Afghanistan (11 page)

Reconciling change with Afghanistan’s conservative culture has been problematic. Rural Afghans are suspicious of change. Change has usually brought them nothing but grief and distanced them from the true path of Islam and an honorable life. But even conservative rural Afghans will support change if they are shown that it is consistent with their beliefs and goals and that it is effective. Only then will they take ownership and, most reluctantly, take responsibility for change. At the national level, the Afghans have taken ownership of the constitution and the parliament. They have generally accepted that female members of parliament and provincial councils are a good and useful thing, like female doctors. The grassroots may take pride and ownership over Afghanistan’s Constitution, the Loya Jirgas and 2004 and 2005 elections, have been appreciative of schools, healthcare, and their cell phones (over 6.5 million in service by
the end of 2008); but many, not limited to the uneducated rural majorities of all ethnolinguistic groups, were horrified at television showing Bollywood movies or Afghan women singing. Terrorists and insurgents have been quick to exploit this as examples of the infidel invader’s aim of subverting Islam.

Elites have all too often seen change as a source of personal enrichment to provide security against the day when the outsiders go home and they may have to go back into exile. Yet many individuals—including President Karzai—still appear to be foreign creations. Traditionally, those pushing the hardest for change were urbanized educated middle class and elite Afghans, but this group was largely destroyed, marginalized, or driven into exile in 1978–2001 and has not managed to reconstitute itself as a viable Afghan political force (in terms of patronage and ability to get things done) since then. Despite the return of a number of exiles with access to foreign support, including those at the highest levels of government, they are still a much less powerful force than they were prior to 1978; they rely on their patrons, the international community and the aid donors, for their positions and what internal influence they possess.

Conversely, rural Pushtuns often appear to be most conservative element of Afghan society, though this differs greatly from place to place and tribe to tribe. Yet detribalized Pushtuns—often without the intermediating effect of tribal leadership and extensive kinship-based patronage networks—have in the past backed radical or extremist leaders, Communist and Islamist alike. Those Afghan ethnolinguistic groups without tribal divides tend to be more open to change, but even these are deeply conservative. Rural Badakshis are closer to rural Pushtuns in their worldview than they are to educated urban Kabulis, even though they share the Dari language and lack the Pushtun’s tribe and clan organization. Ties of family and kinship provide legitimacy. Afghans disparage another Afghan by saying “Who was his father?” (Part of President Karzai’s strength is that his father, a chief of the Popalzai tribe of Durrani Pushtuns and a large landowner in Kandahar province, was widely known.) This attitude influences Afghan life and politics today, and leads to a deeply conservative cast to a society that tends to be shared even by those—such as Communists or Islamists—otherwise devoted to radical change.

When top-down change seems to threaten Afghan culture or the Afghan or Pushtun way (“Afghaniyat” or Pushtowali), it has historically been resisted. King Amanullah in the late 1920s implemented change without securing support from elites. The result was years of bloody civil war. The Khalqi government in 1978–79 set about remaking Afghanistan using the bloodiest methods of their Soviet patrons’ history. They had no need to legitimate themselves or rally Afghan support: the tide of history (and Moscow) was with them. The result was the largest national rising of the twentieth century, with Moscow feeling compelled to intervene militarily. The challenge facing those working to implement change in Afghanistan post-2001 is how to ensure that their efforts are not seen as following these unacceptable models. It is hard to get Afghans to take ownership, harder still to get them to take responsibility (reflecting the society’s collectivist and qawm-based roots).

Since 2001, the Afghan insurgents have sought to portray themselves as defenders of culture as well as religion and nationality. Even more disconcerting for the conservative connection of Afghan culture to legitimacy has been the post-2001 non-Muslim foreign presence, with military convoys running farm carts off roads, the presence of unveiled women, and drinking. The negative cultural impact of the foreign presence in the eyes of many Afghans—even if they accept the security rationale for its presence—has made the association of President Karzai and the current Kabul government with the West a political liability. Cultural resentment of much of the negatively perceived impact foreign presence is, like Afghanistan’s conservatism itself, shared by its ethnolinguistic groups, even those who originally welcomed the foreign presence and still see it as preventing a return to a disastrous civil war.

Cultural conservatism has presented the insurgents with a powerful weapon in the battle of ideas. They present Karzai as a current “Shah Shuja” (the nineteenth century ruler installed by the British before the First Anglo-Afghan War who was overthrown by a Pushtun revolt). Karzai is presented as being as much of a foreign tool and no more of a Pushtun than was Najibullah, the hated former secret policeman installed by the Soviets who was able to use Moscow’s gold to govern from 1986 to 1992. Karzai’s reacting to foreign pressure has also undercut his links to
cultural legitimacy. When an Afghan accused of apostasy was allowed to leave the country under foreign pressure rather than be tried for what is a crime under Sharia law, it appeared to the conservative grassroots that Karzai represented the foreigners’ belief systems, not their own, even if they were in favor of Afghanistan abiding by international agreements on human rights.

To the extent that the struggle inside Afghanistan is seen in terms of cultural values instead of reconstruction, it has undercut progress. This conservatism has led Afghans to reject—often violently—social change imposed top-down without securing support from a broad base of institutions, groups, and individuals and showing deference, respect, and support of Afghan sources of legitimacy and values. Conservatism has led some in Afghan society—especially rural Pushtuns—to reject the changes in governance and life to emerge since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and oppose the foreign presence.

Yet the Western dichotomy of conservative and radical change is difficult to apply to Afghanistan. The original Taliban of 1992–96 succeeded for many reasons, including the fact that they could legitimate themselves to Afghanistan’s Pushtuns in pre-existing social terms, a basically conservative action. The original Taliban was able to use the links of existing networks and patronage, especially that of the Pushtun clergy and tribal leaders, to legitimate themselves while at the same time creating radical change, especially in Kabul, Herat, and elsewhere outside their heartland. Yet the Taliban imposed radical change in religious practice, including their insistence on men growing beards, and gender relations, including their insistence on prescribing a dress code enforced by extrajudicial violence, banning women from the public sphere in general and in working outside the home in particular. The only previous Kabul regime in Afghanistan’s history that had attempted that degree of radical change, using the force of state power to determine how each Afghan must treat the women in his family, was the polarizing Khalqis of 1978–79, who had Afghans of all ethnolinguistic groups in arms against them within months. The Taliban were able to use a combination of armed force as well as money and connections supplied by Al Qaeda and other outside allies to enforce this radical change. But even the Taliban’s fighting men
were outraged at the sight of Afghan women being beaten for transgressing the dress code, one reason why few were willing to fight for them once it became apparent that the US had intervened against them in 2001.

The collectivist orientation of traditional Afghan society has led to suspicion of the free market economy that has emerged since 2001. Since then, the appearance of goods (unaffordable to most Afghans) from the world market and the large houses built in Kabul or in the Panjshir valley have given Afghans much scope to exercise the propensity for envy that Mountstuart Elphinstone first noted back in 1815. Similarly, resentment of the West, coupled with envy of its material gains, dates back to the nineteenth century but required satellite television and DVDs in every village in Afghanistan to become a powerful force cultural force post-2001.

The post-2001 media revolution in Afghanistan resulted in a flood of new newspapers and television and radio stations. DVDs have arrived in even the poorest villages, giving people the ability to compare their quality of life to that of the outside world. The political implications of this media flood are enormous. If, prior to 2001, the average Afghan was content to interact with a distant world through shortwave radio broadcasts, they have since then had to contend with a much greater engagement with an outside culture that does not reflect Afghan culture and does not appear to value it, reflected in the appearance of satellite television and bootleg Bollywood movies that both fascinate and, often, repel the rural and uneducated majority. Afghanistan’s insurgents have been able, in some areas, to transform this cultural unease into active or passive support for their cause. The first time the Afghan parliament overrode a presidential veto, in September 2008, it was to sustain a law restricting media rights, vindicating the cultural concerns of the grassroots while, conveniently, limiting press scrutiny of elite activities.

This deep conservatism is by no means an across-the-board rejection of change or nostalgia for the Taliban.
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Most Afghans, including the most religiously conservative, point with pride to the constitution, the elections, the Loya Jirgas, and the parliament. Repeated polls show that Afghans of all classes support education and want their children—including the girls—to go to school.
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The Hazaras—the poorest large
ethnic group in Afghanistan—have since 2001 been in the forefront of pushing for girls’ education and enabling women’s involvement in the political process. The media revolution, following decades of exposure to international radio news and the widespread experience of being a refugee or working abroad, has brought the outside world to rural Afghanistan.

CHAPTER TWO

“
Rule the Punjabi, intimidate the Sindhi, buy the Pathan, and honor the Baluch.”

—British colonial-era aphorism

attributed to Sir Robert Sandeman, c.1890

G
eographically, the heart of the Vortex corresponds to the Pushtun world. This has meant that the shift from the Frontier to Vortex has had a tremendous—in some ways devastating—impact on life and culture in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Because of the centrality of ethnic Pushtuns to the post-2001 conflicts, the politics and culture of the Pushtuns in Afghanistan and Pakistan have risen to a level of importance that is not shared and is often resented by the other ethnic groups in these countries. In 2008–10, those carrying out insurrections and supporting terrorists—as were those suffering from them in both Afghanistan and Pakistan—were largely Pushtuns, although both insurgencies were reinforced by substantial number of volunteers from Pakistan, especially Punjabis, and from would-be jihadis with worldwide roots.

In neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan was there large-scale violence between ethnic groups through armed organizations, the type of fighting that marked the conflict in Iraq at its height, though anti-Shia violence in
Pakistan has dramatically increased since a campaign was opened against the Touray Pushtuns near Parachinar in November 2007. If, in either country, the insurgency became widespread among other ethnic groups, such as Punjabis in Pakistan or Tajiks in Afghanistan, then it would transform the nature of the conflicts emerging from the Vortex. The conflicts waged by Pushtuns have an intrinsic ethnolinguistic firebreak. If it leaps over these firebreaks, then it will greatly enlarge the Vortex’s heart of darkness and potentially engulf both countries, with global ramifications.

Other dwellers on the Pakistan side of the Vortex include Pakistan’s security and intelligence services, especially the military’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) but also the civilian Pakistan Intelligence Bureau (PIB), the Federal Investigation Agency, and provincial police Special Branch organizations. Pakistan’s radical Islamic parties and their associated organizations also have a strong presence there. A third category of the dwellers in the Vortex (discussed in subsequent chapters) are those defined by their activities, including terrorism, insurgency (and crime), and narcotics cultivation and trafficking.
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The Durand Line

Sir Mortimer Durand actually knew what he was doing in 1893. The Durand Line, when it was the Frontier, was the limit of colonialism and of the post-Westphalia rational, ordered world of states, rulers and ruled, a seam between different civilizations and worldviews, the wild and the sown. In other ways, it is more comparable to the missing lines between countries in the Arabian Peninsula, put aside as too hard for mapmakers, independent sovereigns, or colonial administrators to draw. There are 350 known unofficial crossing places to the current Afghanistan-Pakistan border, many more in practice.

Much as Afghans will claim that the line is an arbitrary one imposed on Afghanistan to deprive them of control over the Pakistan heartland of what became Pakistan by the British Indian government at its Victorian zenith, there is actually a clear firebreak between the tribes that lived on each side, with a few exceptions primarily among traders (such as the Afridi, “lords of the Khyber”) and truly transborder tribes (such as the
Mohmands and Wazirs, both of whom took up arms to oppose the line without the help of their neighbors). The line reflects a meaningful seam in the human geography of the Pushtun world, and the impact of over a century of separate history has increased pre-existing differences between the Pushtuns on both sides. The Pushtun world was so diverse that it required the policies of multiple Pakistani governments and the impacts of Afghanistan’s 1978–2001 wars to change it from a Frontier to a line dividing an insurgency into two halves, helping the Pushtun insurgents on each side, enabling their own cross-border activities while preventing those of their opponents.
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