent of Afghanistan is served by power lines.
Much of the country's growth, Barfield predicted, will be fueled by returning Afghans, who emigrated to Iran and Pakistan.
"If there is reconstruction going on," he said, "I don't think you'll see people going back to their village to do agriculture."
"[Refugees] have the skills for reconstruction," he continued, and their return would spur urbanization in a country where four out of five people live in the countryside.
The economic benefits of a stable and unified Afghanistan are numerous, according to Barfield. Its location is ideal for a central Asian transport hub and with shaky relations between Iran and the west, Afghanistan is the next best option for a natural gas pipeline connecting resource-rich Turkmenistan with South Asia.
Small power-generating stations could be attached to the pipeline and provide electricity to the Afghan people. Royalties could also generate as much as $1 billion in government revenue. The figure - larger than any Afghan government has ever seen - would be particularly important since Afghanistan has historically relied on outside sources instead of taxation for revenue.
But Barfield noted that the pipeline would be a mere pipe dream unless Afghanistan achieves the stability Bush and other global leaders hope for.
Once the conflict in Afghanistan ends and nation rebuilding begins, Simons said the UN will take a crucial role in maintaining stability in the country, either with peacekeeping troops or national armies with a UN mandate. The US - as a party to the conflict which ended the Taliban's dominance - could not take charge.
Simons said the heightened foreign presence in the region could also benefit neighboring countries like Pakistan, a US ally in the war against terrorism, but home to significant anti-American sentiment and many Taliban sympathizers.
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan, as it is officially known, was established as a Muslim state in 1947, but the founders envisioned a country similar to India, with a western constitution. "But it never found a stable identity within that definition," Simons said.
But with the region now transforming, "Pakistan [has] the opportunity to go back to the ideals of the founders," he said. The country's future, Simons said, would depend on continuing international intervention in the region.
The EPIIC series continued last night with "Islam and Terrorism," a discussion with Harvard history professor Roy Mottahedeh and Geneive Abdo, a former correspondent for The Guardian of London who was stationed in Tehran, Iran.
Today, Alfred Rubin, a professor of international law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy will discuss terrorism and war in the context of international law. The series will continue into next week with several discussions about the future of Afghanistan and the surrounding region.
