War From the Ground Up (14 page)

In terms of the ‘enemy' there are broadly three groups against whom the coalition fights: the Taliban, associated more with southern Afghanistan and the city of Quetta; the Haqqani Network; and Hizb-i-Islami Gulbuddin (HiG), associated more with the east and the cities of Peshawar/Miram Shah. Beyond this are a number of syndicates who may operate in Afghanistan but whose focus is primarily in Pakistan or in central Asian states.
¹⁰
The al-Qaeda presence is very small.

However, the insurgency in Afghanistan, at the time of writing, can be broken down further into endless sub-groups who fight for different
reasons. Many are insurgents with a legitimate grievance, many of whom see themselves as defending their land rather than fighting for any wider motive, as Kilcullen's concept of the ‘accidental guerrilla' posits.
¹¹
The official Afghan government language promoting the reintegration of insurgent fighters refers to them as ‘lost brothers', or ‘angry brothers' (in many cases legitimately) who need to be brought back on side. This confuses the idea of polarised sides. Other insurgent motivations vary widely: crime, drugs, money, a certain interpretation of Islam, revenge, excitement, war against the foreigner. The list goes on and motivations are usually found in combination. Having questioned captured insurgents myself, many are unclear in their own mind of their motivations; their self-identification as ‘Mujahideen', which is one of the common features of most insurgents, belies a large range of possible meanings.

Self-interest, rather than commitment to a wider movement, is the predominant motivation of many of the Taliban's field commanders in southern Afghanistan. They obey Quetta's direction when it suits them. At the tactical level, Taliban fighting groups frequently fail to come to one another's support in battle; such selfishness is rational in the sense that they do not strongly identify with one another. To try to understand the tactical actions of the Taliban in terms of a wider ‘operational intent' is thus usually wrong. Only rarely can the Taliban actually achieve this level of coordination when a particularly influential commander can temporarily unite different groups. When they do, it can be effective and catch coalition forces off guard; the fact that really serious insurgent ambushes or deliberate attacks are actually quite rare are the exceptions that prove the general rule.

For instance, in August 2010 a platoon-sized group of insurgents tried to overrun one of the checkpoints in our battle-group area in a coordinated operation which involved a preliminary diversionary attack and proper fire support; this led to an intense fight lasting well into the night. A handful of soldiers from the Mercian Regiment, attached to the Gurkha Battlegroup, successfully fought off insurgents on their perimeter, with the assistance of considerable fire support, after all the Afghan soldiers in their checkpoint had been wounded. Yet this was a highly anomalous event which had been coordinated by an unusually dynamic insurgent commander. Most Taliban ‘operational' commanders actually struggle to coordinate the actions of ‘their' fighting groups, who often only agree to a plan when it suits them.

The counter-argument would be that there does seem to be clear intent behind much of what ‘the' insurgency does in terms of deliberate operations. The suicide bombings and assassinations, for example, are against carefully selected political targets. Many of the ‘spectacular' attacks are designed to humiliate the Afghan government politically at particular points, such as during the visit of VIPs, or to coincide with international conferences. I would agree with such a line of argument. The Taliban senior leadership and the other groups associated with the insurgency do clearly have a capability to translate a political intent formulated by the senior leadership into actions on the ground. However, spectacular attacks do not require many people; they are much easier to coordinate than the day-to-day activity of all insurgent groups in a district, let alone across the country. In many ways the Taliban leadership's spectacular attacks are just as much about the encouragement of an idea that has themselves at the head of an organised movement, and thus legitimise their own position, as about the political impact against their enemies.

The Taliban fail to define themselves. In one study by Martine van Bijlert of Uruzgan Province (published in 2009) the term ‘Taliban' had many different senses:
Taliban-e jangi
or
Taliban-e shuri
(fighting or insurgent Taliban) as opposed to
Taliban-e darsi
(madrassa students), some of whom may exclusively be students and not fight;
Taliban-e alsi
(the real Taliban) or
Taliban-e pak
(the clean Taliban) which referred to the honest Taliban committed to Islamic principles of justice as opposed to opportunistic Taliban, and sometimes opposed to
Taliban-e Pakistani
, who do Pakistan's bidding;
Taliban-e duzd
(the thief Taliban), who were local bandits;
Taliban-e mahali
(local Taliban), as opposed to outsiders (van Bijlert notes that the local Taliban were not always seen as less violent to the civilian population than outsiders); some were previously known as
zalem
(cruel) or
badmash
(no-good);
Taliban-e khana-neshin
(Taliban sitting at home) who are generally those associated with the 1990s Taliban, who are not currently active, but may have taken refuge in places such as Quetta, Helmand or Kandahar.

Van Bijlert also writes that such descriptions are often associated with concepts such as
majbur
(forced) and
naraz (dissatisfied)
to nuance the explanation of the behaviour of leaders associated with the Taliban.
Majbur
implies that the individual was persecuted by local authorities or international forces for associations with the original Taliban and now
had no option but to fight for the new Taliban.
¹²
Naraz
implies that the individual has been humiliated in some way, perhaps as a result of not having been offered any government role, or not being treated in accordance with his social standing. Van Bijlert argues that in both cases loss of face in front of their tribe or constituency has been the key driver of the rise of the Taliban in Uruzgan. Van Bijlert points out that a conceptual framework that recognises that the Taliban is not a unified organisation could legitimately be used to describe the original Taliban of the 1990s; she acknowledges the enduring validity of Bernt Glatzer's description of the original Taliban as ‘a caravan to which different people attached themselves for various reasons'.
¹³

The Taliban, when the term is used as a label to describe the whole insurgency rather than just its leadership, is better understood as a franchise than as a unified, centrally controlled movement. There are several audiences among the insurgency, whose political stances are frequently different from one another; what convinces one actor to stop fighting may not persuade another.

That the Taliban insurgency is a franchise movement is part of the problem with trying to negotiate a political solution with the Taliban leadership. When the Taliban leadership takes credit for the actions of those in the franchise, they may seem to exert real control over the movement, which in reality they do not. If the leadership were to negotiate a political solution only to have it ignored by the groups it claims to control, it would lose all credibility. The Taliban leadership possibly knows this, and understands that a deal might result in their political marginalisation. That does not mean it is not in their interests to negotiate, for while they do so, they increase the legitimacy of their claim to represent the movement and gain power. The coalition's application of a polarised model of war ironically gives the leadership of the insurgency more credibility than it really has. A distinct, but related, point is that the difficulties inherent in the coalition achieving decisive top-down solutions make the case for attempting bottom-up solutions; this in turn requires a close understanding of the conflict on its own terms at the local political level.

A further complication to a political settlement is the perception among some insurgents that reconciliation with the Afghan government essentially equates to honourable surrender. In Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement was based on the existence of opposing parties
who could provide a political channel for insurgent grievances. One of the key issues with Irish Republican Army (IRA) weapons decommissioning was the possibility that it would be perceived as the IRA apologising for having fought. The political approach to reconciliation in Afghanistan is different from a model in which the appeal to insurgents is to resolve their problems through non-violent political means. No party in the Afghan government represents the Taliban.

Adam Holloway MP sagely argued in 2009 that what he terms the ‘patriotic' elements of the Taliban, who have legitimate political grievances, ‘must be allowed to claim much of the success in local areas for reducing the presence of international forces and the establishment of order'.
¹⁴
As Daniel Marston writes in his chapter on Afghanistan in
Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare
(2010): ‘it is critical to remember that today's so-called enemy is likely to be part of tomorrow's solution. This has always been true, throughout the history of counter-insurgency'.
¹⁵

The Afghan government is as much a franchise as the insurgency. The self-interest of the majority of the key players is more in evidence than a sense of ideological commitment to the government. Ahmed Wali Karzai, the President's half-brother, was the key government figure in Kandahar until his assassination in July 2011. The majority of coalition security contracts, a huge sum of money, went through his businesses, or those owned by his relatives. His allegedly close connections to powerful narcotics factions, inside and outside the government, were widely known. The government was very profitable for him. Ahmed Rashid, a leading authority on the insurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan, writes that Tajik and Uzbek warlords in the north of the country are reported to have become so ‘rich and powerful that they barely listen to [President] Karzai'. He adds that governors of northern provinces have created their own fiefdoms that are left alone by NATO forces based there because removing them would create further instability.
¹⁶

The Afghan Army also exhibits characteristics of a franchise. In some areas they are very effective. The most obvious example of this is in close quarter combat, where their warriors (the Afghan National Army term for private soldier) have consistently shown themselves to be very brave. One domain where the franchise factor does come into play is in their logistics. The notion that army resources belong to the state, not to the individual officer, still finds significant resistance in many quarters. This
may be an unfair criticism. To expect the Afghan National Army to model its logistic arrangements on a Western system is perhaps to go against the grain of how armed forces can operate reasonably effectively through a patronage-based system. Where a common conception of loyalty to the state cannot be assumed, other mechanisms of maintaining unity could perhaps be seen as the more pragmatic option.
¹⁷

Nor are the government and insurgent franchises exclusive. Family, social, business and political connections cut across the government-insurgent divide. Many of the Taliban, particularly at the local level, are literally the relatives of those on the government side. For many Afghan district governors, or Afghans of the urban landowning class, to have friends in the Taliban is entirely common (and probably, in their own mind, sensible). Many are old Mujahideen fighting companions of the 1980s now on different sides of the fence, but still friends. For example, the Afghan government district governor of Musa Qala, Mullah Saalam, in 2007 said that a major Taliban commander called Abdul Bari ‘is our friend'; to understand such comments as unusual would be to misunderstand the dynamics of the conflict.
¹⁸

Other actors in the political kaleidoscope of the Afghan conflict have real power, but are not clearly identifiable with the government or the insurgency. Antonio Giustozzi, in the article, ‘Armed Politics and Political Competition in Afghanistan' (2011), analyses in far more depth than is offered here the dynamics of armed political competition by non-state actors that have been extensive in post-2001 Afghanistan.
¹⁹
Several militia groups which were officially disbanded in 2005 continue to hold real power, often within the Afghan police. Moreover, the old Mujahideen parties endure as important political constituencies. Giustozzi makes particularly evocative use of political maps (see
Figures 5
and
6
) to show the extent of affiliation of various Afghan provincial governors and MPs to the two main branches of Afghanistan's Islamic movement: Jamiat-i Islami, formerly led by Ahmed Shah Masood, who were the core of the Northern Alliance of 2001; Hizb-i Islami, the movement whose part led by Gulbudin Hekmatyar now forms the core of the insurgency in eastern Afghanistan, but who have a legal identity as a legitimate political movement within Afghanistan, which disassociates itself from Hekmatyar.

We have to understand the conflict in Afghanistan on its own terms. In a personal example, diluted for security, an Afghan district governor I
knew explained that certain elements of the insurgency in his district were not of great concern to him personally. He and his peer group were landlords, and these elements of the insurgency were mostly the sons of some of their tenants. These ‘Taliban' represent only a limited threat to them, although the out of area insurgent fighters were a genuine concern. This governor was on a day-to-day basis more concerned about a large militia that was on the government side, but he did not see it as being on his side. The militia was tied into a faction based on the Barakzai tribe which competed for power in Gereshk; the governor was not from that faction. He could not have effectively exercised authority without ISAF being there as a counter-balance to the militia's authority. Therefore the governor and the militia were both on the ISAF side, but not on each other's sides. The governor's main concern was to position himself politically for the future. He and the man commanding the militia were actors in their own right, affiliated more to themselves than to their side. These examples are not anomalies; they are the norm. There are endless examples of linkages between those on the ‘Taliban' side and those on the ‘government' side. This is illogical in a strictly polarised conception of conflict, but makes sense when understood in terms of a politically kaleidoscopic frame.