LETTERS Afghan consensus
Sir: 'There will be a bloodbath when the Russians go,' one hears from all sides in the wake of Mikhail Gorbachev's recent noises. The mujahedin have indeed drawn up a list of 1,000 communists whom they advise to pack up and go with the Russians, or face punishment for their crimes. These people will surely be prudent enough to escape.
There might still be a civil war in Afghanistan, but not for the reasons your correspondent states (Thomas S. Arms, `The Afghan vacuum', 13 February). Mr Arms argues that when the Russians with- draw, Afghanistan might be taken over by the proxies of the Ayatollahs from Teher- an, and in place of a communist Afghanis- tan, we will get a fundamentalist one, which will be just as inimical to Western interests.
Mr Arms is barking up the wrong tree. The Shi'ite minority which he regards as the source of threat to Afghanistan's stabil- ity comprises at most ten per cent of the population of Afghanistan and has no means of extending its influence over the rest. Among the Sunni majority the Islamic clergy has the status of village craftsmen it is not organised into a disciplined hierar- chy such as the one which allowed Khomeini to consolidate power. The Ira- nians are now resented for the way they have treated the refugees on their territory and restricted the resistance's war effort. This, plus Afghan nationalism and the memory of centuries of defiance against Persian influence, should do the rest in thwarting the threat from Teheran which he fears.
Afghanistan is not a nationally homogeneous country like Iran, but a confederation of ethnic groups in which politics is made through extended family networks, the tribal structure, and patron- age. One night spent in an Afghan camp during a council would have persuaded Mr Arms that the Afghans have an ancient habit of the politics of consensus, not of democracy in our sense, but of settling their differences through bargaining based on the law of the Holy Koran. The only two forces that try not to play the tribal patronage game, and want to impose on the country a bureaucratic dictatorship, are the communists in Kabul and one of the parties in Peshawar, Gulba- din Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami. However, the latter has been sustained by money and weaponry from Washington and Islam- abad, not Teheran. Mr Hekmatyar's party might try to fight for power but my bet is that when the money runs out its influence will wane.
If the Russians withdraw — and that is still a very big `if — Afghanistan will probably slip back to being the backwater it was before they invaded, and will prob- ably have a weak central government based on the coalition of the traditional tribal chiefs and the newly elevated guerril- la commanders.
Afghanistan is not in itself strategically important and is not by itself capable of harming Western interests. Only the Soviet invasion, and the possibility that they might use its territory to manipulate events around the Gulf made it so. Instead of harping on about implausible threats, we should be thinking about ways in which we can help a nation which has suffered too much.
Radek Sikorski
42 Blenheim Crescent, London W11
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