In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

other organizations.

The insurgency also includes loosely aligned horizontal networks of full-time and part-time guerrillas, criminal groups, tribes, local powerbrokers, and support networks. Few are motivated by ideology; the majority of insurgents are driven by money, grievances against the government, or coercion. The Taliban’s primary goals remain expanding their territory, instituting sharia law, and creating an Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Taliban leaders describe their struggle as a “confrontation between Islam and apostasy” and have created a shadow government in areas they influence or control.¹⁸ This focus on Islam explains why so many of the Taliban’s shadow governors are mullahs, including Mullah Aminullah (Kandahar), Mullah Naim Barech (Helmand), Mullah Ismail (Zabol), Mullah Rasul (Farah), and Mullah Salam (Kunduz). Historically, the Taliban have attempted to enforce a strict dress code for men, forcing them to grow beards and avoid Western haircuts or dress. But in some areas they have temporarily relaxed their insistence on a strict interpretation of Deobandi Islam to secure popular support. They released an updated code of conduct before Afghanistan’s August 2009 presidential elections, noting that the “mujahideen should strive to win the hearts and minds of Muslims by treating them with justice and good faith.”¹⁹ And senior Taliban leaders created an accountability commission to relieve members involved in corruption or unwarranted brutality toward the local population.

Not surprisingly, Taliban commanders have developed a fairly sophisticated understanding of the tribal dynamics in their areas. It is impossible to generalize about the Taliban’s overall tribal strategy because of their adaptability to conditions and shifting tribal dynamics. In broad terms, however, they aim to take advantage of grievances against the government or international forces, conducting targeted assassinations against collaborators, and capitalizing on Taliban momentum (and the perception of a domino effect) to increase their appeal to locals. In April 2009, the Taliban announced the beginning of Operation Nasrat (Victory), noting that they would continue to use “ambushes, offensives, explosions, martyrdom-seeking attacks and surprise attacks.”²⁰ Taliban commanders being knowledgeable of Pashtun tribes, sub-tribes, clans, and qawms, can convince local leaders that resistance is futile, prompting them to either disband or join them. The Taliban sometimes appoint commanders who come from local tribes to more effectively reach out to the population. And they have recruited tribes that are the majority in their districts but have been marginalized by ruling minority tribes, such as the Popalzais or Barakzais, who are favored by the central government. The Taliban’s tribal engagement strategy is perhaps best summarized in Mullah Omar’s 2009 code of conduct, or La’iha, which provided guidance that “Taliban will constructively engage tribal leaders” and “commanders should, where possible, be reassigned to their ancestral, tribal area” to better engage tribal leaders at the local level.²¹

The ultimate goal of any insurgent movement is to become the government. While I was visiting Paktia Province in October 2009, tribal leaders explained to me that local Taliban were involved in trying to resolve a land dispute between the Chamkani and Moqbil tribes in Chamkani District. “The government has failed to resolve the land dispute,” noted one local, “and the Taliban has moved in to broker it. They are trying to play the role of the government.”²²

A Local Strategy

The Taliban’s tribe-and community-based strategy is a purposeful, grassroots effort to take advantage of a government vacuum in rural areas—especially Pashtun areas. The Afghan and international governments have failed to counter the Taliban at that level. The war will be won in Afghanistan’s rural villages, not in the cities. The reality is that the United States is stuck in Afghanistan and Pakistan because it is not in America’s national security interests to abandon the region. But as violence levels continue to increase, Afghanistan is at a critical juncture. Rather than banking on stability entirely from the top down, as Amanullah Khan and the Soviet-backed regimes tried and failed to do, it would be more prudent to develop a bottom-up strategy.

What would such a strategy look like? General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has already indicated that it should be predicated on a core tenet of counterinsurgency: protecting the local population.²³ Both insurgents and counterinsurgents need the support of the population to win. As the last chapter argued, protecting the Afghan population will require building more competent Afghan army and police forces, countering corruption at the local and national levels, and targeting Taliban and other insurgents in Pakistan.

It is critical to neutralize senior Taliban leaders in Baluchistan Province, where most of the senior Taliban officials reside, since neither the United States nor Pakistan governments have conducted serious operations there. It is telling that many Taliban leaders have moved their families to such Baluchistan cities as Quetta. The Pakistan government leaves them alone and, in a number of cases, elements of the government provide active support. The Pakistan government would almost certainly respond unfavorably to capturing or otherwise targeting senior Taliban officials in Baluchistan. In October 2009, Pakistan Frontier Corps forces halted the movement of nearly eight hundred trucks along Highway 4 from Quetta, Pakistan, to Spin Boldak, Afghanistan, because of the possibility of U.S. airstrikes in Baluchistan. “I interpreted this as a signal from the Pakistan government that it was demonstrating leverage over the United States, and wasn’t afraid to use it,” one senior U.S. military official told me. “What better way to show it than halting logistics supplies going to NATO military bases.”²⁴ In previous weeks, there had been some unconfirmed media reports that U.S. president Barack Obama supported targeted strikes in Baluchistan.²⁵

Instead, a more effective counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan needs to “go local,” as one Afghan government cabinet minister put it to me.²⁶ Since late 2001, the United States has crafted its Afghanistan strategy on the assumption that stability will be achieved by building a strong central government. While this is an admirable long-term objective, as a strategy it is fatally flawed.

In many countries where the United States has engaged in state-building, such as Germany and Japan after World War II, U.S. policy makers inherited a strong central government that allowed them to rebuild from the top down.²⁷ Even in Iraq, Saddam Hussein amassed a powerful military and intelligence apparatus that brutally suppressed dissent from the center. But Afghanistan is different. Power has often come from the bottom up, especially in Pashtun areas of the country, the focus of today’s insurgency. It is striking that when considering Afghanistan’s recent history, we often turn to the failed military exploits of the British or the Soviet Union. Just look at the list of books that many newly deployed soldiers to Afghanistan are urged to read, such as Lester Grau’s The Bear Went Over the Mountain and Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin’s The Bear Trap, which document some of the searing battlefield lessons that contributed to the Soviet defeat. A better—or at least equally relevant—focus needs to be spent on understanding what factors have contributed to Afghanistan’s stable periods.

The Musahiban dynasty, which included Zahir Shah, Nadir Shah, and Daoud Khan, ruled Afghanistan from 1929 to 1978. It was one of the most stable periods in modern Afghan history, partly because the Musahibans understood the importance of local power. Many U.S. policy makers have not grasped this reality. Even Afghans have had to learn this lesson the hard way. Amanullah Khan, who ruled Afghanistan from 1919 to 1929, tried to create a strong central state in the image of Ataturk’s Turkey and Reza Shah’s Iran. This proved disastrous. The central government’s attempt to push into rural areas sparked social and political revolts, first in Khowst in 1923 and then in Jalalabad in 1928. By 1929, local rebellions became so serious that Amanullah was forced to abdicate, and Afghanistan deteriorated into several months of anarchy.²⁸ Masses of rural Afghans today still reject a strong central government actively meddling in their affairs. In southern and eastern Afghanistan, which are dominated by Pashtuns, many consider the central government a foreign entity.

“My allegiance is to my family first, then to my village, sub-tribe, and tribe,” one tribal elder from Kandahar told me earlier this year. The government played no meaningful role in his daily life.²⁹

I have often been struck by the disconnect between the center and periphery when traveling through areas where, as recently as this year, some villagers had never heard of President Hamid Karzai, who has led the country since 2001. In a few cases, they even thought the U.S. military forces I was traveling with were Soviets, not realizing that the Soviet army withdrew in 1989. The lessons of Amanullah Khan were not lost on the Musahibans. While they managed to build a strong army and competent government technocrats, they exempted many Pashtun tribes from military service and established a fairly effective tribal engagement strategy in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Zahir Shah supported village-level defense forces, called arbakai, to establish order in eastern Afghanistan. These village-level forces were used for defensive purposes and organized under the auspices of legitimate tribal institutions.

The result was clear: Law and order were established by a combination of local institutions