Eyes on Afghanistan : Proclamation of Islamic state rivets the region’s attention

Pivotal, distant Afghanistan has become, after neighboring Iran, the world’s second proclaimed Islamic state, and its neighbors should pay undivided attention. This is, after all, the country that sounded the death knell of an expansionist Soviet Union.

In 1979, Soviet tanks rolled through its mountainous passes south to the capital of Kabul, where a Communist regime was promptly installed. One of the last Soviet proconsuls of those days, former President Najibullah, was strung up on a tower in the capital Friday, a lesson to the people that henceforth Afghanistan will be ruled by nationalists.

Lieutenants of the conquering Taliban militia, funded in part by neighboring Pakistan, set up microphones on street corners to read from the Koran. The militia’s leader, a mullah known only as Omar, told reporters a “complete Islamic system” will be enforced in the country.

The strategic importance of Afghanistan is without question. In the 19th century, Russia and British India maneuvered for influence there in what was called the Great Game. More recently came the Soviet army, after crushing Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Hungary in 1956. Now there is a line--from the Arab Middle East, Iran, through Afghanistan to Pakistan--of Islamic powers, though some parts of Afghan territory are still controlled by forces of the ousted government. India, with a Muslim minority, and the former Russian republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, largely Muslim, will be touched by the militant new leadership in Kabul. Pakistan’s troubled government, under pressure from religious militancy at home, immediately sent emissaries to the new regime.

The Taliban had been moving on the capital for more than a year, most of its members former students of Islamic schools along the Afghan-Pakistani border, the staging area for forces opposed to the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul. The resistance was armed in part by U.S. sources during the 1980s. The American aim was ultimately met by the Taliban. Russian influence is gone from Kabul. What takes its place will be closely watched in the region.