Afghanistan (14 page)

This network survives today and runs inside Afghanistan, providing support for the insurgents.
⁵²
However, the degree of control in ISI hands is uncertain. The ISI claims to be unable to turn the network off. Post-2001, Pakistan was unwilling to close it down. In 2008–10, the insurgency was so powerful inside Pakistan that it was unable to do so.

Creating the Vortex: The Crisis of Pushtun Authority

Traditional sub-national Pushtun governance in both Pakistan and Afghanistan was primarily tribal and secular. This does not undercut the important of religious leaders in Pushtun society and culture. In the past, in what became Pakistan, when frontier tribes did unite, it was usually under a charismatic religious figure that could cross tribal lines and bring together tribally divided rivals under an Islamic cause. This was seen in the 1830–31 Barevli jihad against the Sikh kingdom, the 1897 frontier rising, and the 1930s revolts led by the Fakir of Ipi.
⁵³
But in Afghanistan, secular leaders were the primary leaders of political actions that cut across tribal lines, not religious figures.

The existence of the Frontier shaped how Pushtuns were governed. Pushtun politics worked as long as they took place in two parallel contained systems at the edge of civilization. Competing forces could be kept in balance: between national and subnational loyalties, between tribal and religious leaders, between Pushtowali and Sharia, between different Islamic practices. Each victory for one competitor would bring a reaction, often financed by external patrons, which would restore equilibrium.

During the 1970s—the decade when the Frontier started to become the Vortex in earnest
⁵⁴
—challenges to the system of secular Pushtun leadership arose from the increasing opportunities to make money for Pushtuns in Karachi and the Gulf. This meant that there were numbers of Pushtuns with money but shut out of power. In 1970s-80s Pakistan, the absence of electoral politics in the FATA meant that tribal politics were the only avenue open to these Pushtuns unless they wished to remain elsewhere in the country. The nature of the government-maintained malik system effectively choked off political participation in the
FATA. In Afghanistan as well as Pakistan, such Pushtuns became “tribal entrepreneurs,” with power and authority but often operating outside the traditional collective decision-making of the tribe.

As more Pakistani Pushtuns moved to Karachi and other cities in Pakistan, they participated in electoral politics and lived under Pakistani law. At home in the FATA, they had no vote until the 1990s and no party politics even after that. The FATA remains governed by the colonial-era Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR) with its emphasis on collective responsibility and collective punishments rather than the same law as the rest of Pakistan. The Pushtun diaspora, in Pakistan, the Gulf, and the UK, has grown throughout this period of instability and has been estimated at up to six million. They provided money and access to outside resources that allowed “tribal entrepreneurs” to challenge a system of power and control that, in Pakistan, increasingly no longer seemed legitimate.

However, under Pakistani president Zia al Haq, the separateness of the FATA was affirmed. His predecessor, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, had looked to assimilate it into Pakistan. Zia stressed the importance of Pushtun religious leadership rather than the power of the maliks and the government political agents in the FATA. This policy direction was applied to Afghanistan during the 1978–1992 conflict, when ISI’s policies enabled the rise of mullahs as Pushtun resistance leaders and the emergence of the Pakistan-established Afghan Sunni Peshawar-based political parties as alternative patronage networks, Pakistan-funded using international aid. In Pushto-speaking Afghanistan, the emergence of religious leaders—with the resources directed to them by the seven Peshawar parties, six of which were themselves headed by religious figures—to lead the qawms of Afghanistan into their transition to guerrilla organizations to fight the Soviets was in line with Pakistani strategy. Religious leaders were thought likely to be committed to a conflict even where there was no easy path to victory.

In Afghanistan, the assault on Pushtun leadership carried out by the Communists soon after they seized power was bloody and had a lasting impact. Non-Communist sources of authority in Pushtun Afghanistan—tribal leaders and major Sufic religious authority figures among them—were in many cases killed or arrested as feudal remnants by the Afghan Khalqi regime in 1978–79. Those tribal leaders who avoided
murder by the Khalqis were forced into exile in Pakistan, along with their tribes. There, they found a Pakistani official policy of marginalizing them, ensuring that authority would be with either the Pakistani government or Afghan religious figures. Many Afghan Pushtun tribal leaders were threatened with violence. As a result, they tended to leave Pakistan for the West—often using their superior connections and access—and were in many cases the spearhead of the worldwide Afghan diaspora. Their connections with grassroots Afghans, either fighting the war at home or in the refugee camps, suffered as a result, as did the perceptions of the legitimacy of those who had gone into exile returning to claim positions of authority.

In part because alternative leadership figures were killed or forced into exile, in much of Pushtun-speaking Afghanistan in 1978–92, the ulema of Pushtun Afghanistan, especially local mullahs, became the primary decision-makers. Seven political parties are operating in refugee camps inside Pakistan. These parties are subject to Peshawar law and Pakistani authority, yet they are operating as part of a shura of Muslim clergy, even though many members of these parties only nominally abide by ulema law and their view of Islam is closer to Pushtun folk traditions and Deobandi-influenced madrassas, customs that are common in the FATA region, where many of these men studied prior to the fall of the Taliban in 2001. In the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, the refugee Afghan clergy had access to religious patronage networks—often funded by foreign money—that allowed them—not the nominal tribal leaders—to benefit their own clients among their tribe or group. Many of the surviving Afghan Pushtun leaders, while their nominal clients were in the field waging jihad or in the refugee camps, did not share this experience with them, but went instead into exile in Peshawar or to the west, taking advantage of their superior contacts with high-level patrons. Those secular leaders—whether tribal chiefs or army officers—who went to Pakistan ended up largely peripheral to both the direction of the conduct of the war in Afghanistan and to humanitarian efforts, both cross-border and in Pakistan. During the war against the Soviets, Pakistan’s government and international aid organizations made decisions of resource allocations on behalf of the predominantly Pushtun Afghans in Pakistan rather than the Afghans making their own decisions.

The Pakistanis were able to do this because Sunni Afghan political leadership was largely controlled by the seven Peshawar-based parties, all dependent on Pakistan. The great fear in Pakistan during the war against the Soviets was that the Afghans, fighting men and refugees, would remain if the Soviets managed to consolidate their rule in Afghanistan and that they could link up with discontented elements of Pakistan’s Pushtuns to mount an armed challenge to Pakistan’s political authority on the model of “Black September” in Amman in 1970 (when Zia was Pakistan’s military attaché to Jordan). Part of his lesson was that, having seen secular Palestinian organizations try to overthrow the secular Jordanian monarchy, religious links need to be stressed if Muslims were not to kill each other but unite against a common enemy, which to Zia was the threat created by the Soviet thrust into Afghanistan and the continuing security competition with India.

Inside Afghanistan, during the 1978–92 conflict, tribal shuras in the border provinces of Paktia, Paktika, and Kunar found themselves unable to defend their home territory against extractive activity, especially clear-cutting of trees, by cross-border entrepreneurs linked to the transport and timber mafias in Pakistan. These often made alliances with local Pushtun “tribal entrepreneurs” that did not represent a majority leadership view but were important figures because of their access to money. Such figures became more important on the Pakistani side post-2001 as the traditional leadership came under attack.

Tribal entrepreneurs with a limited claim to tribal primacy but with important outside contacts that allowed access to networks extending outside the Pushtun borderlands (ore even worldwide) have emerged to become major insurgent leaders, such as Jaluladin Haqqani in the 1980s and Behtullah Mehsud post-2001. These leaders received financial support from the Pushtun diaspora, anxious for change in their homeland.

These events brought crime into the Pushtun world, where it remains important to the present. Most of this is connected with narcotics traffic, but it has its roots in the “timber mafia” and the “transport mafia” in Pakistan, dominated by ethnic Pushtuns, who have become important players since enriching themselves as a result of Afghanistan’s 1978–92 war against the Soviets. By 2008–10, crime and insurgency had become increasingly integrated across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

The rise of the Taliban culture and especially the insurgency in Pakistan has seen a redoubled assault on secular and tribal Pushtun leadership. The widespread killing of maliks and tribal elders (khans) by transnational terrorists, especially Al Qaeda and the IMU, in cooperation with the Pakistani Taliban started soon after 2001. South Waziristan saw an especially bloody campaign of murder and intimidation. This contributed to the rise of what would become the Pakistani Taliban. The victims were replaced as decision-makers by shuras of nominal ulema that were the backbone of what would become the Pakistani Taliban, much as their Afghan counterparts had been during the rise of the Afghan Taliban in the 1990s.

The mullahs that emerged as leadership figures among Pakistan’s Pushtuns are not all ignorant venom-spewing preachers. Many are well educated and have access to a range of governmental and non-governmental support networks. The Pakistani Pushtun mullahs that have emerged as the leadership figures in the FATA and, subsequently, the NWFP have to compete with the entrepreneurial tribal jihadi leaders, most notably Behtullah Mehsud, who targeted and killed Wazir tribal elders who would not go along with being superseded.

After 2005, in many areas of the FATA, alternative malik systems emerged. These new maliks remained the tribe’s interface with the government of Pakistan but were selected by a tribal shura, rather than by the government. The government of Pakistan, in 2008–10, remained committed to trying to use the old system of political agents and maliks in a FATA now marked by an intense insurgency and with many areas controlled by the insurgents and off-limits to the government. This approach has had success in some areas. In mid-2009 the Wazir tribe in Waziristan was being rallied by pro-government maliks to oppose the rival Mehsud tribe that was linked to the Pakistani Taliban through their then-leader Behtullah Mehsud.

These changes in Pakistan’s Pushtun leadership reflected a decades-long process that has, in the Vortex, created a leadership vacuum. This vacuum has, since the 1970s, been filled by other than traditional secular Pushtun leaders. By 2008–10, it was increasingly being filled by two competing new Pushtun leaderships. One is the secular and religious
leaders, radicalized by the Taliban culture but not limited to the Pakistani Taliban. The other is the secular leadership represented by the democratically elected Pushtuns who sit in Pakistan’s parliament or the parliament of Pakistan’s NWFP. The previous source of secular Pushtun leadership in the form of tribal chiefs and the malik system has effectively been sidelined in much of the FATA—although in some tribes, such as the Wazirs, increased government support had revitalized them by mid-2009. By 2008–10, the conflict between these two groups of Pakistan’s Pushtun leaders and their competing vision of the future for Pakistan’s Pushtun had assumed great importance for both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Born in the Vortex: The Rise of the Afghan Taliban

The original Afghan Taliban was much more than a Pakistan-supported Pushtun movement to seize state power in Afghanistan or a fundamentalist Sunni religious movement that sought to transform political Islam, although it was both of those things. In part, the original Afghan Taliban represented the nexus of the bazaar, madrassa, and mosque of southern Afghanistan, cut out of the context and put down in the harsh terrain and refugee camps of the FATA, Baluchistan, and the NWFP.

During the war against the Soviets in the 1980s, the Afghan Taliban was a strong element in the local indigenous resistance to the Soviet invasion, especially in Helmand and eastern Kandahar provinces. However, they declined later in the war as the resistance became more dependent on external support from Pakistan and direction by Peshawar-based parties. The Taliban was transformed in 1994 as a fundamentalist reaction to the failure of the post-Soviet mujahideen government to bring either social justice or order. In 1992–94, support from Pakistan to revive an alterative to the situation in southern Afghanistan where trucks were being stopped and detained—or at least forced to pay bribes—at multiple checkpoints led to the revival of the Taliban. They also represented a response to what was seen as a lack of social justice in southern Afghanistan, with Pushtuns, under the nominal authority of the post-Soviet Islamic State of Afghanistan, extracting resources from local inhabitants. Tribal feuds and disputes were waged with no recourse to effective outside authority. But it was not until 1996 that the Taliban was able to fully displace the
Hezb-e-Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (HiH) as Pakistan’s chosen instrument of policy in Afghanistan.

The original pre-2001 Afghan Taliban emerged not from old Afghanistan or from traditional Pushtun culture, although it drew elements from both; rather, its roots were in the refugee camps along the Pakistani border in the 1980s. The Taliban culture grew in the 1980s with the marginalization of much of traditional Afghan Islam in the refugee camps in Pakistan. These were dominated by the “rupee mullahs,” who used rupees—foreign funding—to buy sound-amplification systems to literally drown out those with otherwise greater religious authority. To this was added, in the 1980s, a mixture of Pushtun tribal conservatism, poorly understood Deobandi reformism from the subcontinent, and Wahabi fanaticism associated with support from Arabia and the Gulf. The Taliban’s gender policies reflected the realities of the camps, a totally cash-based economy. Traditional subsistence agriculture and herding, which depended on women, was limited or impossible. Male heads of families signed the roll for rations. The economy was unlike that of rural Afghanistan, where female labor was valued because it was necessary. The depopulation of much of rural Pushtun-speaking Afghanistan by the Soviets, along with accelerating the pre-1978 trend of a shift away from an economy based on subsistence agriculture to one based on cash transactions and top-down distribution reflecting the impacts of patronage networks, paved the way for the rise of the Taliban culture.