In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (23 page)

Most alarmingly, reports from the CPA’s regional offices suggested a spreading insurgency. “A number of incidents have occurred which have served to reinforce that this is a dangerous place,” wrote Regional Security Coordinator Bill Miller in March. “We have had numerous attacks, bombings, rocket attacks, and improvised explosive devices.”
⁴⁰
After the assassination of CPA members Fern Holland, Salwa Oumashi, and Bob Zangas, staffers began wearing more protective equipment, varying times and routes of travel, increasing the presence of Gurkhas to provide security at camps, and taking State Department counterthreat classes. Bremer became sufficiently concerned about the security situation that he postponed U.S. congres
sional visits to Iraq, though not all members of Congress complied. Military convoys were being attacked so regularly that on April 17 Bremer seriously considered ordering food rationing at the CPA.
⁴¹

Warning Signs

The levels of violence and sheer brutality continued to increase in Iraq, with the introduction of grisly suicide bombings and a string of beheadings in 2004. Afghanistan, by comparison, was relatively quiet. The Taliban and other insurgent groups, bolstered by the American preoccupation in Iraq and America’s unwillingness to target them in Pakistan, began to conduct small-scale offensive operations to overthrow the Afghan government and coerce the withdrawal of U.S. and Coalition forces.
⁴²
In April 2002, insurgents orchestrated a series of offensive attacks in Kandahar, Khowst, and Nangarhar Provinces. In 2003 and 2004, the Taliban continued a low-level insurgency from bases in Pakistan. Perhaps the most significant event was the September 2004 rocket attack against President Hamid Karzai in the eastern Afghan city of Gardez.

Insurgents also began to target international aid workers. Afghans organizing or otherwise involved in election work were attacked or killed. So were nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers and Afghan citizens believed to be cooperating with Coalition forces or the Afghan government. In October 2004, three UN staff members were abducted in Kabul. Attacks occurred throughout the country, though most were in the south and east, in such provinces as Nangarhar, Paktia, Paktika, and Khowst.
⁴³

The result was a decrease in security for Afghans and foreigners, especially those living in the east and south, but “the level of criminal activity—characterized by increasing numbers of armed robberies, abductions, and murders even in areas controlled by the ANA and police patrols—[was] still high.”
⁴⁴
Interfactional fighting continued among regional commanders in Herat, Nangarhar, Nuristan, Lowgar, Laghman, and Badghis Provinces.
⁴⁵
The withdrawal in July 2004 of
the NGO Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders), which had been in Afghanistan for nearly three decades, was a sobering testament to the deteriorating security environment. A month earlier, five Médecins sans Frontières workers had been ambushed and shot in the head in the northwestern province of Badghis.

“We began to get concerned about the insurgency in late 2003 with the shift in tactics,” noted Afghan National Security Council official Daoud Yaqub. “There was an increase in the number of improvised explosive devices, and soft targets were increasingly attacked.” But the U.S. position was different, he contended. “U.S. officials in Afghanistan didn’t see the Taliban as a strategic threat then”.
⁴⁶

Indeed, Lieutenant General Barno believed that “the Taliban were a fairly amateurish organization. There were only a few Arabs from al’Qaida present in Afghanistan, and we killed most of them. In 2004, we killed insurgents video-taping helicopter take-offs near Jalalabad. Most of the insurgent deployments we were seeing were in the 10s and 20s, not in the 100s of fighters. It was a ragtag group.”
⁴⁷
Nonetheless, there was thinning patience with the slow pace of killing or capturing insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Secretary Rumsfeld wrote a memo in October 2003 to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and several top-level officials expressing frustration that “we are having mixed results with Al Qa’ida, although we have put considerable pressure on them—nonetheless, a great many remain at large.” The United States had made some progress in capturing top Iraqi insurgents, but it “has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban—Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.”
⁴⁸

Bitter Irony

Despite these concerns, the levels of violence in Afghanistan were relatively low. Fewer than 300 Afghans died in 2004 because of the insurgency, which paled in comparison with the tens of thousands who died in Iraq in 2004.
⁴⁹
Most Afghans believed the security situation was somewhat better than under Taliban rule. An opinion poll
conducted by the Asia Foundation indicated that 35 percent often or sometimes feared for their personal safety, a decline from 41 percent during the Taliban period.
⁵⁰
And another poll showed that 84 percent of Afghans believed that their living standard had improved since the end of the Taliban government.
⁵¹

Yet fate took a strange twist. In 2005, Zalmay Khalilzad replaced John Negroponte as U.S. ambassador in Iraq. It was a move symptomatic of the U.S. government’s tunnel vision on Iraq. The State Department had taken one of its most seasoned and effective ambassadors, who spoke Afghanistan’s two main languages and had a special rapport with its political leaders, and moved him to Baghdad during an extraordinarily fragile period in Afghanistan’s history. Lieutenant General David Barno was replaced by Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, effectively shattering the military-civilian coordination Khalilzad and Barno had painstakingly fashioned during their tenure together. Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Iraq had taken center stage as America’s most important foreign-policy concern. Proven staff were in great demand and Khalilzad and Barno had thus far been among the best. Still, it was a dangerous gamble.

The rise of an insurgency in Afghanistan was a serious and unfortunate development. Insurgencies frequently lead to the death of thousands—and sometimes millions—of civilians. To paraphrase Princeton history professor Arno Mayer, if war is hell, then insurgency belongs to hell’s darkest and most infernal region.
⁵²

ONE OF THE twentieth century’s most successful insurgents, the Chinese leader Mao Zedong, wrote that there is an inextricable link in insurgencies “between the people and the troops. The former may be likened to water and the latter to the fish who inhabit it.”
¹
Insurgencies require a motivated leadership but, more important, they can only form amid a disillusioned population. Mao had both. He led China’s beleaguered peasants, who had been harshly oppressed by the feudal landowners, in a violent insurgency that toppled the government and Chiang Kai-shek’s National Revolutionary Army in 1949.

Mao’s experience was comparable to that of countless other insurgencies, virtually all featuring poorly trained and badly equipped guerrillas overwhelming a much more powerful opponent. In the American Revolutionary War, Francis Marion, better known as the “Swamp Fox,” organized a disheveled band of fighters in South Carolina against the British. Operating with great speed and elusiveness from inaccessible bases, and taking advantage of local hatred against the British, Marion’s troops struck isolated garrisons, convoys, and other targets in rapid succession. The British, unable to effectively counter Marion, complained that he fought neither “like a gentleman” nor “like a Christian.” His actions inspired the “Song of Marion’s Men,” by the American poet William Cullen Bryant, which hailed the geographical advantage held by the Americans:

Bryant’s poem highlights a practice that Afghan insurgents would mimic several centuries later: the use of guerrilla tactics against a better-equipped conventional military. This chapter seeks to understand insurgencies at a systematic level in order to explain the situation in Afghanistan. Why do insurgencies begin? The first question to ask is: What exactly is an insurgency?

Understanding Insurgencies

An insurgency is a political-military campaign by nonstate actors who seek to overthrow a government or secede from a country through the use of unconventional—and sometimes conventional—military strategies.
³
Insurgent actions also cover a range of unconventional tactics, from small-scale ambushes and raids to large-scale, lethal violence.
⁴
They usually involve four principal actors.

The first are
insurgents,
those hoping to overthrow the established national government or secede from it.
⁵
In Afghanistan after the 2001 fall of the Taliban, key insurgent forces included the remnants of the Taliban, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami, the Haqqani network, al Qa’ida and other foreign fighters, criminal groups, and a host of Afghan and Pakistani tribal militias. The second is the
local government,
which includes the government’s security forces, the army and police, as well as key national and local political institutions. In states with weak central governments, such as Afghanistan, tribal militias may also serve these purposes. The third group consists of
outside actors:
external states and other nonstate entities, which might support either side. Outside actors can tip the balance of a war in favor of either insurgents or the government, but they can rarely win it for either side. There were two sets of external actors in Afghanistan. The United States, NATO forces, and the United Nations supported the Afghan government; the international
jihadi network and some individuals from neighboring states—such as Pakistan and Iran—supported the insurgents.

Finally, the
local population
is the most important group; it is for their hearts and minds that the war is being fought in the first place. The support of the population is the
sine qua non
of victory in counterinsurgency warfare.
⁶
As one study of the insurgency in El Salvador concluded: “The only territory you want to hold is the six inches between the ears of the
campesino.
”
⁷
Each side needs money, logistics, recruits, intelligence, and other aid to achieve its objectives.
⁸
Support is especially critical for insurgents, who must fight asymmetrically. Political scientist Daniel Byman writes,

If insurgents manage to separate the population from the government and external forces, however, and acquire its active or passive support, they are more likely to win the war. In the end, the exercise of political power depends on the tacit or explicit agreement of the population—or, at worst, on its submissiveness.
¹⁰

While outside actors often play an important role, they rarely stay for the duration of the conflict, and the result of the war is almost always a function of the struggle between the local government and insurgents.
¹¹
My analysis of insurgencies since 1945 shows that successful counterinsurgency campaigns last for an average of fourteen years, and unsuccessful ones last for an average of eleven years. Many also end in a draw, with neither side winning. Insurgencies can also be brutal, drawn-out affairs: more than a third of all insurgencies last more than twenty years, with the incumbent governments winning
slightly more than twice as often as the insurgents.
¹²
Again, only a few of these conflicts are fought—and won or lost—by foreign armies. Most countries quickly tire of having their troops deployed abroad, as the Soviets did during their Afghan campaign. Moreover, most local populations view foreign armies as occupiers, which impedes success.
¹³
A lead indigenous role, on the other hand, can provide a focus for national aspirations and show the population that they—and not foreign forces—control their destiny.

Research on past cases suggests that two factors correlate strongly with the beginning of an insurgency: weak governance and a well-articulated cause from insurgent leaders. Competent governments that can provide services to their population in a timely manner are rarely beset with insurgencies. But there are also uncontrollable factors: countries with low per-capita incomes are at a greater risk of insurgency. Geographical factors are important too. Mountainous terrain can have a compounding effect on the grievances of a restive population.
¹⁴
David Galula, a French military officer and counterinsurgency expert, wrote that the ideal location for insurgents is a landlocked country with mountains along the borders, a dispersed rural population, and a primitive economy.
¹⁵
If ever a country matched this description, it surely would be Afghanistan.

Governance Collapse

Weak and ineffective governance—the ability to establish law and order, effectively manage resources, and implement sound policies—is a necessary precondition for the rise of insurgencies.
¹⁶
It creates a supply of disgruntled locals eager to find other ways of governing themselves. Political scientist Stathis Kalyvas explains:

If insurgents take advantage of weak governance and assume state-like functions, they can raise tax money, set up administrative structures, and begin to perform government functions.

In the Canipaco Valley of central Peru, for example, the Shining Path
(Sendero Luminoso)
guerrillas “assumed control and organized every aspect of the inhabitants’ daily life. Sendero undertook the administration of justice and played the role of a moralizing force. Shining Path settled marital conflicts, supervised the work of teachers, mediated the relationships between the
comuneros
and those authorities and state functionaries who were not obliged to quit, executed thieves who robbed livestock from the herders and even organized recreation.”
¹⁸

In Vietnam, the Vietcong were able to establish a highly sophisticated five-level “shadow” administrative infrastructure run by close to 40,000 full-time employees by the end of 1968. “One of the striking conclusions from interviewing [Vietcong] defectors,” wrote Jeffrey Race in
War Comes to Long An,
“is the total absence of government movement in revolutionary areas for years at a time, except on occasional large-scale sweep operations which had little impact on the Party’s local apparatus.”
¹⁹
According to another account, “peasants conscripted into the revolutionary organization became more than soldiers in a temporary fighting force; they potentially became subjects integrated into a new institution founding the basis for a nation-state.”
²⁰
Even before Vietnam, in the Philippines during the 1950s, “one government was legal, but in these areas had little or no physical control. The insurgent government was illegal, but had partial or complete control and enforcement capability.”
²¹

A key essence of weak governance, then, is enforcement. Following Max Weber, any government that cannot control a monopoly on physical force will be unable to force people to comply with the state’s laws.
²²
Since the Enlightenment, philosophers in the tradition
of Hobbes and Kant have seen a link between strong and responsible governments with peace and order. Even Adam Smith, the English economist and philosopher famous for advocating a minimal government role and the invisible hand of the market, supported a strong and competent security force to establish domestic order.

So how does weak governance contribute to the outbreak of an insurgency? By definition, weak states cannot meet the basic needs of their population.
²³
They cannot consolidate authority over all their territory and they often do not succeed in maintaining order within the territory they do control.
²⁴
They fail to use state resources to promote security or serve the public interest.
²⁵
Weak states lack sufficient bureaucratic and institutional structures to ensure the functioning of government. They often lack trained civil servants and thus can barely operate school systems, courts, welfare systems, and other essentials for social functioning.
²⁶
It is not just that law and political institutions in these states are ineffective. It is that the faith in law and political institutions that underpins policing and order does not exist.
²⁷
Without confidence in the rules of society, including the quality of contract enforcement, the police, and the courts, the general public will look to other organizations to provide structure and order.

Political scientists David Laitin and James Fearon, who examined all civil wars and insurgencies between 1945 and 1999, found that “financially, organizationally, and politically weak central governments render insurgency more feasible and attractive due to weak local policing or inept and corrupt counterinsurgency practices.”
²⁸
Another study found that between 1816 and 1997, “effective bureaucratic and political systems reduced the rate of civil war activity.”
²⁹

In many cases, weak governments have stemmed from the legacy of colonization, since most colonies of the post-World War II era were unprepared for independence when it arrived. The imperial powers put little thought or effort into establishing in their colonies domestic governance structures that could function on their own.
³⁰
A few colonies, such as India and Sri Lanka, had been allowed a degree of self-government. But others, such as Somaliland, were lit
tle more than outposts. Somalia struggled with a weak state after its independence in 1960 and experienced several major insurgencies. The structural fragmentation of the Somali state was a relic of the circumstances of its independence, which required the unification of two separate colonial administrative structures. Each half of Somalia had its own judicial system, currency, administrative rules, taxation rates, accounting systems, and legal histories, which had to be unified into a single system.
³¹
Somalia also faced a severe lack of resources. Scholar Patrick Brogan has written that Somalia confronted “a depressing future as a perpetually impoverished Third World country with very few natural resources, constantly burdened by drought and the refugees from Ethiopia.”
³²
Somalia’s security forces also lacked the capacity to contain conflict. Without a strong central state, the country reverted to its nineteenth-century condition—with no internationally recognized polity, no national administration exercising real authority, no formal legal system, no banking and insurance system, no police and public-security service, no electricity or piped-water system, and weak officials serving on a voluntary basis surrounded by violent bands of armed youths.
³³