Burhanuddin Rabbani Dead

Burhanuddin Rabbani

Burhanuddin Rabbani, who has died in a bomb attack in Kabul, has been a key player during some of the most turbulent years in Afghanistan's history.

A pragmatist who saw engagement in the reconciliation process as a way of securing his position in a post-US Afghanistan

Ten years from now, the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of Afghanistan's High Peace Council (HPC), may well be seen as a decisive step towards a renewed civil war. Rabbani, a former president of Afghanistan and important northerner, 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 the remote northern province of Badakhshan, Rabbani became an outspoken professor of Islamic law at Kabul University and the leader of the ideological and activist group Jamiat-e Islami, or Islamic Society. In 1974, fleeing arrest for his political activities, he settled across the border in Pakistan. There, subsequent to 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 mujahideen groups who inherited the country after the fall of the Communist-backed regime in 1991, and Rabbani became president for a brief period before the government split along factional and ethnic lines, ushering in a period of brutal 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 fractious Jamiat network, which, though often opposed to Hamid Karzai, grew soft on the lucrative aid and contracting boom, was too divided by internal rivalries to be effective.
In October 2010, he surprised many supporters when he became head of the HPC, a Karzai-appointed group that was criticised for consisting mostly of former mujahideen, precisely the people the Taliban had kicked out of power.

And indeed, it is likely that Rabbani saw the council, which helps administer a $200m trust fund for reintegration, primarily as a patronage mechanism and a way to enhance his clout and resources after spending a decade outside of government. A friend and tribal elder from Badakhshan told me last summer that mysterious Taliban groups had appeared in formerly secure districts in his province, in what he presumed was a ploy by Rabbani's people for the funds made available for reintegration.
Taliban groups had appeared in formerly secure districts in his province, in what he presumed was a ploy by Rabbani's people for the funds made available for reintegration.
Still, 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 undoubtedly harden attitudes against a peace process across northern Afghanistan. It also means the High Peace Council will be in disarray before important conferences in Turkey and Germany this year. And as the latest in a string of high-profile assassinations over the past year that has eliminated many of the old mujahideen leadership, it is a worrying sign that Afghanistan, with fewer figures capable of reining in its centrifugal forces, is careening towards a renewed disintegration.