Afghanistan (25 page)

A senior Pakistani official was quoted as saying in 2009: “We’ve already been talking to the Taliban. If the US helps the process, some arrangements can be worked out for political arrangements.”
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This is essentially the failed 1990s Pakistani policy returning. Pakistan has urged the US and Afghans to negotiate with the Afghan insurgents, with the goal being creation of a government in Kabul that would meet Pakistan’s perceived security needs (to the detriment of Afghanistan, especially its non-Pushtuns). But the Afghan Taliban, as the major insurgent group, shows little interest in negotiations. As of 2008–10, Afghan Taliban leaders appeared assured that time was on their side. They had no interest in any future that did not include the withdrawal of the foreign support for Kabul and did not embrace their views on Islamic practice. In 2008–10, while the Afghan Taliban were willing to reassure regional powers that they posed no threat to them, they offered no such indications of any lessening of their pre-2001 enmity toward Afghan’s non-Pushtuns.
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Mullah Omar has even been willing to reassure the West that he would not be under the control of Al Qaeda.
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But there has been no such reassurance offered to Afghanistan’s non-Pushtuns. In Kabul, there was concern among non-Pushtuns that negotiations with the insurgents may be used to increase Pushtun power and exclude non-Pushtuns. In October 2009, one (ethnic Pushtun) former cabinet minister justified negotiations with the Taliban: “All of the warlords are criminals; some of the Taliban are criminals.”

In 2008–10 there were reports of a number of parallel negotiation
attempts with Afghanistan’s insurgents. The US was supporting efforts to identify those insurgents—within the Taliban or in different groups—that could be brought into the government through a settlement. There were separate negotiations running with Kabul, either directly or through an intermediary, including Saudi Arabia. These were not with local leaders but the Taliban’s leadership and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In 2008, both of these felt they held the upper hand and were reluctant to deal.

The Afghan insurgents’ current commitment to a fundamentalist Islamic vision and the insistence on the illegitimacy of the infidel foreign presence—which ensures Pakistan, which has officially denied any presence or role in the conflicts, would control Afghanistan—and their association with the control of state power by ethnic Pushtuns gives little apparent room to compromise. Ideas that a “moderate Taliban” might be created and would be suitable subjects for negotiations if, at the end, they had the prospect of being brought into power—a policy Pakistan has held out since the late 1990s—is less likely because those willing to talk are not those able to have authority over the fighting men or the flow of resources. Even if local deals were made with insurgent commanders, they would become a magnet for assassination attempts and suicide bombers, as former Afghan Taliban local leader turned district governor Mullah Salam has been in 2008–09 in Musa Qala in Helmand province.

The most useful approach is likely to be bottom-up, paying off local Afghan Taliban leaders to come over or at least halt offensive operations until reforms in security and governance allow Kabul to be more effective; a strategy for the long term. This has been the objective of the PTS (Program Takhim-e-Sohl, strengthening peace), although the number and importance of the insurgents this has brought in has been limited. The local level is largely where the negotiations were focused in late 2008, largely on the pattern of the Anbar awakening in Iraq and many local negotiations in Afghanistan’s 1978–2001 conflicts. Recent surveys show 71 percent of Afghans supporting reconciliation efforts with “anti-government elements.”
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US Central Command combatant commander GEN David Petraeus said: “reconciliation of ‘reconcilables’ has been identified as a priority. We need to establish who they are, identify them, separate them from the irreconcilables and make reconciliation.”
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The Afghans are not intrinsically warlike. That the Afghans are sick of war and want peace was used by the Taliban in 1994–96 to expand their control of Pushtun Afghanistan. People wanted peace so much, they would accept rule by a group that otherwise would not have been able to legitimate their rule even among their own ethnolinguistic group. By 2001, the Afghans’ desire for peace meant that few Afghan Pushtuns were willing to fight to the end for the Taliban; many joined forces with the Northern Alliance to displace them. By 2008–10 the insurgents were counting on this to help increase their control of Pushtun Afghanistan, that even a bad peace may seem preferable to an unending insurgency. Yet neither the insurgents nor their foreign supporters has any interest in offering Afghanistan’s non-Pushtuns a peace that would not see them marginalized. In practice, the insurgents offer the potential for peace to Afghanistan’s Pushtuns and the certainty of civil war or worse (especially in the case of Shias) to non-Pushtuns.

In 2008–10, Afghan insurgents looked to increase the at-home impact against Afghans, US, and coalition forces alike. Anti-election efforts aimed at the 2009 Afghan presidential election began with the start of the voter registration campaign in 2008, with the Taliban threatening to behead Afghans caught with a voter registration card. However, as Election Day came closer, the Taliban limited this campaign. The pre-election surge of US and coalition forces was intended to drive insurgents into Pakistan and prevent them from interfering with the vote. When the presidential election was finally held in September 2009, the insurgents launched over 400 attacks as Afghans went to vote, following months of an overall “spike” in violence. The overall turnout for the election, at 38 percent, was just over half that of 2004. But the damage done to governmental legitimacy internally and internationally by Afghans trying to rig the election was far more widespread than that inflicted by the insurgents.

The insurgents are also capable of undertaking offensive action targeted at different coalition national contingents at times meaningful for their own political calendars. The insurgents are capable of identifying and targeting the seams in the coalition and the differences in perceived levels of will and the national caveats that indicate a limited liability
commitment of many coalition partners. This has become “fuel for insurgents to break up the alliance,” in the words of BG Marquis Hainse.
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The insurgents are aware that every tactical action can have strategic implications. “Most opposition groups learn that they can impact foreign capitals. Do something in Ghazni, it has impact in Warsaw,” LTC Chris Cavoli, who commanded an infantry battalion of the US Army’s 10th Mountain Division in northeast Afghanistan in 2007, said.
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“They focus on weakening the will of the international community,” agrees Rahim Wardak, Afghanistan’s defense minister.
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This was seen as contributing to the spread of insurgent operations into northern Afghanistan by autumn 2009. These apparently had a goal of inflicting German casualties—along with a threat of Al Qaeda attacks directly against targets in Germany—to influence that country’s September 2009 election and inflicting Italian casualties to force that country to withdraw.
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This is a change from the pre-2001 Taliban, with minimal understanding of the outside world, and reflects the Al Qaeda influence on the insurgents and their continued cooperation with transnational terrorists.

Another change from pre-2001 Afghanistan is the intense coverage of its conflicts by the international news media. BG Marquis Hainse said that when he was commanding Canadian and coalition forces in Regional Command South in 2007–08: “We hear about each NATO soldier that dies.”
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The degree of political judgment and operational timing that led to the 2004 Madrid railroad station bombing has come to Afghanistan.
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The Internet and the rise of the 24-hour news cycle have become great levelers, enabling a few clever insurgents with laptops to successfully fight against the infinitely better-resourced coalition and Kabul (with the benefit of large numbers of foreign experts and consultants).

Insurgency Against Legitimacy

The insurgents seek to justify their warfare against Kabul and its foreign allies primarily in Islamic terms, secondarily in ethnolinguistic terms (as the avengers of Pushtun rights), and to a lesser extent as the authentic voice of Afghan nationalism and as the expression of a wide range of grievances ranging from the highly local (absence of jobs) to the global (the perceived US-directed war against Islam). Their great strength, however, is not their
policies but their persistence. When Afghan or coalition troops leave an area, the insurgents—especially the Taliban—move in, exact retribution, destroy the benefits of contact with the outside, and stay. They cannot build or create, but it takes only limited numbers and resources to be spoilers in a region where there is little enough of anything to spoil.

At the same time, the insurgents seek to prevent the Kabul government (and this, in light of the limited capability building post-2001, means its foreign supporters) from taking acts that would legitimate itself (especially in Pushtun areas) by providing reconstruction and security, making possible economic activity other than narcotics cultivation and trading, and by not having to rely on non-Muslim foreign troops. Where there is no functional economy, the insurgents can buy all the fighting men they need cheaply in the absence of alternative employment. Where there is no security or development, the insurgents can profit from the activities that can flourish, especially narcotics and the extractive activities of the mafias. To do this, the insurgents have—so far successfully—waged a battle of ideas to legitimate their own actions in Islamic, Afghan, and Pushtun terms that has gone largely uncontested by Kabul and their coalition supporters, who have watched as the reservoir of goodwill and support that they enjoyed post-2001 among the majority of Afghans of all ethnolinguistic groups has eroded away. By 2008–10, many of the rural Pushtuns of southern Afghanistan have become more Talibanized than democratized.

“The Taliban needs an absence of governance to succeed,” in the words of LTC Cavoli.
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Such an absence of (non-corrupt) governance is one thing that has marked much of southern Afghanistan since 2001. Where it has been present, the building of roads, schools, and mosques has been outweighed by the years of extractive action by local officials or warlords—claiming their share under color of Kabul authority—and corrupt police. Some have seen the roots of insurgency in the south in extractive practices under the color of Kabul’s authority that were widespread in 2001–05. These were almost all done by Pushtuns against other Pushtuns (with the targets for extraction often reflecting long-standing tribal divisions and rivalries). That they were less endurable than elsewhere in Afghanistan reflects the fractured nature of Pushtun politics, especially in the south (an earlier version of the same intra-Pushtun politics had
led Pakistan to support the Taliban to take control there in 1994). More cohesive local politics in the east, in provinces such as Nangarhar, Paktia, Paktika, and Khost means that while these are not peaceful, the impact of the insurgency was less there in 2008–10. The Helmand province intelligence (NSD) chief, Dad Mohammed Khan, was considered particularly extractive, but also happened to be good at his job; when he was finally fired in 2006, the insurgents gained more ground in the province.
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That the officials carrying out these unpopular actions have almost all been, in the south, ethnic Pushtuns brought Kabul no benefit. “The people who are pro-Kabul created the situation in Kandahar, Helmand and Uruzgan, not the Taliban, [it was] the wrong policies post-2001,” in the words of Massoud Kharokhail of the Kabul-based Tribal Liaison Office, a non-governmental development organization.
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It was not simply a matter of extractive or rapacious ANP or other government officials. A series of governors and other Kabul appointments diminished the perceived legitimacy of the government in Kabul in the south and—by their concentration on corruption rather than governance—undercut the ability of the government to deal with the initial stages of the insurgency.
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Other Pushtun leaders led Afghan Military Force (AMF) units post-2001 in the south and east. These often sought to operate as independently as possible from the Defense Ministry in Kabul (then under Panjsheri control). Power and land grabs, backed up by armed force, became commonplace. Where such leaders were from rival or outside tribes, they were in many cases resented more intensely than would any non-Pushtun.

The insurgents have pushed Afghans to embrace xenophobia. They have succeeded to an extent, radicalizing their own ranks and imbuing a hostility to outsiders that was alien even to the pre-2001 Afghan Taliban. The Afghan insurgents have to show that a continued foreign presence in Afghanistan remains illegitimate and a threat to Islam and Afghan nationalism. They have done this, in part, by successfully embracing the theme that they are fighting a global war on Islam that has targeted Afghanistan and that Afghans need to be concerned about the oppression of Palestinians, Kashmiris, Bosnians and others by non-Muslims. Most important is resentment toward what is seen (however unrealistically) as
an infidel-controlled non-Pushtun government in Kabul and its actions that threaten Afghanistan’s culture: perceived failure to be responsive to local concerns and unwillingness to engage with grassroots Pushtuns. The issue was often seen as whether their family, clan, or tribe had been treated justly. The cumulative impact—of extractive officials and police, a government and coalition that cannot keep them safe or seems to favor local rivals, of collateral damage and lack of economic opportunity—is too often negative. In the words of GEN McChrystal in 2009, “We run the risk of strategic defeat by pursuing tactical wins that cause civilian casualties or unnecessary collateral damage.”
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