What About the Tajik Solution?

“It would be a mistake to simply transfer the Tajik solution like a pattern,” Emomali Rahmon, the president of Tajikistan, said in an interview in December 2001 with an Austrian newspaper, Der Standard. He’d been asked if the Tajik experience with civil war and negotiated peace could be transferred to the Afghan context. Rahmon was right. The structure of each country’s civil war is fundamentally different and the so-called Tajik solution was less a solution than the deferment of one.

The idea of the Tajik solution has popped up several times over the past 15 years of war in Afghanistan. It is, in simplified form, a hopeful allegory: a secular central government settling a devastating war with an Islamist opposition by bringing that opposition into the government.

But the simplified version of the Tajik civil war on which the solution theory was based isn’t an accurate representation of reality, let alone one comparable to Afghanistan. The peace accords were a useful tool to end the Tajik civil war, but they didn’t address the war’s causes. If the idea ever held much sway--and it’s debatable that it ever really did--what’s become clear in the past several years is that the Tajik solution was only ever but a facade. In 2015 the hallmark of the peace accords--the inclusion of the opposition in the government--suffered its greatest setback.

A Solution for Two Different Problems?

In 2009, Foreign Affairs ran an article titled The Tajik Solution: A Model for Fixing Afghanistan in which George Gavrilis argued that the “best analogy” for understanding the “challenge of stabilizing Afghanistan” was Tajikistan.

Gavrilis vastly oversimplified the Tajik civil war and called the resulting state “tolerably stable -- stable enough for the international community to forget about it, which is a striking mark of success.” He gave credit to the small UN mission that orchestrated the peace accords for opting for a “more limited and realistic set of goals”: 

They brokered deals across political factions, tolerated warlords where necessary, and kept the number of outside peacekeeping troops to a minimum. The result has been the emergence of a relatively stable balance of power inside the country, the dissuasion of former combatants from renewed hostilities, and the opportunity for state building to develop organically.

If anything, the past seven years have illustrated that these results were an illusion. The “former combatants” have, indeed, not renewed hostilities but the balance of power tilts heavily toward the government. Far from developing “organically,” the state has become increasingly consolidated around President Emomali Rahmon.

Notably, Gavrilis exhibits an obsession with “warlords,” a term that doesn’t really fit the political structures of Tajikistan or adequately explain the civil war’s dynamics. Regionalism, rather than warlordism, is a defining feature of Tajik society. As Kirill Nourzhanov and Christian Bleuer note in their 2013 political and social history of Tajikistan, the Soviet Union did not create Tajikistan’s regional identities; “Soviet policies, however, gave these identities the ‘meaning and structure’ that they currently have by politicizing regional identities, giving them relevance at both the elite and the non-elite levels.”

It’s no coincidence that the Tajik leadership that oversaw the spiral into civil war were the remnants of the Soviet-supported elite--from Leninobod (now Sughd) in the north and Kulob in the south.

Rahmon Nabiyev--a former first secretary of the Communist party of Tajikistan, who had been ousted in 1985 over a corruption scandal--engineered his way back into power on the eve of independence.  Nabiyev was a Leninobodi. He became the Republic of Tajikistan’s second president in September 1991, mere weeks after independence was declared. Qahhor Mahkamov--who had succeeded Nabiyev in 1985 as first secretary-- had been appointed the republic’s first president in November 1990 by the Tajik Supreme Soviet as part of Gorbachev’s reform agenda. Nabiyev ousted him and then stepped out of office himself in October 1991, ostensibly in deference to the election campaign for Tajikistan’s first post-independence president. Nabiyev “won” that election and in December 1991 became president again.

But the botched election became fodder for the forces unleashed through perestroika, which Nourzhanov and Bleuer say granted elites in Tajikistan and elsewhere the opportunity to take opposition positions publicly. For the first time, elites from outside the politically-dominant industrialized regions had an opportunity to contest national-level positions. “With the rapid decay of the mono-organizational system… the national elite in Tajikistan quickly reached a ‘disunified’ state, characterised by ruthless, often violent, inter-elite conflicts,” Nourzhanov and Bleuer explain.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, this nascent but incomplete democracy (for lack of a better term) dovetailed with already-established regional divisions. Gharmis and Pamiris paired with other democrats and the powerful resurgent forces of political Islam (which had been repressed by the Soviet Union) to oppose a central government long dominated by Leninobodis and Kulobis.

Nabiyev resigned in September 1992--after riots shook Dushanbe--and Emomali Rahmon, a party apparatchik from Kulob, took over.

None of this nuance factored into Gavrilis’ assessment that ruthless deal-making and prioritizing ending the war over addressing its causes could set a precedent for dealing with the war in Afghanistan.

Not only did Gavrilis oversimplify the Tajik civil war but his parallel to Afghanistan was lacking. As Alanna Shaikh, an international development professional, wrote for UN Dispatch, “the similarities between the two countries are superficial. Tajikistan and Afghanistan weren’t starting from the same place.” She comments that citizens of Soviet Tajikistan “remembered what real government was like, even if it was autocratic. And they were willing, in the end, to trade their political and military ambitions for a government that looked a lot like the USSR.” Meanwhile, “the people of Afghanistan just don’t have that model to work from.”

An Untenable Solution

While few have suggested in recent years that Tajikistan is an adequate template for peace in Afghanistan, the themes undergirding the so-called Tajik solution remain key aspects of Western engagement with Tajikistan and gamesmanship with regard to Afghan politics.

On Afghan politics, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s managed solution to 2014’s presidential election debacle--the establishment of a National Unity Government and the sweeping under the rug of accusations that President Ashraf Ghani rigged the polls--smacks of the compromises the UN mission made with Rahmon in 1990s.

Gavrilis wrote praisingly of the fact that the UN mission “refrained from publicly condemning Rakhmonov” (Rahmon dropped the -ov officially in 2007 but Gavrilis used the Soviet spelling) “in exchange for assurances that he would quickly appoint opposition figures to key national and provincial posts.”

“These behind-the-scenes measures saved the peace accord and compelled a government that had stolen elections to be more inclusive,” Gavrilis concluded.

But the Tajik political system has become anything but more inclusive.

“The memory of bloodshed and violence in the collective psyche has inoculated the country somewhat against overt conflict, yet the problem of regional divisions, especially when exacerbated by the idiom of political Islam, has not withered away,” Nourzhanov and Bleuer wrote in 2013.

At its height of democratic progress, the Tajik parliament sat two representatives from the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRPT), the inheritors of the opposition movement and at the time the only legal Islamic party in the region. Initially 30 percent of government posts were given to opposition members, but over the years that percentage has declined. In 2015’s parliamentary election the IRPT failed to gain even one seat out of 63 and shortly thereafter found their members under pressure to publically denounce the party. By year’s end the party’s offices had been closed, its leadership arrested on terrorism charges, and the party labeled an extremist group.

Rather than the opposition taking up arms and violently ending the peace accords, it has been the government quietly eroding its own peace. Rahmon’s consolidation of power includes appointing relatives to government positions--his son heads the anti-corruption agency and one of his daughters is the presidential chief of staff; meanwhile a family friend was made head of the country’s criminal investigation department recently. He is also engendering a cult of personality; in December parliament lavished Rahmon with the title “Leader of the Nation” (which also comes with immunity from prosecution).

Arne C. Seifert, a diplomat who worked as a political officer with the OSCE in Tajikistan in 1996 and 1997, wrote in a 2015 review of Nourzhanov and Bleuer’s history that “in Tajikistan itself, obviously, the currently ruling elites did not draw appropriate lessons from their own civil war and its causes.” Seifert notes that in “present day Tajikistan, the philosophy of the 1997 peace agreements, that peace will bring about no losers and winners but only one winner – the Tajik nation in its entirety – has been abandoned.”