External actors of instability that drive conflict in Afghanistan include Islamist groups like Al Qaeda, militant foreign fighters, charitable NGOs and foreign governments with varied political agendas such as Pakistan, Iran, Russia, China and even Coalition nations. In other words, no matter what the intent or goal or mission statement of the outside actor, any involvement in Afghanistan upsets the chaotic homeostasis and adds to instability.
With respect to NGOs and development agencies, the population of Afghanistan has demonstrated a dysfunctional dependency. Another article could be written on this subject alone. For the sake of space and relevance, we will keep this brief. There exists government corruption, price-fixing and jealousies that lead to second and third order effects of conflict, welfare-dependencies and fraud. Individuals in GIRoA and regional leaders have established contracting cartels and regularly practice price-fixing[1] schemes to bilk development agencies and Coalition Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT) of their monies; overcharging for contracted services and often providing substandard products, and hiring their own workers who are often not local. This practice reduces the total number of projects completed and creates local disharmony with people that see the disproportionate distribution of cash and benefit. These price-fixing schemes can be painfully simplistic with the low bid following an obvious rotation and bids being submitted at approximately twice the rate for reasonable profit. An observed example of one such price-fixing incident was when five separate projects were announced for bid and five regional companies submitted bids for each project. Not only were all of the bids submitted on paper from the same ream with an identifying flaw, of the five projects up for bid, each company had one “low bid” that was exactly $5,000 less than those of the other four companies. The “winning” contractor for each project clearly charged 2-3 times more than what was considered to be the reasonable price for completion. In these types of instances, the people and the government of Afghanistan criticize the development companies, which are bound by policies created for more stable areas, for paying the fraudulent prices. Further complicating development projects are local conflicts, feuds and jealousies. The authors have worked on development projects where these issues were everyday hurdles to completion of work. One observed example took place in a village split by a river. The people on the “project side” of the river insisted that the project benefit only those villagers living on that side of the river to the exclusion of those living on the other side. Villagers living on the “non-project side” of the river handed the author a note claiming they would “explode” the project if it continued on the opposite side and was not constructed on their side of the river. Another such example is when extra money was saved in the construction of four projects because of honest bookkeeping and utilizing cash-for-work strategies of construction, a fifth project was proposed to the local District Development Committee. The response from the representatives of the four villages having already received projects was that the money should be given to them as leaders and a fifth project should not be considered because it would make the other village as good as theirs.
Perhaps the most troubling of all of the problems associated with development and how it becomes an actor of instability in Afghanistan, instead of a stabilizing factor, is the un-sustainability of utilizing development monies to shore up a broken economy, and the dependencies that it creates. Afghanistan’s population is greater than its present economic carrying capacity. For decades, illicit crops — opium poppy in particular and its refined form, heroin — have been a major contributor to Afghanistan’s economy and a major problem for the rest of the world. Trafficking in heroin provides funding for terrorist networks and is an avenue for many contentious groups in the region to gain money and power. Coalition nations and international NGOs have made counternarcotics (CN) a priority for stabilization and development goals in Afghanistan; though they differ tremendously in approach. Most outside actors agree that if opium production were to halt immediately, the entire economy of Afghanistan would be destroyed and the most affected by this collapse would be the small landholder and farmer. As a result of this thinking, the US has decided to pull out of the poppy eradication business and instead attempt to eliminate heroin refining labs and stop precursors from entering the country. NGOs have decided to follow a course of building local capacity and providing alternative livelihood and development projects as a bridge until a more permanent solution is discovered. The British continue a more hard-line course of eradication, potentially causing farmers who have borrowed against their future crop, or who are share-croppers, to find themselves in the pocket of a drug-lord or Taliban. All of these approaches lack a comprehensive overarching strategy as well as a truly collaborative CN campaign. Populations have become heavily addicted to opium and heroin and farmers have become either indentured to poppy seed suppliers or entrenched in a lifestyle only affordable by producing the only cash-crop that has a yield to labor to land to water ratio to be successful in the austere environment of Afghanistan. The Opium trade is a key element to the delicate balance of chaos, and interference from the outside indubitably upsets this balance.
Though Afghanistan is rich in non-renewable natural resources, lack of security and a non-existent infrastructure make exploitation of these resources impossible in the near term. Many NGOs and development agencies address this issue by providing short-term village and district level economic development projects. Lack of centralized planning and coordination, as well as short deployment tenures for planners, has provided a patchwork of development with no consistency and little in the way of sustainability. Ten years of such projects have created among the Afghan population a dependency on the cash and a sense of entitlement to aid. This dependency/entitlement relationship is akin to a welfare mentality that festers into anger and animosity when aid and assistance are not delivered; once again tipping the balance thus increasing instability.
It goes without saying how Al Qaeda and other militant and Islamist groups foster instability in Afghanistan. Briefly, ancient tribal animosities are fueled and bolstered by involvement of outside military support. The Ghilzai / Durani conflict is the most obvious and documented in Afghanistan and the Hotak / Kharoti split within the Ghilzai is also prevalent in modern conflict. The Ghilzai, once rulers of the area, were overthrown by the Durani and Persians and have been engaged in a tribal feud since. Representing the Hotak-Ghilzai, supported by Al Qaeda is Mullah Omar, the Emir of the original Taliban. His Popalzai-Durani nemesis is Hamid Wali Karzai, President of Afghanistan and backed by Coalition forces and international recognition. The Kharoti-Ghilzai brother-enemy of Mullah Omar is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Leader of the Hezbe-Islami Gulbuddin (HiG). Other groups and individuals that maintain tribal animosities and add to the chaotic balancing act are many warlords, drug-lords, Taliban sub-commanders and mullahs of: Ghilzai and Durani Confederations; other Pashtun tribes and their respective sub-tribes; Tajik, Turkmen and Uzbek ethnics; Hazaras; and the Haqqani Network, led by Jalaluddin Haqqani a Zadran-Pashtun. Were the situation simple and binary like the arms of a balanced scale, as Al Qaeda adds support to one side, Coalition Forces would simply need to add more support to the other side. However, this situation is not binary. It has so many internal actors with such complex and contextual relationships that any involvement by outsiders upsets the balance in unpredictable ways.
Returning to the concept of enemy, as discussed above, the real enemy in Afghanistan is a varied combination of numerous anti-government forces. For lack of a better name, we (ISAF) call them Taliban, though it has been clearly shown that they bear no resemblance to the original Taliban and even make war between themselves. Paraphrasing definitions of Insurgency as set forth in FM 3-24, the United States Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency manual, the end-state of an insurgency is to gain legitimate power within or control over a recognized nation-state. Quoting another contemporaneous article we have written on the de-evolution of insurgency (Meredith, Villarreal, & Wilkinson, 2010): “There are those who believe that there exists in Afghanistan a core element of Taliban; True Believers who continue to perpetrate an insurgency against GIRoA and Coalition forces in order to reestablish an Islamic state such as existed during the time of the prophet Mohammed (Peace be upon him) during the 7th century. This article does not intend to disprove that belief per se, but rather it is our position that if such a group still exists, it has, through effective counterinsurgency, been reduced and marginalized to the point of near irrelevance in the present situation. This paper will also demonstrate that there have been other armed groups in Afghanistan with distinct motivations for many years.” Clearly, the warring elements within Afghanistan are not Insurgents, nor are they a single anti-government entity. They are, however, actors of instability that function and prosper from a weak centralized government. Even individuals within the government itself prosper from the instability in the region.
