by Noah Raford
The linkages made to transnational terrorist movements not only drew international attention but also changed the nature of domestic interaction. African governments have embraced foreign assistance in strengthening their security capacity, and a number of examples exist where countering terrorism has been used as the justification to violate human rights, quell political opposition, and suppress dissent. In Mauritania in 2003, for example, the then-president used the war on terror to justify arresting twenty-one people, including the militant activist Hamada Ould Mohamed Kheirou, who would later rise to prominence as a leader in the groups that continue to terrorize Mali’s north. Mauritania’s move, which was described more as an opportunistic attempt to remove political opponents than as an interest in combatting global terror, resulted in Kheirou’s move to join al-Qaeda training camps in Iraq followed shortly thereafter. As the Economist succinctly expressed it, “In many cases such men do not move from country to country voluntarily, but one step ahead of the security forces.”43
Putting Patronage in Its Place?
The perpetuation of warlord statehood has serious ramifications, and not only for African states and their citizens. Local political conflicts interlinked with organized crime in a context of globalization has consequences in both northern and southern hemispheres, and these consequences are becoming increasingly visible. The extraordinary growth in conflict- and crime-driven displacement, both in Africa and in Central America, has had enormous humanitarian and financial consequences. Predation by armed groups on commodities in vulnerable states imposes costs throughout the global market: in 2009, an attack by insurgents on an oil facility in the Niger Delta raised the price of oil by $2.33 per barrel, increasing costs for around the globe.44
There is an urgent need to strengthen governance and institutions in these warlord states. But it is frankly hard to see much reason to be optimistic. Successful indictments, like the U.S. case against the Obiangs, are mere glimmers of hope in an otherwise bleak picture. Even when individual states find themselves with a leader genuinely committed to the greater good and sustainable development of his people, the structural conditions make it broadly unlikely. These states need significant reforms of electoral politics and constitutions, and they need strengthened state institutions staffed by capable individuals of integrity. Instead, democratic reforms have largely reinforced patronage political frameworks. Diplomatic and civil-service appointments are offered as rewards; capacity-building opportunities are offered to a favored ally as a chance for international travel and some donor-sponsored shopping trips. Resources that should be spent on health-care, educational, and infrastructure development that could facilitate livelihoods or trade are squandered or squirreled away into an international financial system that offers far too many opportunities to hide resources. Popular uprisings and crises are often heralded as a “new dawn,” an unprecedented opportunity to achieve change. Regrettably, all too often, they fall quickly into business as usual, as international diplomacy offers insufficient time or space for genuinely inclusive dialogue, and financial austerity reduces the capacity for external support. Furthermore, as multilateral frameworks become increasingly hamstrung by warlord states determined to filibuster action or veto change, the possibility for genuine reform recedes still further.
Reversing this paradigm will require extraordinary political will and a shared accountability framework by which both nation-states and their international partners agree to hold themselves (rather than each other) accountable for the woeful state of affairs. There is precious little evidence that these conditions exist, and thus the status quo of the warlord state will continue to sit heavily on the shoulders of the poorest and most vulnerable in society.
Part 2
SHADES OF GRAY
6 Warlord Governance
Transition Toward—or Coexistence with—the State?
Daniel Biró
Given the persistent caricatured and demonizing portrayal of warlords in the media and in scholarship dedicated to so-called failed states, the core objective of this chapter is to correct, to a certain extent, this tendency toward oversimplification and sensationalizing. By delineating a governance space within the particular social context of warlordism, it is my intention to describe the phenomenon of warlordism as an alternative form of organizing political communities outside and beyond the classical state’s centralized monopoly over violence. In doing so, this chapter argues that warlordism is neither just “the opposite of the state” nor an anachronistic remnant of feudalism, but instead it represents a modern hybrid form of state/market economy that privileges decisive action—preponderantly, but not exclusively, military action—together with low-level administrative control.
In describing the phenomenon of warlordism as another way of organizing political communities beyond the state, this chapter is structured around two axes. First, alongside the “governance” aspect, it is important to collect some historical and contemporary evidence that shows that, under specific circumstances, warlords have—and to some degree still do—performed important social functions supporting religion, culture, and other basic aspects of a civil society. These include, in some instances, maintaining some kind of societal order, if not law; adjudicating disputes; building infrastructure (road and bridge construction, for example); as well as, to some extent and in specific circumstances, health and education provision, albeit in unconventional forms. It must be emphasized that warlords are not the only non-state armed actors involved in the provision of social services in conflict zones in general or in the so-called failed states in particular. While there are still debates regarding their motivations, there seems to be a consensus that, particularly in recent times, these groups do provide some social services.1 Having the widest range of services delivered, Hezbollah and Hamas are probably the most prominent non-state armed groups that provide services, but they are clearly not exceptions. Among other examples, “the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) in Colombia supply medical services, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka maintained mail delivery (among other services), and the Communist Party of the Philippines (New People’s Army) supports literacy programs and performs marriage ceremonies for their supporters. The IRA provided transportation services within Republican neighborhoods during the Troubles and even smaller Loyalist groups delivered milk for new mothers living in their communities”2
Second, and deriving from this diversity of motivations and services, it is important to touch upon the specific circumstances under which this alternative form of governance can occur, distinguishing between the warlords’ source of income, their relationship to other local or regional powers, and their relationship to foreign institutions such as NGOs and aid agencies. The suggestion put forward as a result of this inquiry is that, far from being isolated from the state or society, the position of the warlord is enhanced by and is dependent on the links with both. In this regard, the zero-sum game analyzing the warlords in terms of an absence of the state is misguided. I suggest that these entrepreneurial controllers of organized violence (warlords) obtain their autonomy from both state and society by situating themselves in a nodal position in the network of various providers of social services (states, NGOs, INGOs, and IGOs). Through these two axes, it becomes clear that the view of the warlord as simply a bandit is overly simplistic and ignores his—invariably in my research the warlord is a man—position as complex entrepreneur and provider of governance.
In the public perception, popularized by the media at large, the warlord is associated with feudalism, and this is used as an explanatory device to explore the causes and effects of state failure. In contrast, a scholarly understanding of the phenomenon of warlordism must move toward a more sophisticated perspective. Specifically, it is important to understand that in its contemporary incarnation, the warlord stands outside the model of the modern state and (despite what is sometimes claimed) also outside feudal societies;3 nevertheless, the warlord shares selected characteristics with and appropri
ates functions from both. This understanding allows us to avoid the error of ignoring the public goods that—intentionally or inadvertently—may be delivered as part of warlord governance. It also allows the examination of cases of long-term resilience, despite the widespread expectations of warlordism either disintegrating or transitioning (sooner rather than later) into some form of state or state-like governance. In Afghanistan, for instance, even though the country has gone through several regimes in the last three decades, one constant has remained: the presence of warlords such as Ismail Khan and Abdul Rashid Dostum, both still prominent actors in Afghan politics.4
Before addressing these points in detail, it is useful to offer a précis of the ways in which warlords provide social services. The literature on the “economy of war” has developed, since the early 1990s, as a result of the emphasis on how globalization and transnational economic dynamics have facilitated the thriving of the warlords (though it has never fully accounted for their appearance in the first place). This literature focuses on the motives and rational strategies employed by warlords to promote their personal interests, unveiling the “modern warlord” as an integral part of a contemporary globalized international economy. Despite the substantial contribution of this “economic” paradigm to the development of a sophisticated perspective on the study of warlordism, predictably, the description of non-state armed groups in the process of “building authority through commerce” in a violent environment most often ignores their provision of social services. The positioning of the warlord in strict opposition to the institutions and functions of the state—a view held by most analysts—partly justifies this tendency. As one prominent scholar argued, the strategy of building authority through commerce rather than institutions “obviates the need to build bureaucracies, since warlord political authority that fails to replace the state would make no pretension of carrying out state-like functions.”5 Furthermore, it is suggested that the warlord’s reluctance to carry out state-like functions derives from systemic constraints—warlords risk losing their advantage over their competitors in the market of violence if they consume scarce resources by providing social services.
The case of contemporary Afghanistan, however, points toward some limitations of a perspective depicting warlords as driven strictly by the pursuit of their individual economic interests and reluctant to perform any social functions. Based on his extensive research, Antonio Giustozzi argued for a long time that, at least in the particular case of Afghanistan, “social status derives from the control of security rather than of money.… These warlords are more akin to politicians than to businessmen, in that what they are looking for is power rather than money as an end in itself.”6 This being said, it is true that, in their attempt to introduce develop and maintain a degree of social order, the prime social function that armed groups provide is in the area of security and protection (jut like the state itself).
Moving beyond Afghanistan, research has shown that as late as the 2000s, in significant areas of Colombian territory, some paramilitary units and guerrilla insurgents—in particular, FARC—were the major if not the only agents that had both the capability and the will to limit the spread of some forms of local crime and violence by repressing petty criminals.7 To be sure, the strengthening of the Colombian state institutions, the expansion and modernization of the state armed forces (between 2002 and 2012, the size of the military and national police almost doubled), the changes at the international level (with both the United States and the European Union including FARC on their lists of terrorist organizations), and the decapitation of its leadership, the stature of FARC had significantly diminished, and with this, FARC’s legitimacy and its capacity to provide social services, including security, has atrophied. However, as Garry Leech has shown, without ignoring its involvement in illicit drug trafficking or the use of terrorism and human rights violations, for a significant period, FARC acted as a de facto authority in the area under its control, most impressive in the department of Meta, introducing a “revolutionary” judicial system and building electrical grids, roads, bridges, schools, and so on.8
Following an investigation of the social content of the interaction between the paramilitary, their social constituency, and the state in Colombia, some scholars have warned against too strict an interpretation of the conflict as fuelled solely by economic considerations, concluding that it “cannot be reduced to rent-seeking.”9 Not only did Colombian armed groups try to legitimize their control by providing some social functions, offering, for instance, security against petty thieves, but, due to a complex relation with the state, “they [were] intent on inviting both state agencies, and investment, and on guaranteeing a stable economic environment.”10 Evidence of similar activities in the “establishment and maintenance of basic law and order, and re-enforcement of mechanisms of survival in a particular area or among a particular section of the populace” is reported from research on Tajikistan,11 as well as on Sierra Leone, where, at least initially, the Kamajors militias were “providing security to communities and enforcing social norms that most people considered legitimate.”12
It is important to note the existence of a small number of studies that not only approach warlordism as a violent form of predation or primitive “racketeering” but also emphasize the potential—by no means ubiquitous—provision of some social services. To be certain, the vast majority of these services appear to develop in close relation to the necessities of military confrontations and, in particular, appear to be subordinated to the objective of satisfying the necessity of supplying war factions. For instance, returning to the case of Afghanistan, during the long years of civil war, in areas otherwise far too remote from the government control to benefit from state infrastructure projects, war was the environment that led to the development of a new and patchy infrastructure. Some areas gained a limited “new infrastructure including roads, hotels and bazaars due to the need for secure supply routes for the resistance.”13 Giustozzi reminds us, however, that prolonged conflicts can sometimes lead to the development of “political complexes” in which military aspects are intrinsically linked with economic, political, and social dimensions: “a more sophisticated type of warlord may develop some form of partial legitimacy and transform his dominion into a ‘proto-state’,… a structure featuring some sort of civilian administration and providing at least some services, such as education, policing, electricity and other supplies, public transport, etc.”14
Afghanistan is a powerful illustration of a case in which, not being able to penetrate society beyond the capital, the structures of the modern state were and still are complemented by what some scholars define as traditional “networks of solidarities.”15 In such a social configuration, with the state present but weakened, traditional clan-based khans and warlords, who benefit from the additional apparatus of armed forces, function as a surrogate for the state in supporting at least some segments of the population by “re-distribution of wealth through patronage” and by using accumulated wealth to create “public goods like irrigation [and] influence with or protection from outside powers.” Thus, in some regions under warlord control, the conventional depiction of warlords acting in an environment void of any form of governance does not correspond to the reality on the ground.
In 1992, at the end of President Mohamed Najibullah’s grip on power, the majority of Afghan provinces were under the direct control of various military commanders. Among those, the most substantial substitute systems of governance in face of the atrophy of central authority were the ones founded by Ahmad Shah Massoud and Ismail Khan. In the eastern provinces under his control—due to energetic support from a mixture of sources such as USAID or NGOs such as the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan and the United Kingdom’s Afghan AID—Massoud was involved in social provision ranging from engineering projects to education and health projects (building clinics and attracting doctors).16 Working toward the creating what Barnett Rubin considers to have been “the most extensive proto-sta
te in Afghanistan”, Massoud’s Shura-yi Nazar-i Shamali (Supervisory Council of the North) grew as an administrative system that incorporated committees dealing with “judicial and military affairs, civil administration, finances and economy, culture and education, health, political affairs, intelligence and Kabul affairs.”17 Similar reports show that, while the northern province of Balkh was run “almost totally separated from the central government,… basic services such as schools and health centers [were] funded by a combination of resources from regional leaders and international aid.”18
A third important military commander, Ahmed Rashid Dostum, controlled the northern part of Afghanistan and, during the most important part of the 1980s, managed to prevent the region, including the major city of Mazar-i-Sharif, from becoming a battleground, like the rest of the country. Furthermore, following the fall of the Soviet-supported regime of Najibullah, the preservation of some liberties—including the presence of unveiled women, the selling of alcohol, cinemas, and the like—led one author to proclaim the territory under the control of Dostum, the Autonomous Northern Zone, as “the glittering jewel in Afghanistan’s battered crown.” Similarly, Brian Glyn Williams has written recently that, “by [the] Afghan standards of the 1990s, Dostum’s realm was a true sanctuary from the fundamentalism and warfare that had swept over much of the country. With financial and military support coming from the neighboring Uzbekistan, Dostum’s fiefdom thrived. Dostum ran his own airlines—Balkh Air [and] protected the only university in Afghanistan that women could still attend—University of Balkh.”19
Another spectacular case is that of the self-titled “Amir of Western Afghanistan,” Ismail Khan. Situated in western Afghanistan, bordering Iran, the province of Herat was dominated by the charismatic military commander Ismail Khan for about twenty years until his replacement as governor by President Hamid Karzai. During this time, essential public services functioned in Herat, unlike in the vast majority of Afghanistan’s other provinces, with relatively large numbers of women having access to education and opium cultivation maintaining a low profile.20 A large part of the significant domestic extraction in the province of Herat was spent on public projects, once again privileging infrastructural works. Thus, following agreements at the highest level with officials from Pakistan, he was actively involved in the regional project to open a secure route from Quetta to Kandahar to Herat and reaching Ashkhabad in Turkmenistan.21 It is not unjustified to speculate that, had it not been for the centralizing movement of the Taliban, which eventually conquered Herat and imprisoned Khan, the trade growth on that route would have significantly increased the revenues of Khan’s system and would have propelled Herat even more toward being a regional trade hub. Further demonstration of the diversity of his financial and political sources is that he started work—with Iranian support—on rebuilding the road linking Herat with the Iranian border city of Qala at the same time that he initiated work to restore important regional irrigation canals to functionality.22