War From the Ground Up (9 page)

The political history of Helmand between 2001 and 2005 exemplifies how labels such as ‘Taliban' and ‘government' were used figuratively by local actors to benefit their interests in a kaleidoscopic political environment, manoeuvring vis-à-vis one another. Elements of the insurgency, and indeed elements of the Afghan National Security Forces, could be seen as holding patterns for factional interests until the next stage of their conflict with each other.

After 2001 local militia commanders had carved up Helmand between them as the coalition looked for allies to sweep up the remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Apart from Akhundzada, Malem Mir Wali brought his militia recruited mainly from the Barakzai tribe, which was based out of Gereshk, Helmand's second city, within the Afghan government security structure. He subsequently served as Member of Parliament for Helmand in Kabul. Other key posts went to militia commanders who had de facto control in the districts. Thus Daud Mohammed Khan, who controlled an Alikozai militia from Sangin, became the provincial head of the National Directorate of Security. Abdul Rahman Jan, who controlled a militia from the Noorzai tribe, became the Chief of Police.

Mike Martin, a British army officer, and Pashto speaker, with close knowledge of central Helmand, has argued in
A Brief History of Helmand
(2011) that the fact that these militia commanders were all on the government ‘side' meant little. They continued to attack one another, and those outside the government patronage network, and dressed up this ongoing low-level violence as government versus ‘Taliban'. Martin cites several clashes in the early days between Abdul Rahman Jan and Akhundzada, and between Malim Mir Wali and Akhundzada; subsequently Abdul Rahman Jan joined Akhundzada in attacking Malim Mir
Wali's men. Martin makes clear how all actors used their connections to the coalition to attack their rivals. At one point Malem Mir Wali and Gul Agha Sherzai, the Barakzai governor of Kandahar, almost managed to persuade the US military to strike Akhundzada himself. This was only vetoed with the intervention of the senior US general in Kabul.
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The background to this was another layer of tribal-factional conflict that involved the Barakzai tribe and Malim Mir Wali, the leader of a mainly Barakzai militia called the 93
^rd
Division, an anachronistic legacy of the Soviet era. Daud Mohammed Khan had come into confrontation with Malim Mir Wali over the expansion of the former's power base in Sangin into the latter's in central Helmand. This tension linked into wider power balances in southern Afghanistan between Barakzai strongman Gul Agha Sherzai (who backed Mir Wali) and President Karzai's late half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai (who backed Sher Mohammed Akhundzada and Daud Mohammed Khan), both powerful government figures who were competing for power in Kandahar city. This led to a series of clashes near Gereshk, the second city of Helmand, which ultimately resulted in the disarmament of the 93
^rd
Division by the government and the marginalisation of Barakzai power in central Helmand.

These clashes were dressed up as part of the government against Taliban fight, as comments from Sher Mohammed Akhundzada's spokesman concerning Afghan army and police operations in September 2005 exemplify: ‘anti-insurgency operations conducted in Gereshk District of the southern Helmand Province have led to the killing of a large number of miscreants and arrest of 60'.
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Indeed the practice of arresting tribal enemies as ‘Taliban', and the theft of one another's opium stocks as operations against ‘drug smugglers', was commonplace.
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Sarah Chayes' book,
The Punishment of Virtue
(2006), paints a similar picture of the kaleidoscopic dynamics in Kandahar city in the early years of the current Afghan conflict.
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In the context of Helmand, Martin makes clear that the biggest losers were groups who were ‘not included in government patronage networks'. The Ishaqzai in Sangin, the Kharotei in Nad-e Ali and the Kakars in Garmsir, for example, were tribal groups not represented in the provincial government, and were rapaciously abused. These groups are today associated with the insurgency in Helmand. Their reasons for appealing to the Taliban were logical in terms of self-interest rather than as part of a wider ‘Taliban' ideological agenda. Antonio Giustozzi has
argued in
Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan 2002–2007
(2008) that the extent to which ‘Karzai's cronies' antagonised particular groups of people gave the Taliban a ready base of support.
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In a Chatham House paper on Afghanistan of December 2010, Stephen Carter and Kate Clark argued that:

The human rights officer at the European Union told one author that they had documented illegal arrests, torture and other abuses carried out by government officials and police in the province [Helmand pre-2006]… Tribal enmity aggravated many of these injustices: Alizai circles around Governor Akhundzada marginalised and ‘taxed' Achakzai communities, and officials have been accused of selectively eradicating poppy crops and punishing smugglers belonging to tribal rivals, and of packing state offices and security forces with their tribal supporters… The conflict in Helmand is to a large extent a drugs turf war … with figures on both the government and Taliban sides protecting their interests.
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The actual reasons for the violence of 2006 are complex. There was no doubt an element of cross-border pressure directed by the Taliban leadership from Pakistan, which increased in late 2005. However, tribal loyalties and the self-interest of the Afghan government power brokers cut across a neat insurgent-versus-government narrative.

Martin argues that after Daud Mohammed Khan, Abdul Rahman Jan and Akhundzada were successively removed from office by international pressure in 2005 and threatened (or actually disarmed) by the national disarmament process, there was a power vacuum, as they had been the de facto government forces. Critically, ejecting them from the Afghan government structure removed their incentive to support President Karzai. The deployment in 2006 thus tried to extend the rule of the by-then non-existent Provincial Afghan Government. This was particularly problematic in northern Helmand, the heartland of the Alizais who had a history of hostility to the British. When British troops legitimately fought back against those who attacked them, they antagonised what was a more complex political issue; this contributed to the formation of a more genuine and lethal insurgency.

General Sir Peter Wall, in evidence to the Defence Select Committee's July 2011 report, discusses the earlier part of the summer of 2006 in Helmand. He states that the ‘crisis started to unfold' when:

the Taliban had the District Centres in Northern Helmand under pressure (…) There was, undoubtedly, pressure coming from the Akhundzada axis. If the
Government flag had fallen in any of these district centres and the Taliban flag had replaced it—it was totemic stuff like that, it was the battle of the flagpoles in some ways—the UK effort, in terms of its recognition of Afghan political motivation from the district level through the provincial level up to the national level … would have been in political jeopardy.
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Hence General Wall acknowledges the importance of local political dynamics, but identifies that as the wider perception of the conflict was framed in terms of government versus Taliban, this constrained British actions. More specifically, the British had to intervene in northern Helmand, in the sense that Afghan government authority, as subjective a term as that may have been in 2006 in Helmand, could not be seen politically to have been displaced by that of the ‘Taliban'. This was despite the ‘Taliban' insurgents being in actuality for the most part local political factions, who had previously themselves effectively been the Afghan government forces. General Wall's evidence illustrates how of having understood the conflict through an overly polarised lens was a broad issue, engaging the perceptions of wider strategic audiences, as much as that of the military on the ground, who may have understood some of the basic local political factors at the time (as General Wall does), but were nonetheless trapped in a two-way narrative.

In Helmand in 2006, and indeed more widely in Afghanistan, the reciprocal escalation of violence, unconstrained by genuinely bilateral state structures which serve to channel and contain violence, has unnecessarily created enemies for the coalition and catalysed the insurgency in its earlier phases. This encouraged the growth of what David Kilcullen has termed ‘accidental guerrillas'.
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The case of the Kharotei tribe in central Helmand's Nad-Ali district, which I base on Michael Martin's personal involvement in understanding these dynamics, exemplifies the problem of a polarised concept of conflict generating ‘accidental guerrillas'. The Kharotei are one of a number of groups who moved to Nad-Ali from eastern Afghanistan as economic migrants during the 1950s and 1960s. There had been long-running tension over land rights there with other tribes, particularly the Noorzai. This tension was emphasised in the control of revenue from the opium crop, a hostility which pre-dated the 2001 Afghan conflict.

Nad-Ali was not a ‘Taliban' area during the early part of the British operation in Helmand. In 2006 and 2007 British convoys could generally drive through it without attack. The local Afghan police in 2007
were dominated by the Noorzai tribe. They wanted the Kharotei opium crop, and fought them for it. This group of the Afghan police then claimed to be fighting the ‘Taliban' and got support from British troops, who were indeed engaged by fighters of the Kharotei tribal militia. That move itself had been prefigured by the British forces' suspicions of the village where the Kharotei tribal leadership lived, called Shin Kalay. When British forces had first moved into Nad-Ali in 2008 and asked the district governor, a Noorzai, where the Taliban were based, he had pointed this village out, in line with his interests.
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The Kharotei fighters then were accidental guerrillas; later they could probably be more genuinely defined as Taliban, as war's reciprocal violence accentuated emotional antagonism.

In summary, the political history of Helmand immediately before and during 2006 demonstrates that this was not a two way fight, but an extension of pre-existing, normal, kaleidoscopic political activity, albeit within a context in which the use of violence to further political ends was relatively normal too. To an extent local factional interests were able to exploit the coalition's initial naivety as to the actual political dynamics of Helmand in 2006 and tap into coalition resources to further their interests against other factions. However, the coalition was also achieving its aims in Helmand and in Afghanistan, which had more to do with global issues such as terrorism than purely the benefit of the Afghan people. So the extent to which local actors used the coalition to pursue their own ends needs to be seen in the context of the whole Afghan operation having aims beyond Afghanistan: there was give and take operating in both directions—between the coalition and local partners.

The category of people who are most ruthlessly exploited by subscription to a polarised conception of the conflict are often the foreign jihadists. They are typically, and somewhat tragically, Pakistani teenagers who are exploited by local Afghan insurgent commanders as ‘martyrs' for cannon fodder. In my experience idealistic young foreign jihadists are often viciously bullied by older local insurgent commanders to perform attacks in which they will very likely die; their terrified pleadings and regrets at the last minute are frequently the response. I have tended to come across this reality, which presents a far more authentic voice than jihadist videos, when Afghan insurgent commanders have been known to banter to one another about their ‘unwilling martyr', a standard, and grotesque, joke among them. Far from participating in what they
thought was an ideological war, many young jihadists are in fact being exploited by local actors to pursue their own interests. Indeed, suicide bombers are sometimes sold between Afghan insurgent commanders.

Just as the polarised Afghan government-Taliban model is insufficient to comprehend the conflict in itself, so too is an exclusive retention of other models, for example the idea that it is not a war but a tribal conflict. Tribal motivations are important, but tend to be quickly discarded when they do not serve the actor's self-interest. The ruthless pragmatism that has characterised the political history of Helmand since the start of the Soviet war supports this.

There are definite axes of tension in the conflict, which can in themselves be polarised, such as the most important driver of the conflict: the Afghan government-insurgency antagonism. To deconstruct that to the point where it plays no role would be nonsense; it remains the most important tension. However, the point is that these central tensions exist within a far more complex web of affiliations, and to see everything through a single, if pre-eminent, axis of tension is myopic. The key tensions are simply powerful magnets, which can work to repel and attract actors in the political kaleidoscope; the only truly consistent themes are self-interest and survival, the latter meant in both a political and a literal sense.

The illegitimacy of the rigidly polarised narrative went for a long time undetected by the British parliament's official reports on Helmand, which did not understand that many of the ‘Taliban' were already there before 2006, albeit as militias who had backed the Afghan government. Such narrow conceptual boundaries led to confusion. Lord Malloch-Brown elsewhere in his evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in 2009 asserts that ‘the strength of the insurgent opposition we have faced in Helmand has surprised us; there is no way around that'.
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Actually, there might well have been a way around that, which was to have understood the situation on its own terms, rather than to have imposed an artificial and simplistic polarity. The February 2011 House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee Report presents a more realistic assessment. For instance, it recognises the insurgency as a franchise: