TEN YEARS from now, the killing of Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council, may well be seen as a decisive step towards a renewed civil war. Rabbani, a former president of Afghanistan, is the most significant national figure to be assassinated since the fall of the Taliban regime at the end of 2001.
Born in 1940 in Badakhshan, he became an outspoken professor of Islamic law and the leader of the activist group Jamiat-e Islami. In 1974, fleeing arrest for his political activities, he settled across the border in Pakistan. There, following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he would play a crucial role in transforming Jamiat, with US and Pakistani patronage, into a network of mujahideen fighters.
It was these groups who inherited the country after the fall of the communist-backed regime in 1991, and Rabbani became president briefly before the government split along factional and ethnic lines, ushering in a civil war that was halted only by the rise of the Taliban, who captured Kabul in 1996.
After the fall of the Taliban, Rabbani presided over the Jamiat network, which, though often opposed to Hamid Karzai, grew soft on the aid and contracting boom and was too divided to be effective.
In October 2010, he surprised many when he became head of the peace council, a Karzai- appointed group criticised for consisting mostly of ex-mujahideen, precisely the people the Taliban had kicked out of power. But Rabbani was a pragmatist who saw engagement in the reconciliation process as a way of securing his position in a post-US Afghanistan. His killing will harden attitudes against peace. It is a worrying sign that Afghanistan is careering towards disintegration. – ( Guardianservice)