Afghanistan: Mapping the Insurgency

This parallel economy has incentivized the rise of a variety of ‘conflict entrepreneurs’[32] who use ethnic patronage and extensive independent militias to coercively entrench their power and relevance. The 2005 parliamentary elections saw 40 of those elected associated with armed groups, 24 affiliated with criminal gangs, 17 drug traffickers, and 19 facing serious human-rights charges.[33] The September 2010 parliamentary elections continues the trend with only one female (sister of the ANA Chief of Staff) feeling secure enough to run for office in Khost[34] and widespread vote-rigging in Loya Paktiya leading to a vote described as “doomed already and fixed before it starts.”[35] Even in provinces relatively removed from the insurgency such as Badakshan, “routes and border crossings… correspond to the map of political power groupings,”[36] bad news to any aspirant without his hand in the cross-border smuggling trade.

Such pervasive abuse of official authority has incentivized government stakeholders to fight for a continued status quo, although fighting the war for “greed rather than grievance.”[37] However their failure to meet basic communal needs has also been manna for Taliban recruiters and significantly narrowed the legitimacy of the Karzai government, ceding political space to insurgents. A survey by Integrity Watch Afghanistan revealed disturbing statistics: 67% of those polled admitted they had not sought a single government service in the past year while 50% admitted to seeking out non-state justice providers, essentially legitimizing insurgent structures.[38] The extent of corruption and misgovernance is best demonstrated in the capital flight out of Kabul Airport, estimated at $3.65bn annually, more than a quarter of Afghan GDP and potentially more than the government officially collects in tax and customs revenues.[39]

A doctrinal shift towards counterinsurgency has also failed to reap adequate dividends to date. Created with the understanding that “reconstruction and development in the absence of security for the population have little enduring value,” efforts have been made to unfold a ‘government in a box’ after coalition-led military offensives. The reality so far is grim, as voiced by Lt. Col. Peter Benchoff, a 101^st Airborne battalion commander who notes that months after an offensive into Kandahar, “Security sucks. Development? Nothing substantial. Information campaign? Nobody believes us. Governance? We’ve had one hourlong visit by a government official in the last 2 ½ months”[40] Kinetic operations too have failed to degrade Taliban strength and support. Special Forces operations are at their highest tempo since the war began[41], as are drone strikes against high-value targets in Pakistan[42] but key metrics of improved Afghan collaboration such as IED turn-in ratios continue to decline from 4.5% in early 2009 to 2.2% today.[43]

The Conflict

At the local level, various sources of discontent persist, including victimization under predatory elites and an official failure to deliver on expected economic improvements or degrade illegal enterprises. Moving away from the conception of the insurgency drawing strength from a disenfranchised populace, another interpretation is that of an ethnic conflict pitting Northern Tajik/Uzbek powerbrokers against the Pashtun south. There is some merit to this interpretation given the existence of an acute and entrenched ethnic security dilemma. All parties are armed and many non-Pashtun communities who suffered under Taliban rule are allergic to the idea of Taliban resurrection. This is particularly true of the Hazaras, but also large segments of the Tajik and Uzbek populace. They are not so easily pigeonholed, however, as individual ethnic concerns have the potential to be overridden by other status concerns, among those marginalized by the current power structure. Such an example is Hazara commander Sedaqat in Daikundi, who briefly flirted with the government before rejoining the Taliban and kidnapping two French nationals,[44] or the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which helps give the Taliban a local face in the North.[45]

Today ethnic cleavages have grown increasingly pronounced as a direct result of elite posturing and government decisions. The integration of former Northern Alliance commanders into the post-Taliban structure led to fears of Pashtun marginalization and the creeping de-legitimization of a Karzai government perceived as window-dressing for an Uzbek/Tajik coalition. An embattled Karzai further entrenched ethnic powers in the 2009 presidential elections, by allying with various ethno-warlords, including Uzbek Abdul Rashid Dostum, Tajik Ismail Khan and Mohammed Fahim and Hazara Mohammed Mohaqqeq.[46] Despite all the aforementioned having been implicated in various crimes, including wartime atrocities, involvement in criminal enterprises and provincial mismanagement and corruption, their command of ethnic bases made them crucial electoral allies. ISAF-NATO are also seen as complicit in these oppressive power-structures. Not all Afghans can be as understanding as a Pashtun leader in Balkh when he stated, “America does not support Dostum so that he can loot people’s homes. We understand that”[47]

The willingness to tolerate armed factional leaders in exchange for a basic modicum of security has greatly weakened the democratization process and ordaining the prevailing perception of state institutions as elements to be “captured and manipulated by … factions that can summon up the guns and money to do so.”[48] It does not help that many of these men have used their official posts to dispense patronage for ethnic compatriots and entrench their hegemony in institutional structures. Under now Vice President and former Defense Minister Fahim’s guidance, the Afghan National Army (ANA) counts 41% of enlisted personnel as Tajiks, vastly exceeding the Eikenberry guidelines of 25%.[49] Tajiks also command 70% of ANA battalions, and the recent Pashtun appointee to ANA Chief of Staff is believed to command the loyalty of only a single brigade commander, while Fahim through his networks is assured the support of an estimated six of eleven brigade commanders and twelve of forty six battalion commanders.[50]

Interestingly, perhaps the strongest opponents of an ethnic interpretation to the conflict are the Taliban themselves, who take great pains to portray themselves in religious-nationalist terms as a pan-Islamic party rejecting both tribe and ethnicity as the  “standard-bearers… of the Afghan-Pashtun vendetta against the Americans”[51] Yet in many provinces, they have benefited from leveraging existing ethnic grievances as in districts in Wardak and Logar provinces where they have supported the Pashtun Kuchi nomads against the Hazaras.[52] Directly the conflict has little bearing on the insurgency, being related to historical tensions over grazing rights, but the exploitation of ethnic cleavages allows the Taliban to make inroads into districts they would otherwise be a marginalized force.

Despite the Taliban being predominantly Pashtun (see map) and often the “authentic voice of rural Pashtun conservatism,”[53] it is not true that all Pashtuns are Taliban. Powerful Pashtun confederations such as the Durrani Zirak, composed of Karzai’s Popolzai tribe and the Barakzai and Alokzai tribes, all of whom have benefited in the post-2001 Afghan order, are vociferously anti-Taliban. Their rise has, however, marginalized other tribes, such as Helmand’s Ishaqzai, who have found themselves on the wrong side of an unequal competition for government resources and control of the drugs trade. Capitalizing on this marginalization, the Taliban’s Helmand shadow administration consciously elevates Ishaqzai and relies upon them as a key source of provincial recruitment. Similarly, in other provinces, the systematic undermining of tribal identity by various armed groups over the past few decades has meant that today tribes are no longer independent actors, but rather an “arena in which political competition takes place,”[54] including recruitment by ‘tribal entrepreneurs’ from the government and the Taliban.[55]

In many ways the conflict was developed and catalyzed on the global level. The bipolar struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States set the stage for a large-scale proxy-war that destroyed institutions and set the stage for the intra-factional anarchy that was to pave the path for the Taliban. The subsequent 9/11 attacks whose inspirational genesis emanated out of Afghanistan provided the overarching rationale for coalition involvement in Afghanistan centering around the denial of safe havens for Islamist militants with a penchant for global jihad. Today with domestic political pressure intensifying and wider global issues requiring attention, the Obama Administration appears to have diluted its goals from transformative nation-building to basic conflict limitation mechanisms centered around the building up of indigenous Afghan military capacity while broadening aerial strike campaigns against high-value insurgent targets.