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COMMENTARY
December 7, 2011
Shifting away
We must have done our job well in Afghanistan, for the latest bombing horrors could not have been imagined before western intervention removed the Taliban and rearranged the country's ethnic loyalties and surviving feudal arrangements. Commentators are right to discern something new in this latest convolution of psychotic violence.New, at least, for Afghanistan; and apparently an export from Pakistan, where sectarian violence against members of the minority Shia and their shrines, compounded by the occasional Shia retaliation against Sunnis, has become a characteristic feature of national public life. A massive suicide bombing at the entrance to Kabul's famous Abul Fazl shrine left hundreds of religious celebrants dead, maimed, or traumatized. As well, a bicycle bomber struck a religious parade in Mazar-i-Sharif, adding a few more dozen casualties. In both cases the targets were Shia Muslims, celebrating Ashura, their holiest day. The Taliban promptly and convincingly denied any part in these atrocities. At least on the surface, the predominantly Pashtun Taliban cannot wish to incite "distracting" clashes with the mostly Hazara and Tajik followers of the Shia way of Islam. That is the sort of thing they do after their return to power; not before. From the previously received Afghan terrorist point-ofview, it is essential to maintain a common front between those terrorists nurtured in frontier Pakistan, and those nurtured in revolutionary Iran, since unity is required to displace Hamid Karzai's regime. But the game is made more subtle by the foreign sponsorships. For across the Middle East and Central Asia, the contest between Shia Iran, and the rising Sunni Islamists of the "Arab Spring," stokes conflict in a dimension previously invisible to western eyes. To us, Islamists have seemed all one force, and we grade them from "moderate" to "radical." But as election results in Tunisia and Egypt - and manoeuvring in Syria and Yemen - show, these are meaningless categories. In addition to the conflict between Islamism in the East, and the post-Christian West - focusing upon the western "proxy" of Israel - a devastating conflict emerges within the Muslim realms, between those who defer to Iranian leadership, and those looking instead to the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, or to Ankara or elsewhere for authority and a governing model. This is no simple question of Sunni versus Shia, for compounding sectarian differences within Islam, aspects of tribal, regional, and national identity are coming to the surface, after generations of outward peace. We see, writ rather larger, the sort of phenomena we saw in the Balkans during the disintegration of Yugoslavia, or at the fringes of the former Soviet Union - where ethnic rivalries successfully repressed by a totalitarian state suddenly spring back to life. In Iraq, the unintended consequence of demolishing Saddam Hussein's despicable regime was to expose all the ethnic and tribal fault lines within the country he had ruled. There, too, to this day, "conflict between Sunni and Shia factions" explains just one of several orders of malice upon which Saddam's greater malice once sat. To understand this is to understand that really, there is no such thing as a "purely religious" war. Contemporary western secular propaganda against religion in all forms has obscured this fundamental truth from us. War is about earthly power, and when the religious engage, it is to advance the power of their community against specific, hated rivals. Religious differences are subsumed with other differences on the front line; language, race, and the chance of booty invariably come into it; and the leadership of warring religious factions falls invariably into the hands of intensely worldly men. So in Afghanistan. While the temptation, from this distance, to write off the country as a hopeless, "mediaeval" quagmire is understandable, the resolution of conflicts within Afghanistan is relevant to our prospects for peace. We need to grasp what interests are at stake, in a remote corner of the world where larger forces remain in play. Our troops made possible, over the last decade, a country in which girls could go to school, and religious minorities could celebrate their festivals publicly. At the same time, while superficially encouraging an unrealizable "democracy," we shifted domestic power back from the centralized tyranny we overthrew, to what we call "tribal warlords." These in turn have been adopted, inevitably, by transnational Islamist factions, which fill the power void we are now creating by calling our troops home. What we have just seen, I suspect, is the first round in a battle between Pakistani and Iranian revolutionary interests, that will render our old fear of the Taliban and al-Qaeda moot. We are in a new phase of intra-Islamic conflict, that will have repercussions far beyond Kabul, and ultimately threaten us in ways even less predictable than the hits on 9/11/01. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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