Afghanistan (26 page)

In parts of Pushtun-speaking Afghanistan, the insurgents had local leaders to direct those with grievances in their direction, where Kabul did not have a counterpart capability. On the insurgent side, many of the lower-level leadership that emerged under the Afghan Taliban, especially in Kandahar and the south, were not de-legitimated along with the national leadership and so it was not widely accepted when they were cut out of power post-2001. The new would-be leaders that Kabul put in place in the south post-2001, despite being largely ethnic Pushtuns, did not enjoy a presumption of legitimacy from the local population that had shared the hardships and risks they had fled in 1994–2001. In a number of cases, inter-Pushtun rivalries made these leaders more hated than any non-Pushtun. It was easier for many to find the insurgents more legitimate than Kabul.

The Afghan insurgents have acted to try and discredit the strategy of trying to increase legitimacy through provision of developmental aid: “the road is for infidels to drive on.” The perception that the international community is doing nothing to benefit the average Afghan, as a result, has remained strong in much of Afghanistan. US ambassador to Kabul LTG (rtd) Karl Eikenberry’s statement that “The Taliban begin where the road ends” sums up the link between lack of reconstruction and development in Afghanistan and the areas where the insurgency has been successful. Yet development itself does not cause insurgency to fade or create security.

Nor has action by the government or parliament aimed to preempt the social policies that the Taliban had used to legitimate their rule
proven successful. Urban Pushtun elites had come to dominate Kabul politics. Non-Pushtuns pointed at Karzai’s desire to win the allegiance of Pushtuns. Many non-Pushtuns resented the centralizing influence on the process of US ambassador Dr. Zalmay Khailzad, himself an ethnic Pushtun. The insurgency in Afghanistan has grown rather than declined in scope since 2004 as Northern Alliance-connected figures (including all Panjsheris) have left the cabinet and key provincial governorships. By 2008 none of the power ministries were in Panjsheris’ hands and the only former Northern Alliance regional leader, Ismail Khan, was the minister of energy, kept away from his former home base of Herat. Cabinet reshuffles to achieve ethnic balance alienated many non-Pushtuns, failed to attract Pushtuns to support Kabul, and helped retard the initial steps toward creating a functioning Afghan government.

Appointments within each ministry (as well as at the provincial and subnational level) also became problematic as the patrimonial model of Afghan politics reasserted itself. Many cabinet ministers or provincial and district governors treated their responsibilities as personal fiefdoms and filled positions with those to whom they were tied by blood (tribe in Pushtun areas) and patronage. The familiar Afghan pattern is where the member of one group gets control of patronage and surrounds himself with those who have such ties to the exclusion of everyone else, regardless of issues such as competence or representation, leading to resentment. Some of the Afghans who received their positions due to kinship ties proved surprisingly effective, reflecting their access to patronage networks and a desire not to let family members in power down.

While the insurgents do not provide a positive vision of the future for grassroots Afghanistan, they can provide some elements of the social justice Afghans demand: suppressing bandits and adjudicating disputes. While there have been a state legal system and codified laws since the nineteenth century, in pre-1978 Afghanistan, dispute resolution was not purely or even primarily a governmental function. Religious leaders, especially
sayids
, were used as arbitrators in the land and water disputes that mean so much in rural Afghan life. The pre-2001 Afghanistan Taliban’s willingness to settle land and water disputes was seen as important to restore peace to rural Afghanistan.

There appears to be a concerted policy by the Afghan insurgents to infiltrate governmental and non-governmental organizations, especially the security forces and police. The Afghan Taliban also creates shadow provincial and district leaders. These apparently are located mainly in Pakistan, but they reportedly will receive petitions and listen to and resolve disputes, especially about land and water rights. Tribal or other local groups that have been radicalized or need a counterweight to rivals have looked to insurgent support. The Afghan Taliban were able to use long-standing tribal feuds to their advantage when Kabul appointed officials or provided aid to one group, alienating the other, as with Barakzai and Noorzai Pushtuns in Kandahar province. A perceived Kabul bias in favor of the Popalzai, Karzai’s tribe, has led some of their rivals to side with the insurgents. Those Afghan leaders with links with Kabul tend to use these to benefit their own kinship or affinity group almost exclusively, largely because these are the only people they believe they can trust.

The losers in this process are natural recruits to the insurgency. The insurgents have demonstrated an ability to focus on the voids in Afghan society and move to take advantage of kinship, tribal, or patronage ties. These are based, in large part, on tribal loyalties and links between Pushtu-speaking clergy. The Afghan Taliban (as with their Pakistani Taliban counterparts in the FATA) has made a practice of reflecting tribal representation in their appointments. For example, in 2006–09 the coalition found parts of Kandahar Province’s Maiwand District “bandit country” because the population, largely resettled there pre-1978 to occupy irrigated lands from other parts of southern Afghanistan, had turned to the Taliban for support against their neighbors, envious and eager to dispossess them.
¹⁹³
In 2008–10, in Logar and Wardak, the insurgents have tried to build on local ties, tribal loyalties, old HiH links (strong in Logar pre-1996), and leadership personnel dating back to the war against Soviets. In the Kunar, the insurgents have made common cause with timber mafias marginalized by Kabul’s actions. In Kunduz, insurgents rallied Pushtuns feeling threatened by more numerous Tajik neighbors. These insurgent tactics have not always been successful. The situation in Wardak was reportedly helped by co-opting many insurgents into local police forces in 2008.
¹⁹⁴

Insurgency and Development

The Soviets threw a great deal of money and effort at aid programs, especially in Kabul, but it did not buy legitimacy or security for them or their Afghan clients and thus was largely ineffective. In non-Pushtun Afghanistan, there is still widespread resentment that post-2001 development spending has been perceived as concentrated in the Pushtun areas, while everyone else’s problems are ignored.

But the insurgency is not motivated primarily by the lack of development and reconstruction, as clearly the insurgents have brought none of these things and are still finding support. Throughout post-2001 Afghanistan, it has become evident that it is simplistic to equate the provision of the benefits accorded by development—schools, clinics, wells, and roads—with security.

By 2008–10, in much of Afghanistan, perceptions of aid were that it does not prevent, but rather contributes to, instability, with insurgents being paid protection money by donor-funded contractors. “Building something” without insisting on local approval and participation—often frustrating because the Afghans will insist that their own patronage networks benefit—undercuts the local leaders who have been bypassed. Aid that bypasses local or traditional authority damages their perceived legitimacy and weakening them for challenges by competitors, such as insurgents or warlords. The competition for aid resources has been used by insurgents to recruit resentful losers to their side. The availability of aid resources has fueled the culture of corruption. Those benefiting have used their resources and power for resource extraction rather than enabling a better life of Afghans. Grassroots Afghans, especially in Pushtun areas, will not take ownership and—hard to achieve in a kinship or tribal-based collectivist society—take responsibility for it. But aid projects built without this degree of local involvement have gone undefended and the insurgents then destroy it easily. In Pushtun areas, outside aid that does not receive community support creates more for the Afghan insurgents to burn. In the areas of Afghanistan where there is the most need for development, notably in the provinces in the south where the insurgency is most intense, there is also the least capability and motivation for development to occur. There cannot be development without
security, yet there is still progress despite the continuing security setbacks. “Even in the south there is more construction than we think, especially where we have seen communities stand up to the Taliban,” according to BG Marquis Hainse, CF.

That said, development by itself cannot avail in Afghanistan without legitimacy; and legitimacy, in the eyes of Afghans, requires security from outside attack, which the government in Kabul is not doing, especially in much of the south and east. This was the thinking behind the Pakistani-inspired tactic of rocket attacks on Kabul in both the 1980s and 1992–96, which was intended to demonstrate to Kabulis that the government could not defend them. It also suggests the importance of the lack of a functioning national civil sector economy that will provide a degree of unity to Afghanistan and repair the damage caused by decades of fighting, corruption, and instability. It also points out the importance of the lack of alternative employment for young men, making them easy targets for insurgent recruiters or further susceptible to criminal temptations.

But the Afghan insurgents have an interest in development or making life better for Afghans only as far as it advances their goal of attaining power and answering the one existential question: how best to live in conformity with their vision of a Deobandi-influenced Sunni Islam. In some areas the pre-2001 Taliban made local deals to permit schools, even for girls, to operate and basic health services to be provided (both under strict supervision). The current Afghan insurgency has aimed to prevent meaningful development. The Taliban burned down 1,089 schools in Afghanistan in 2005–07 alone.
¹⁹⁵
In the same period, over 40 health workers were killed or kidnapped while delivering services; and at least 36 health facilities were shut down in the east and south due to insecurity.
¹⁹⁶
Some 5,000 schools have closed in Pushtun areas.
¹⁹⁷
As a result of the insurgency being concentrated in the south and east, only 44 percent of Pushtuns have access to girls’ schools while the figures for other groups are over 70 percent.
¹⁹⁸

As the insurgents in Afghanistan destroy clinics and state schools, they largely do not replace them with their own clinics or maktabs (Mosque schools), though there have been some examples of this being done in Kandahar, Helmand, and other southern provinces in 2008–10.
The Taliban has also provided protection to narcotics traffickers where they have funded clinics. The Afghan Taliban has made a major effort of discouraging positive work and prefers disorder and chaos, aiming to present the rigor of their rule as the only viable alternative. In the south and other areas where there are many foreign fighters among the insurgents, most humanitarian work is seen as being in league with Kabul and the Western infidels. One of their initial successes of the insurgency was in forcing the withdrawal of NGOs and most reconstruction and development programs from most of southern and eastern Afghanistan. Burning clinics and schools and the killing of “spies” and collaborators are the message the insurgents wish to send to their potential supporters.

This is a major difference between the pre-2001 Taliban and the current insurgents. The pre-2001 Taliban wanted Western aid and were willing to compromise to some extent to get it as long as their overarching ideology was maintained, at least until the US cruise missile attacks of 1998 and the increasing influence of Al Qaeda cut off the potential for accessing those resources. The insurgents object more to the source of aid—a Western involvement they see as illegitimate—than the concept of aid. In a number of places in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where institutions like schools have been adopted and embraced by the local community and do not have the fingerprints of outsiders on them, only these have been allowed to remain. Schools, mosques, and the like, built by the West, become targets of destruction. Aid is accepted only in some parts of Afghanistan by the current insurgency. In Wardak and Logar provinces in 2008, for example, insurgents made deals with NGOs to allow projects such as basic health services to be implemented by Afghan staff.

The diverse insurgent factions, with their shared links to the Al Qaeda-inspired battle of ideas, have been flexible enough, however, to be able to shift the focus in their war on legitimacy from structures and military operations to politics. These same groups all decided not to engage in widespread offensive actions, and did not attempt to block voters from registering for the 2009 election. They had also previously refrained in the 2004 presidential and 2005 parliamentary elections, reflecting an unwillingness to openly disenfranchise those they were looking to for at least passive support. By 2008, they were even
promulgating a “Taliban constitution” for Afghanistan. It was uncertain how much of this document represented a formal commitment by insurgent leadership (and, if so, what process had led to its adoption), or whether it was an instrument of psychological warfare.

Horror and Hearts and Minds

The Afghan insurgents’ influence and inroads are not without significant flaws. “The Taliban inability to modulate the use of violence has led to overreach,” in the words of LTC Cavoli.
¹⁹⁹
As conflicts in Afghanistan are essentially about legitimacy, unrestricted implementation undercuts claims to legitimate Afghan or Islamic authority. The tactics that decapitate supposed informers with dull knives or send handicapped people to be suicide bombers are unlikely to win a broad base of support in Afghanistan, despite their claims to provide security and conflict resolution. But the overall message has been a powerful one: that the foreigners and the ANA will eventually leave, but the insurgents will stay and take retribution. This has led to continuing reluctance among many grassroot Afghans to cooperate with the government and their foreign supporters.