The 9/11 Wars (77 page)

THE TALIBAN’S VIEW

It is unlikely that any Taliban commander really did tell his interrogator the oft-repeated aphorism ‘You have the watches, but we have the time’, as often said. After all, most Taliban commanders did have watches – along with, by the end of 2009, an array of sophisticated military equipment that few amongst them had even heard of a few years previously. But the phrase did nonetheless sum up perfectly the point, so evident by the time of the London conference of January 2010, that to win, all insurgents in Afghanistan had to do was avoid losing.

It was still the case that many of the insurgents’ problems were internal. Over the previous eighteen months the Taliban leadership in Quetta – those with whom the British FCO had suggested concluding a settlement – had continued to work hard to manage the various challenges thrown up by their successful resurgence. The insurgents were still fragmented and, though the faction led by Jalaluddin Haqqani did now liaise relatively closely with the senior leadership of the Quetta Shura Taliban, there was still almost no coordination with many other groups scattered across the country. ‘[Gulbuddin] Hekmatyar is a
mujahid
and we respect him but he is independent,’ a Taliban spokesman said.
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Problems of discipline continued despite Mullah Omar’s injunctions over the previous eighteen months. The
leyha
or rulebook for the Taliban was repeatedly republished and redistributed by senior leaders in a bid to curtail the more anarchic followers but seemed often to have minimal effect. When the third edition of the ‘code of conduct’ was released in the late spring 2009 it stated that the use of suicide bombings should be limited to high-value targets and that ‘the utmost effort should be made to avoid civilian casualties’.
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The aim, spokesmen said, was ‘to guide faithful fighters in the way of the jihad to best liberate the country with minimum loss’.
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The use of suicide bombs did drop – down from a peak of 142 in 2007, to 122 in 2008 and to around 90 in 2009 – but the use of IEDs increased, as did the number of political assassinations. The result was that the toll of civilians being killed through the actions of the insurgents continued to climb.
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The United Nations estimated that more than two-thirds of the 6,000 non-combatants killed and injured in Afghanistan in 2009, the worst year yet for civilian casualties, were caused by the Taliban.
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Others put the figure as high as 80 per cent.
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Young commanders remained often difficult to control, and many Taliban ‘fellow travellers’ continued to ignore efforts by the hierarchy to dictate strategic directives. A wave of executions to impose order and the bureaucratic reshuffles of 2008 and 2009 had had some impact with many more senior, experienced men appointed to senior posts in the ‘shadow government’ and the more criminal, and often more extreme, elements being weeded out.
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A range of efforts continued to be made to build or retain broader community support. Some involved a degree of flexibility on the rigorous codes that often alienated locals. So the new appointees frequently turned a blind eye to girls being educated, at least at primary level. Other efforts were more active. In some areas, Taliban commanders enforced limits on expenditure on weddings, a seemingly draconian measure but, in a society where the spiralling cost of marriage was forcing many men into prolonged celibacy, one that was popular, particularly among the young males whose support the Taliban most wanted. A ‘commission’ of high-ranking Taliban officials was appointed and travelled through various provinces to question local communities about the behaviour of local Taliban commanders.
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Taliban propaganda operations also continued intensively, with a range of products from traditional night letters through to increasingly sophisticated DVDs or internet video clips which all carefully depicted the movement as primarily local and nationalist. When Mullah Omar rejected the talks that the Saudis, Karzai and various others were hoping to open, he did so categorically, saying ‘our
mujahid
people will not accept the negotiations that will add legitimacy to the continuing occupation in their country. Afghanistan is our home, and no one accepts [these] negotiations that’ll give others a share of our home and to manage it.’ In a long speech devoted ‘to the supporters of freedom from the people of Europe and the West in general’, Omar stated:

Your colonist rulers have attacked our country in the name of war against terrorism, and that is to serve a small number of capitalists and suckers of people’s blood, in order to gain more wealth. They have built their new colonialist traps and daily they kill our youths, elderly, women and children. And at night they barge into our homes and destroy our green gardens and general property, educational and trade centers, with blind air raids. Pushing away this aggression and defending our country is our legitimate and national right, and we will use our rights to defend with all methods and sacrifices … [against your] financial power and your satanic trickery.
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Though Western observers, particularly within coalition ranks, and urban, worldly Afghans saw this kind of rhetoric as a mendacious effort to disguise the Taliban’s global pan-Islamist agenda by appealing to local sentiment, at least part of the appeal of the insurgents for some continued to stem from the ease with which they could appropriate the mantle of legitimate defenders of the ‘Afghan’ nation. The bottom line remained that the Taliban were local Muslim men fighting, on the whole, non-Muslim foreigners. As ever the propaganda was backed up with other means of persuasion. ‘Spies’ continued to be executed, often publicly hanged, and ‘collaborators’ assassinated with statements issued to justify – and publicize – the murders.
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The combination of intimidation and ‘hearts and minds’ campaigns was usually effective in areas where conditions were right.

One problem that did prove insurmountable to the Taliban was the ethnic divide in the country. Despite carefully avoiding any statements that might encourage ethnic or sectarian violence, only a few low-level commanders from non-Pashtun ethnicities ever joined Taliban ranks, and these did so for the kind of micro-political reasons that had historically been so recurrent within the conflicts in Afghanistan. Attempts to push recruitment in the north of the country were successful – but only in Pashtun areas. This imposed a natural limit on the Taliban’s expansion and stymied the efforts to depict the movement as a ‘national uprising’, as Taliban propaganda so consistently sought to do. One obvious question for all involved in the conflict at the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010 was thus the level of support the Taliban actually had. This was impossible to quantify. The Taliban’s ‘commission’ had been one effort to do so. The coalition and international community relied on other means, more familiar in the West, such as surveys. But pollsters faced huge practical problems, largely as a result of the parlous security situation in two-thirds of the country, and were thus limited to the urban areas, where Taliban support was lowest. Often surveys were carried out by telephone, again favouring urban literate populations. Equally, for obvious reasons, few Afghans would openly confess to supporting insurgents or their ideology. Nonetheless results in January 2010 indicating that 68 per cent of Afghans supported the presence of US forces – down from 71 per cent in 2007 and 78 per cent in 2006 but up from 63 per cent in 2008 – and that 69 per cent saw the Taliban as the main threat to the country – up 10 per cent from the year before – were probably accurate for those communities surveyed.
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Much more important than national statistics were support levels in the third of the country where insurgency was raging. This was even harder to gauge. Even the best-informed Western analysts in Afghanistan – specialists who had been in Kabul for decades – admitted that the international community ‘had no visibility in the villages’. All they could say was that support for the insurgents in Pashtun conservative areas was ‘extremely variable’.
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It could be very high in one community and much lower on ‘the other side of the creek’, as Captain Vasquez had found in Logar. As ever in Afghanistan, such support was contingent on local circumstances, dynamics between tribes, the behaviour of individual families and leaders. There was still much fence-sitting. What did appear certain was that the overwhelming emphasis among Western soldiers and policy-makers on the economic roots of the insurgency seemed misplaced. At all levels within NATO and among Western diplomats and policy-makers the idea that the insurgents were fighting for money was dominant. Colonel Haight of Taskforce Spartan had said, ‘Give a man a day’s wage and a spade and he will put down his Kalashnikov.’ Biden, the American vice president, said that 70 per cent of the Taliban had purely financial motives.
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Miliband and others had repeatedly quoted the old Victorian-era saw that ‘you can rent an Afghan, but you can’t buy him’, arguing that insurgents were ‘rented by the Taliban’.
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But even if such generalizations had been true when they had been coined they were of limited use a century or so later.

A study for the British Department for International Development based on hundreds of interviews with fighters found that a desire for cash was only one of a number of personal reasons which had brought young men into insurgent ranks. Often recruits sought status or a degree of protection. Frequently a desire to gain advantage in an ongoing dispute with another family or relative over land or water was critical. Even these factors themselves inevitably existed in a context defined by structural issues such as the perception of the government as partisan and corrupt. Genuine religious belief played a part too, the study found, though levels of religious knowledge among combatants were low, and their faith was more heavily informed by the new ‘single narrative’ popularized by radicals over the previous decade than scholarly Islam.
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Another indication that money was far from a prime motivation for most insurgents was that some at least, though clearly a minority, did have relatively good incomes, sometimes even from jobs within the government administration.
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People plunged in the everyday social warp and weft of the insurgency also painted a very different picture from that given in NATO briefings. Roshana Wardak, a trained gynaecologist from a major political family in Wardak province who was a popular and effective member of parliament, spoke of how ‘there are ten educated ideological Taliban in the entire province and for each there are 100 pro-Taliban [people] who don’t like foreign troops and are fighting to defend their religion’. Where she lived at least, she said, ‘it is not common for the Taliban to pay’. The member of the national assembly for Ghazni, Daoud Sultanzoy, said the insurgents in his home area included ‘one per cent staunch Taliban’, some former Hezb-e-Islami commanders who act as ‘pivots’ in logistics networks, other local small-scale warlords who had lost out to the original Taliban in the 1990s and about ‘eight to nine per cent who are just local thugs’. Taliban fighters themselves reacted with predictable but genuine anger to the proposal that they might accept money to stop fighting when asked by reporters, citing faith, principles, patriotism and vengeance for dead family members and comrades.
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Miliband was an intelligent man who evidently doubted the simplistic formula he was often forced to use. The insurgents were, he explained to one interviewer shortly after a trip to Afghanistan, ‘on the whole conservative Pashtun nationalists’ who were ‘pursuing a local grievance’ and who ‘need to be inside the political system’. This meant that, if the Taliban rented them, he said, it was ‘not easy to rent them back’.
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Money would not necessarily trump culture and identity.

The Taliban closely monitored Western media and were thus well aware of the various debates about strategy that evolved over the year. NATO’s new campaign plan, with its emphasis on ‘valley-by-valley’ solutions and securing the population, was an undoubted improvement. But in three main areas that McChrystal saw as critical to turning around the situation in Afghanistan – the rapid development of Afghan security forces, the improvement of ‘governance’ and the reduction of civilian casualties – trends were mixed at best, still firmly negative at worst.

The ramifications of the use of increasing numbers of Afghan troops was an example of the way that the new NATO strategy risked exacerbating the broad structural problems that fuelled the insurgency in Afghanistan – such as the lack of legitimacy of the central government and their allies – in the south and south-east even while achieving certain limited tactical objectives. As in Iraq, the mantra from Western policy-makers and strategists was, even if it was never put in such terms, ‘We will stand down as they stand up.’ The sooner the Afghan security forces were effective, the sooner international forces could leave. Yet this strategy faced a similar problem as in Iraq: the local security forces both were weak and, to start with at least, lacked ethnic and cultural balance. In Iraq, however, the demographics had meant that the Sunnis had eventually little choice but to join the security forces, albeit as the auxiliaries of the Awakening. But in Afghanistan, with the Pashtuns totalling around 45 per cent, the insurgents often embedded in communities and no equivalent of al-Qaeda in Iraq to turn local populations towards the government or occupation forces as the lesser of two evils, the situation was very different. McChrystal’s plan had envisaged doubling the Afghan National Army (ANA), but though the numbers of the ANA were growing and its patchy fighting capacity slowly improving, many ANA deployments against the insurgents had a variety of potential negative consequences of which most Western commanders appeared unaware. First, the significant ethnic imbalance meant that the soldiers who had been manoeuvring with Vasquez and his men in Logar or were being sent down to Kandahar and Helmand were largely of Tajik or Hazara origin, and thus each further
kandaq
, as battalion-sized units were known, deployed in Pashtun-majority areas risked aggravating a civil war that had been running for several decades and an ethnic power struggle that dated back a century or so.
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Perhaps worse, a high percentage of those ANA officers who were Pashtun had served with the Moscow-backed Afghan Communist forces against the
mujahideen
in the 1980s.
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Many senior officers had been part of the hardline and notoriously brutal Khalq faction of the PDPA. Some, such as General Ali Ahmed, who was in charge of the ANA training centre in Kabul, referred both to the Taliban and to those who had fought the Soviets in the 1980s as ‘insurgents’, or
dushman
, enemy. That he should use the term to describe the Taliban was not surprising but that he should call the
mujahideen
of the earlier period ‘enemy’ was striking, particularly when the long-serving minister of defence had been one of them.
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As the impressive briefing slides shown at the ISAF headquarters had made clear, if one of the many ongoing strands of historical conflict in Afghanistan was ethnic, so other strands pitted those who had benefited from Communist rule, often urban, educated communities, against those who had suffered enormously under it, usually rural communities. Taliban commanders might claim that they did not like fighting the ANA because the troops were ‘Afghans’ and villagers tell reporters that they preferred soldiers recruited from far away to the rapacious locally hired police, but General Ahmed’s vocabulary underlined the cultural gulf that rent Afghanistan and fuelled the internal conflict. Overcoming these fundamental fractures was not impossible. Certainly in some parts of the country communities had begun to welcome the ANA. But consolidating such progress needed time and resources – and a legitimate central government.
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