The Hazaras and the Afghan State by Ibrahimi Niamatullah;

Author:Ibrahimi, Niamatullah;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: C. Hurst and Company (Publishers) Limited
Published: 2018-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

The rise and fall of the Shura illuminates many aspects of the complex dynamics of war, politics and foreign influences in Afghanistan. As an indigenous proto-state, the Shura achieved some significant success. It provided services to the people under its control, although they were very limited and not very efficient. It exercised some degree of control over its territories, although indirectly and through local strongmen. It built a military structure that was weak and dependent on the charisma of a few semi-independent military commanders. Despite these shortcomings, the organisation somehow managed to function even in the absence of substantial external support, which had been a key historical feature of the Afghan state since the reign of Abdur Rahman Khan (1880–1901).

The Shura might well have survived much longer had it not been for its greatest shortcoming, the failure of its diplomacy to attract foreign assistance. In this respect, it was badly outclassed by its radical challengers. The decision of Iranian and Pakistani officials to channel their assistance to the more radical Shi’a and Sunni organisations was probably by far the most important single cause of collapse of indigenous organisations such as the Shura. The Shura ended up having to rely on the collection of religious taxes, which contributed to weakening its legitimacy.

Besides the conflicts and rivalries among various Hazara elites, the Shura also demonstrates the role of ethnicity in the early years of war and violence in Afghanistan. While in its rhetoric the Shura emphasised Islamic and national solidarity, the fact that it became an almost exclusively Hazara organisation demonstrates the role of ethnicity as a major fault-line of Afghanistan’s politics before neighbouring countries such as Iran and Pakistan could exploit such social divisions. Thus, foreign influences in radicalisation and ethnicisation of Afghanistan’s politics in subsequent years must be seen as an additional layer of a complex web of Afghanistan’s own past and new problems in subsequent years.

In the internal politics of the Hazaras, the Shura’s withdrawal from Waras, its headquarters, in autumn 1984 marked the collapse of the Shura as the Interim Islamic state, the marginalisation of the traditionalist pro-Kho’i ulema and the khans, and rise of the Islamist groups to power. The destabilisation that followed resulted in a protracted civil war among the competing Hazara mujahedin organisations, which is the subject of the next chapter.

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