Afghanistan (36 page)

Many, especially returning Pushtun exiles, Kabulis and technocrats, along with their foreign or Pakistani supporters, have been critical that stronger action has not been taken to exclude the warlords from Afghan politics and life. But even had Afghanistan not been threatened by terrorism, insurgency, and narcotics, it would have taken a generation for the warlords to be replaced by state institutions as they were rebuilt. Nor does it appear that there was or is strong support among non-Pushtun warlords’ clients and their ethnolinguistic groups for excluding them. Where warlords have not acted to enrich themselves or oppress the locals, they have considerable opportunity to strengthen bonds, pass on information, perform charity and redistribution of resources, and even provide security. In short, carry out the duties expected of Afghan “patrons.”

Returning Exiles

While many Western observers tend to equate exiles with moderates and the pre-1978 regimes in which they flourished, this is not necessarily the case. Because many exiles did not have the bitter but instructive experience of battlefield cooperation against the Soviets, they retain their pre-1978 expectations of power in Afghanistan untouched by intervening events. Because a higher percentage of Pushtun elites was in exile than non-Pushtun elites, these expectations often include an identification of Afghan state power with Pushtuns in a way that is not necessarily a viable option any longer.

To many exiles, the men who fought and resisted were often seen not as the heroes who had battled first the Soviets and then the Taliban, but as human-rights violators. They were held responsible for the civil war of 1992–2001 and its widespread devastation, especially in Kabul. Many returning exiles looked to the international community to put them on trial and remove them forever from Afghan politics. This motivated the Afghan parliament in 2007 to pass an amnesty law preventing the state from independently prosecuting Afghans for war crimes from past conflict, to the personal benefit of many members of parliament.
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For some former Afghan fighting men, the insult “
sag shoy
” (dog washer), coined by a former HiH commander, summed up their visceral dislike of some of the returning exiles. One veteran Afghan political observer believed “The contribution of the resistance was totally ignored” by the new government in Kabul and their foreign supporters.

The exiles ended up using their superior relationship with the US and other international donors to come out on top. Some of the “dog washers” had been just that. Other, more senior returning exiles received jobs because they offered foreign donors and allies at least the appearance of greater competence and less corruption than did their counterparts in the (predominantly non-Pushtun) Northern Alliance. However, their success has been limited to Kabul or other areas where the foreign influence is determinative. In the countryside, their foreign ties held little sway. Compounding this division is the fact that once an Afghan leaves the country, it is hard for him to re-establish himself on the local scene. Afghan expectations of legitimacy largely include that of shared
experience, especially those as traumatic and violent as the conflicts of 1978–2001. It was difficult for returning exiles to re-integrate themselves. In the words of one long-time Kabul-based observer of Afghanistan, reflecting the attitude of a large portion of the population, “Afghans like to follow a winner. Winners don’t run away.”

Yet in a country where warfare and violence have outweighed political discourse since 1978, the expectation that the returning exiles would function effectively when thrust into a heavily armed, radicalized and polarized political system was unrealistic. Some of their foreign supporters looked to ISAF to use their good, clean, European non-American force to sustain these returning Afghans. Some returning exiles, indeed, had resumes and backgrounds that would qualify them for cabinet-level positions in just about any country. Others had fought themselves as anti-Soviet guerrillas before going into exile. By 2007–09, the returning exiles had broadened their base by reaching out to former Communists, Kabulis, and technocrats. Widespread resentment against former Communists by the former mujahideen had kept them out of cabinet-level positions in previous years. Foreign supporters pressed Karzai to bring in former Communists who had proven capable and had reputations for rectitude to important positions, including that of Minister of the Interior and Minister of Counter Narcotics. Others now hold command positions in the ANA and ANP. Many of those brought in to the government in this way were Pushtuns, leading many non-Pushtuns to see this as a move by the Karzai government to strengthen its ethnolinguistic constituency.

Land and Water

Conflicts over land and water rights underlie a lot of Afghanistan’s internal strife, including those relating to corruption and even terrorism. Arable land and water are both scarce in what is generally an infertile country, and this scarcity adds to their value as a source of income and status in an overwhelmingly agrarian society. This is perhaps the main area where the inability of the Kabul government to put an effective civil system in place has the most direct impact on rural Afghanistan and thus their hold on power throughout the provinces. In the absence of a state
system to allocate water resources and adjudicate land titles, a mixture of traditional law and force has tended to resolve disputes, delegitimizing Kabul even further and giving insurgents and warlords a hold on power that they would not otherwise have.

Traditional law approaches tend to stress the use of
shuras
or
jirgas
. The
hoqooq
, a local traditional dispute-resolution body, made up of experts on land tenure and ownership, is still used in some districts. Mediation by
sayids
is also used. In some areas, the state judicial system has been able to supplant these traditional mechanisms. In insurgent-controlled areas, these have been replaced by rough justice under a veneer of Sharia law, and those who take in traditional dispute resolution are frequently murdered. Much of what is called warlord oppression is their ability to resolve disputes over water and property in favor of themselves or those close to them. Many of these conflicts turn violent, a fact often lost in the larger concern about the insurgency, narcotics, and crime. It is estimated that several hundred Afghans a year are killed in land and water—related disputes.
³³⁹
A non-corrupt local government or court system was absent in the sites of many of these disputes.

Allegiances and orientations are frequently determined, at a local level, by Kabul’s willingness to favor one mode of agriculture over another. In the 1970s and 1980s, the conflict between Pushtu-speaking Kuchi nomadic herdsmen and Uzbek or Hazara sedentary pastoralists was based on competition between different agricultural practices; Pushtun-dominated governmental authority looked away as cattle were driven over standing crops. Dostum’s original Uzbek militia, formed in the 1980s, was intended to halt this practice. In the 1980s, some of Soviet-occupied Kabul’s strongest rural allies were not committed Communists but those who depended on the central government to allow them to hold on to irrigated land against the claims of their neighbors, especially in areas such as those around Khost and in Kandahar province’s Maiwand district. It is not surprising that in 2001 the Taliban’s strongest supporter in the south, Mullah Abdul Wahid in the Baghran district of Helmand province, was an “upstream” leader, who had been able to keep scarce water for local use due to his personal relations with the Taliban. Since then, he has skillfully kept on good relations with both Kabul and the insurgents, which
has enabled him to remain politically important in Helmand through his ability to affect the water supply.
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Some of the water and land—use conflicts cross international and ethnolinguistic borders. The years of drought pre-2001 led to the rise of opium cultivation, which requires little rainfall. For example, the Wazirs, with close links to Pakistan’s transport mafia and timber mafia (both Pushtun-dominated), have been clear-cutting vast areas of Paktika and Paktia provinces since the mid-1980s. This has put them into direct conflict with the local Kharoshti Pushtuns from different tribes. Elsewhere, like the Kunar valley, where the Kabul government’s ban on timber exports had finally stuck by 2009, unemployed low-level timber mafia members found an alternative source of income as foot soldiers for HiH and proved formidable enemies to US Army units.
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Gender

The nature of Afghan culture puts great significance on gender relationships. Control of paternity is vital to a patrilineal, patrimonial society in which lineage and blood ties remain key determinants of political orientation and alliances. Marriage in Afghanistan tends to be arranged, a political and economic alliance between two lineages. The companionate marriages of the West are viewed with hostility by some Afghans across the political and social spectrums as an implicit threat to Afghan and Islamic ways. Reflecting the widespread use of Islamic and traditional Afghan themes to mobilize and radicalize Afghans in the conflicts of 1978–2001 and the pre-2001 Taliban regime’s making the enforced absence of women from the public sphere a core value, control of female life in general and sexuality in particular is often emphasized to the point of obsession. A man who cannot control “his” women is often seen as not much of a man, or, worse still, a man without honor, as it is also a way of controlling his lineage and holding on to power, at least domestically. Control is often seen as requiring withholding women from outside employment, education, or contact with non-family members.

Just as Afghanistan, though now defined by conflict, traditionally saw more cooperation than bloodshed, the worst elements of gender-related oppression also stem from the societal dislocation and polarization
stemming from decades of warfare. The irony is that an insurgency that claims to be motivated by Islamic requirements to safeguard the honor of women (and the men that must protect them) from the threat inherent in an infidel foreign presence has helped create an Afghanistan where widows beg, farmers sell their daughters to opium traffickers to compensate for falling income, and forced marriage or rape is used to create power relationships for the benefit of warlords, terrorists, insurgents, and narcotics traffickers alike. None of this was part of the old Afghanistan. Such gender oppression is still limited in scope and application. But the results of this and other conflicts—the insurgency and those about religion and modernization—have the potential to make life much worse for the future of Afghan women. Conversely, the potential to make life better, though real, remains more limited and incremental.

In 2003, Afghanistan signed the Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against women without reservations, unlike most other countries that base their personal status laws on Sharia. Article 7 of the 2004 Afghan constitution specifically identified Afghanistan as being required to abide by the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as treaties and conventions. Afghanistan has a Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MoWA) and has ensured that governmental development plans, including the Afghan National Development Strategy (ANDS), have emphasized gender mainstreaming. What is significant is the disconnect between the policies implicit in these actions and the political realities of an Afghanistan defined by its conflicts.

To many Afghans, the need for the patriarchal head-of-family to keep control over his family’s honor mandates a rigid separation of the private from the public. The position of women in Afghanistan life and society does not reflect any particular Afghan or Islamic pathology but is comparable to that of other poor and underdeveloped countries. Indeed, Afghanistan has traditionally proven resistant to some of the more severe gender-related practices that resulted in oppressive outcomes in the sub-continent or elsewhere in the Islamic world. Yet this area remains a source of conflict. Any action by outsiders that has the potential to affect, let alone benefit, Afghan women is transformed by rumors and the Taliban culture to be an assault on honor and an attempt to defeat Islam
and the Afghan patrilineal society. Any veteran aid worker in Afghanistan or the refugee camps in Pakistan can tell of programs or activities intended to benefit Afghan women, even those teaching basic sanitation or handicrafts, that resulted in foreigners being accused of enabling immoral behavior and causing men to lose control of their family and lineage, shaming their kin.

Gender emerged as a source of tension in Afghanistan starting with the changes in the 1960s and 1970s. This included acid-throwing attacks against Afghan women in Kabul dressed in Western clothing. Its importance has been fueled by failed attempts first by the Communists and then Afghan Taliban to use state power to transform gender relationships in order to bring their own version of the future. This meant “liberation” from the norms of Afghan and Islamic culture for the Communists and a withdrawal from the public sphere for the Taliban. These were the only Afghan governments to attempt to dictate the terms of gender relationships within the family. The Communists (especially the Khalqis of 1978–79) and the Taliban, despite their ideological differences, were both totalitarians, demanding state involvement in personal life; both parties “told us how we must treat our women,” in a common Afghan characterization. The Soviets tried to use the women of urban Afghanistan as a surrogate proletariat to strengthen their political consolidation in the 1980s, who would receive resources (jobs, money, access to education, cheap food) in return for political loyalty. This policy helped bring stability to urban centers, but could not turn around the widespread hatred of the Soviet presence. Most Kabul governments throughout history have treated the division between public and private as a firewall and do not aim to interfere with domestic life. Actions seen as interfering led to widespread resistance to Communist and Taliban rule.