The curse of a Kunduz martyr

"A thousand curses on you Ashraf Ghani and Stanekzai that you bloodied and covered in dust the people of Kunduz with your bombings....Hey people, share this message that since this afternoon the bombers of the dirty and unclean government have been killing, maiming and wounding the innocent people of Kunduz,” wrote Dr Ehsan Usmani on Facebook on the evening of October 3. He was killed eight hours later in the US airstrike that hit the hospital that was run by the Medecins Sans Frontieres.
Dr Ehsan Usmani’s desperately angry message cursing the Afghan president and the acting defence minister was carried in Alissa J Rubin’s report on October 5 in the New York Times. His charred remains along with those of three other doctors, seven staff member and 11 patients were recovered from the building. He and his colleagues had been working tirelessly to tend to over 400 people who had been critically injured in the fierce fighting since the fall of Kunduz to the Taliban on September 28.
After the catastrophic airstrike, Medecins Sans Frontieres announced that it was leaving Kunduz. In 2014 alone it had treated more than 22,000 patients and had performed 5,900 surgical procedures free of cost. The only losers will be the desperately poor people of the region.
The capture of Kunduz by the Taliban was a disaster waiting to happen. For the last several months the militants had been surreptitiously infiltrating into the northern provinces. This was even conceded in an interview on September 30 by the chief executive of the national unity government, Dr Abdullah Abdullah: “Kunduz was their focus from the beginning. The foreign terrorists – some Tajiks, Uzbeks, Uighurs, Chechens from all over – they were able to get to Kunduz. At that time Kunduz was not a hotspot. But we knew what was evolving, what was going to happen, because these terrorist groups had found their way there.”
If the Kabul regime was really aware of “what was going to happen” it did nothing to pre-empt the catastrophe. Instead, on the eve of the completion of his first year in office on September 28, President Ashraf Ghani told the BBC that his country’s relations with Pakistan were certainly not fraternal. There was nothing special about the Kabul-Islamabad equation, and, to drive home this point he added that Afghanistan’s relationship with Pakistan was no different from the bilateral ties between any two countries.
Within hours of this senseless interview, the Taliban stormed into Kunduz and their flag was hoisted in the city-centre. This was the first major town to be captured by them since their horrendous rule came to an abrupt end in the aftermath of 9/11 in December 2001. The Afghan forces were completely unprepared even though there had been warning signs aplenty.
The Taliban had attempted to take the city in September 2014 and again in April this year. Barely seven weeks earlier, a suicide bomber killed 29 people in Kunduz. Government troops were able to retake the city after a few days but only with the help of American Special Forces and bombardment of Taliban positions by US warplanes.
This was a Pyrrhic victory. Besides the loss of precious lives, it has exposed the weakness of the Afghan National Security Forces and demonstrated that the Taliban presence in Kunduz and other northern provinces has become progressively more menacing. For once the sensible voice through all this turmoil was that of Pakistan. The foreign secretary, who had accompanied the prime minister to New York for the UN General Assembly session, told the media, “Afghanistan is being run by a democratically elected and legitimate government and occupation of its territory by any group is unacceptable.”
In contrast, Afghanistan has always unfailingly blamed Pakistan for its own inability to ward off Taliban attacks. After the terrorist outrages in Kabul and Kunduz in early August, Ashraf Ghani came under pressure to abandon his policy of reaching out to Islamabad, and, wearing the shallow mask of affected affliction, he announced: “We hoped for peace, but war is declared against us from Pakistan territory...Our relation with Pakistan is based on our national interest on top of which comes security and safety of our people. If our people continue to be killed, relations lose meaning and I hope that will not happen.”
Despite being surrounded by hardliners, Ghani still held out the “hope” that Pakistan-Afghan relations would not be completely derailed. He also did not foreclose the possibility of reviving the dialogue with the Taliban, “We will make peace only with those who believe in the meaning of being a human, Muslim and Afghan and who do not destroy their own country on orders from foreign masters.”
Afghan intelligence has gone out on a limb with its venomous propaganda against Islamabad. As a consequence, public opinion has become increasingly hostile towards Pakistan. The former chief secretary of the North West Frontier Province (renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), Khalid Aziz, visited Kabul in September, and, during his interaction with young Afghans he asked them to summarise in a phrase their opinion about Pakistan. A student from Afghanistan University responded, “We hate you in the same manner as the Palestinians hate the Israelis!”
In August a member of the Afghan ulema council, Ahmed Gul, told hundreds of protestors that jihad (holy war) against the ISI and “Punjabi military” was legitimate. Around that time Abdul Jabbar Qaharman, a parliamentarian from Kandahar, said during a television talk show, “A lesson should be taught to the Pakistan ambassador as his country was promoting terrorism in Afghanistan.”
The threat cannot be brushed under the rug. It is serious and this is borne out from previous incidents. On September 6, 1995 the Pakistan embassy in Kabul was set ablaze by a 3000-strong mob that had been instigated by the Burhanuddin Rabbani junta. A Pakistan-based sanitary worker, who the attackers mistook for the ambassador, was killed. The defence attaché was stabbed several times and left bleeding on the floor in the mistaken belief that he had died. The ambassador and other members of the mission were seriously injured. The previous year the embassy was ransacked by hundreds of demonstrators who had been goaded on by Afghan intelligence.
What the Kabul regime has always been reluctant to concede is that many of the major terrorist incidents in Pakistan have emanated from Afghan soil. After Ashraf Ghani assumed office on September 29, 2014 there have been two devastating terrorist attacks in Pakistan – the merciless slaughter at the Army Public School in Peshawar on December 16, 2014 and the carnage at the air force base in Badaber on September 18, 2015. Although both were planned and coordinated from Afghanistan, Islamabad did not accuse Kabul of involvement in the hideous outrages. This is because Pakistan realises that there can be no winners in this futile blame game.
A strong and stable dispensation in Kabul is in Pakistan’s interest. But the writing on the wall is that Afghanistan is hurtling towards the jagged edge of a precipice. This is because of the intensification of the insurgency accompanied by the comatose state of its economy. The country generates a paltry $874 million in revenues while it needs $4.3 billion annually only to maintain its security forces.
Islamabad therefore has no option but to use whatever influence it may still have with the Taliban to persuade them to sort out their differences with the Afghan government at the negotiating table. If a stable dispensation is to be put in place it has to emerge through an Afghan consensus. Only then will the government in Kabul be able to take on the threat from splinter Taliban groups who are likely to merge with the so-called Islamic State.
To take on the challenge, national unity is desperately needed. But the joke currently doing the rounds in Kabul is that Afghanistan has seven presidents – Ashraf Ghani, Dr Abdullah, Ghani’s two deputies, Abdullah’s two deputies and the ubiquitous former president Hamid Karzai.
The writer is a rapper and assistant editor of Criterion quarterly.
Email: mikail.murshed@gmail.com