Fall from grace

Kesava Menon

WHEN the U.S. administration began mapping out its strategy against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, after the September 11 attacks, it was clear that it believed support from Saudi Arabia was indispensable. Now that the campaign in Afghanistan has entered an end-game situation of sorts,

Washington probably regards the need for Saudi support as immaterial as the role the Kingdom can play in the unfolding situation. To an extent, this development does affect the Kingdom's importance in the U.S. scheme of things.

If not from the time of the Saur Revolution in Afghanistan in 1978 then most definitely from the time of the Soviet invasion a year later, Saudi Arabia had been a key element of the U.S.- engineered coalition on the Afghan question.

This coalition could not really be said to have collapsed after the withdrawal of the Soviet army a year later though the U.S. did (as the Pakistanis say) walk away from the Afghan problem.

But if the U.S. suddenly dropped interest in Afghanistan it did not oppose the policy pursued by other coalition members such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. In fact the U.S. behaviour as these two coalition partners went about moulding Afghanistan according to their desires could, at its most negative, be described as benign neglect.

There are also reasons to believe that the U.S. silently supported the joint Saudi-Pakistani efforts to foist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar at first and then the Taliban on the Afghan people - Washington's failure to seriously condemn the anti-women and anti-minority policies of the Taliban is an indicator of its complicity.

The September 11 events, of course, changed the entire U.S. thinking on the Taliban, Al-Qaeda etc. In this new phase of ``with us or against'', the Saudis had to quickly disown their proteges in Afghanistan even to the extent of breaking off diplomatic relations.

But some of the myths created over the 1990s persisted. Among these was the notion that the Saudi monarchy, given its special status in the Muslim world due to its custodianship of the Two Holy Mosques, had to be brought on board on any issue pertaining to the Muslim world.

The second notion, both independent of and corollary to the first, was that Saudi wisdom would be indispensable to the reconstruction of a post-Taliban Afghanistan.

With the stunning military advances made by the United Front (Northern Alliance), making it the primary arbiter of post- Taliban Afghanistan's future, the second of the above notions appears to have lost its substantive basis.

Given the support the Front receives from Russia, Iran and the Central Asian Republics, the only real international antagonist it has is Pakistan. But is Pakistan in a position to decisively intervene in the political development of post-Taliban Afghanistan?

None of the Pashtun groups, over whom Pakistan is making such a song and dance, appears to be really with Islamabad. Saudi Arabia, which has let Pakistan forge their mutual Afghan policy, comes into the picture only as Pakistan's main supporter.

An indicator that Saudi Arabia, in these early stages, is being considered a fringe player is provided by the fact that none of the high-powered diplomats given the task of brokering an Afghan deal has found it necessary to consult Riyadh.

If Saudi wisdom is not being courted in respect of the development of a country where it has invested so much money, political capital and diplomatic energy over two decades then what does it say about the notion that the Saudis play a leading role in the Muslim world? If the Saudis are not going to be consulted in respect of Afghanistan will they be consulted when questions pertaining to Indonesia or the Balkans or the Maghreb are thrown up?

If the Saudi role as one of the chief interlocutors between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds has been exposed in the Afghanistan context, it is bound to affect its ability to play this role in other contexts as well. Since the beginning of this year the Saudis have striven hard to make the U.S. engage itself more directly in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

Pressure on the U.S. increased after September 11 and the Kingdom tried to leverage its interlocutor's role to extract a commitment from Washington that it would rein in Israel. The Kingdom's failure to attain its objectives were clear from its Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al Faisal's remarks that the U.S. refusal to act was such as to ``drive a sane man mad''. He expressed himself as being ``angrily frustrated'' by the U.S. approach or rather non-approach. In the end, the U.S. did give a nod for Saudi sensitivities. The U.S. President, Mr. George W. Bush, went before the U.N. General Assembly and reiterated an earlier statement that a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict was very much part of his administration's vision.

But while giving this in-principle support for Palestinian statehood, Mr. Bush did not lay down a time-table in which he thought it should be achieved.

Nor did he budge from his position of supporting the Israeli stance that no negotiation could be conducted as long as the violence (and in the context he clearly meant violence from the Palestinian side) continued.

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