insurgents never stop but until now have had only limited success. To what extent are India and Pakistan fighting a proxy war, or at least jockeying and struggling against each other, in Afghanistan? Tariq Ali: Until recently the Indians backed Karzai and they have a strong diplomatic and extra-diplomatic presence in southern Afghanistan. They see it as payback time for Pakistan which sent in jihadis to Kashmir in the 90's. So the interests of the two South Asian states are at loggerheads. India will do what it can to stop Pakistan re-asserting its influence after the NATO withdrawal. But talk of a proxy war is exaggerated. There is a US/NATO occupation of the country backed by both Pakistan and ...Tell us a bit about the Saur revolution of the late 1970s. Does it have a potentially positive legacy in Afghanistan Tariq Ali: The Soviet occupation was a disaster on virtually every level and created the basis for what has followed: a country that has been wrecked by wars and occupations from 1979 to this day, i.e. longer than the First and Second World Wars, longer than the US wars in Korea and Vietnam. All this might not have happened had the Russians not sent in the Army in December 1979. I said so at the time. The mode of occupation was verv different. The Russians were backing a government that was attempting to create a health service, free education for all (including women) and combating obscurantism. It did so in a crude way and Wild West style shoot-outs between rival Communist factions in which President Taraki was killed did not create too positive an image. The US occupation is neo-liberal in style. The rich get richer and the slums outside Kabul grow larger. Tariq Ali is an author, film maker, political commentator and socialist campaigner. His Night of the Golden Butterfly, the latest and final volume in The Islam Quintet cycle of historical novels is published by Verso. This interview with him was conducted in New York by Theodore Hamm and Christian Parenti for The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Arts, Politics and Culture and reproduced with The Rail's kind permission. Further information www.brooklynrail.org
International: Interview with Tariq Ali
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