Consequences of conflict in Afghanistan continues....

Though there had been numerous agreements by Afghanistan’s neighbors and other states involved in the conflict to end arms supplies as part of a larger peace process, none of these agreements has been backed by any enforcement mechanism. On 21 July, 1999, at a meeting in Tashkent of the Group of Six-plus-Two, comprising the countries bordering Afghanistan plus the US and Russia, the delegates signed an agreement subsequently known as the Tashkent declaration in which they “agreed not to provide military support to any Afghan party and to prevent the use of our territories for such purposes,” and called upon “the international community to take identical measures to prevent delivery of weapons to Afghanistan.” However due to the lack of enforcement mechanism these agreements lost efficacy.

The drug trade also penetrated Tajikistan and its neighbors, drawing in the Russian mafia and corrupting the Russian border guards, as well as all Central Asian governments. Members of a repressed Islamist group in Uzbekistan’s Ferghana Valley fled to Afghanistan and Tajikistan in 1992.

Some of the Uzbek fighters, reorganized as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, established bases in opposition-controlled areas of Tajikistan as well as in Afghanistan. They reorganized as the Islamic Party of Turkistan, made explicit that their agenda included the whole region. Uzbekistan also supported a militia from Tajikistan (led by Mahmud Khudaiberdiyev, an ethnic Uzbek from that country) that trained in Uzbek areas of north Afghanistan and staged an uprising in Northern Tajikistan in November 1998. Sectarian killings in Pakistan (reflecting the region-wide politicization of Sunni-Shi’a relations sparked by the Iranian revolution and Iran-Pakistan competition in Afghanistan) and the insurgency in Kashmir are also linked to Afghanistan, where Sunni extremists have bases and have participated in fighting along with the Taleban, including against Afghanistan’s Shi’a. Drug traders from Afghanistan threaten order in several Iranian provinces through which they have established smuggling routes.

To be continued......