Out of the Mountains

by David Kilcullen

  We’ve already looked at the megatrends that are transforming the planet and will shape the conflict environment of the next generation. We’ve explored concepts such as urban metabolism, carrying capacity, cities as biological systems, feral cities, dark networks, and the ways in which nonstate armed groups interact with populations and governments in these complex urban systems. In Chapter 2, we looked at three examples—Mumbai, Mogadishu, and Kingston—that cover the spectrum of threats that exist now and which will be even more widespread in the urban, littoral, networked environment of future conflict. In each of these examples, the interaction between a nonstate armed group and a local population prompted a series of events in an urban microhabitat, while networked connectivity gave these events a far broader effect.

  In this chapter, I want to drill down to that hyperlocal level, to look at the intimate interaction between nonstate groups and populations. My goal here is to understand the way that nonstate armed groups try to control populations, and the way those populations manipulate them in return. A secondary objective is to begin the search for a paradigm that goes beyond the confines of classical counterinsurgency theory, and I start by examining the relationship between armed groups and populations from the point of view of the armed actor, before looking at the same relationship from the standpoint of the unarmed or noncombatant civilian. In essence, this chapter looks at how nonstate armed groups of all types (and the states with which they compete, coexist or partner) seek to control populations—the kind of complex two-way interaction that’s highlighted in the quote that began this chapter, from a resident in an urban slum in Brazil.4 And the fish trap is, it turns out, a very useful analogy for the network of incentive structures they use to do so.

  II. Insurgent Control Systems in Afghanistan

  It’s useful to begin with a description of how a real-life control system operates, and the war in Afghanistan has unfortunately provided many opportunities to observe such systems in action. It’s also helpful to start with a nonurban example, since this lets us look at processes of control in a simpler society and a less cluttered environment, without initially having to account for the complex impact of urbanization, littoralization, and networked connectivity. In addition, this example helps to demonstrate that patterns of competitive control are independent of terrain or type of group—indeed, they may be universal.

  So, let’s imagine a village elder in Kandahar province in 2011.5 He may have a dispute with a neighboring village over orchard land, grazing rights, or water for irrigation. Such disputes are common in Afghanistan, where population displacement, agricultural disruption, and changed settlement patterns have eroded community consensus about land ownership. Decades of conflict, in a society where 44 percent of the population is under fifteen years old, have meant that disorder is all most Afghans know.6 Written records of land ownership either never existed or have been destroyed. The fall of the monarchy in 1973, the brutal Communist land reform program in 1973–78, the Soviet-Afghan war of 1978–89, the civil war of the 1990s, the 2001 invasion, and since then the Taliban insurgency have all contributed to population movement and displacement that magnifies this chaos.

  Traditionally, a dispute such as this would have been solved through negotiation among elders, by calling a mediator from another district, through a jirga (a tribal assembly), or, less often, through the government courts. Elders would have been familiar with the nirkh, the customary table of punishments and payments used to settle disputes; some would specialize in this area of traditional justice. If two parties to a dispute couldn’t agree on a common nirkh, they might use that of another village or tribe.7 But today the elders in many parts of Afghanistan are gone—dead, exiled, cowed, or in hiding—or perhaps co-opted by the insurgents, by local warlords or corrupt officials. Fake “elders,” who specialize in negotiating with foreigners, travel from district to district, giving villages a front man who looks the part and can extract money, contracts and concessions from international troops or aid agencies, while the real elders hang back or hide. The government has little permanent presence in this district, and there’s no reliable or legitimate government court system. How can our hypothetical elder resolve his dispute?

  Well, he can turn to the Taliban. Over the years, the insurgents have evolved a resilient set of local guerrilla governance institutions. They’ve appointed a governor for each local area, part of a shadow provincial and district government cadre (sometimes also known as the “district commission”) that includes a financial comptroller, a military commander, and a qazi—a religious judge. Dispute resolution and mediation are the traditional functions of religious leaders in Afghan society, and before the Russian war respected mullahs or maulawis often mediated exactly this sort of conflict.8 Likewise, law and order have always been the Taliban’s primary concerns—indeed, the movement got its start during the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s, when madrassa students and their teachers from districts west of Kandahar City took up arms in reaction to the perceived un-Islamic behavior of other mujahideen, and fought the Soviets in “Taliban fronts.”

  As Dr. Carter Malkasian—one of our generation’s greatest analysts of insurgency, and a courageous participant-observer of conflict on the ground—has noted in the case of Helmand province, religious leaders had a resilient, mobile, and dense network before the war. Mullahs traditionally moved from village to village every few years, maintaining close communication with other clerics in distant villages.9 As a result, being less tied to the interests of any one village or group of elders, they had an independence of action, a less parochial outlook, and a widespread and well-organized social, political, and economic network that allowed them to mediate local disputes and to assume a leadership role during the upheavals of conflict. By tapping into this religious network, co-opting local mullahs, the Taliban were able to multiply and enhance their influence. This is not, of course, unique to Islam or to Afghanistan—I saw the same thing happen with Greek Orthodox priests when I was a peacekeeper in Cyprus in 1997 and with Catholic clergy during the violence in East Timor in 1999.10 But in Afghanistan, because of the weakness of secular state institutions, this pattern has taken a particularly powerful form.

  After the Soviets pulled out in 1989, many members of the original Taliban fronts returned quietly to their madrassas, while non-Taliban mujahideen commanders quickly seized urban centers, expropriated economic resources (especially land), and built militias to secure their supporters and prey on road traffic and market activity. These petty racketeers, dignifying themselves as “regional commanders,” soon became local warlords. In the early 1990s many of them made deals with the post-Soviet government of President Najibullah, which allowed them de facto autonomy over a patchwork of fiefdoms across the country, in all the areas that Najibullah’s government felt itself too weak to control directly.11

  Around Kandahar, these warlords so abused the population that the Taliban came out of retirement and fought back—some Taliban leaders, such as Mullah Abdul Salam Zaaef, have claimed they did this on behalf of the community, though others assert that the Taliban were acting in their own interest.12 Taliban groups served as a public law-and-order force. They gained support from local communities by freeing the population from the warlords’ predation: applying rough vigilante justice, trying abusers in ad hoc Islamic courts and publicly executing them, expelling the militias, and ending the warlords’ system of institutionalized highway robbery with its shakedowns and checkpoints. As Anand Gopal noted in 2010, Kandahar, the original home of the Taliban, fell into chaos as mujahideen commanders from the seven major factions that had fought the Soviets “carved up the province for themselves. By 1994, tales of rape and plunder became widespread, prompting Taliban commanders, who had been sitting aside during this civil war, to rise up against these warlords. Taliban leaders saw their role as restorative (rescuing jihad from the hands of rapacious commanders who were using it for their own ends) and judicial (halting
the conflict-fueled breakdown of society by installing their interpretation of Islamic law).”13

  In this way, the Taliban gained a reputation for austere incorruptibility, and for a harsh and conservative fairness. They also fulfilled society’s traditional expectations of religious elders by resolving and mediating disputes, thereby enhancing their own credibility and prestige. Most important, they established a pattern of predictability, order, and consistency. Over the years, many Afghans have told me that it was this sense of order, and the way that it made people feel safe after the chaos of the anti-Soviet war and the predations of the warlords, that accounted in large measure for people’s initial support for the Taliban.

  The Taliban expanded the area under their control as they took over fiefdom after warlord fiefdom, and they gradually evolved into a regional government. They were aided in this by the civil war that broke out in Afghanistan among rival mujahideen factions after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 cut off the flow of assistance to President Najibullah’s regime. After the Najibullah government collapsed a year later, fighting between influential regional commanders and warring factions destroyed much of what remained of the country. With no unified opposition, and supported by people who sought relief from the unpredictable brutality of the civil war, the Taliban rapidly gained ground. By the end of September 1996 they had captured Kabul, where their first act—on the very day the city fell—was to torture, castrate, and then hang ex-president Najibullah and his brother in a traffic circle in downtown Kabul.

  Thus, in its origin, the Taliban was as much an armed social justice and law enforcement movement—albeit in many ways a ferociously violent and noxious one—as a religious faction. It was certainly not a classical insurgency: far from seeking to overthrow a dominant government, the movement represented an attempt to create order and governance in a chaotic, predatory ecosystem where nobody was in charge. In a society that had been undergoing an unstable and involuntary transition to modernity since the early 1960s and had been subjected to intense violence during that time in the name of progressive causes—land reform, women’s rights, universal education, industrialized agriculture, secularization, and so on—it’s hardly surprising that many people’s search for relief from the chaos led them to look back to the certainty of traditional systems and conservative authority structures rather than forward to the creation of a modern democratic nation-state. In the chaotic conditions of the 1990s, there was little practical alternative anyway—there was no normality or stability to restore. Likewise, in its original form the Taliban wasn’t a proxy for Pakistani ambitions in Afghanistan. Support from Pakistani intelligence came later, as the movement began to expand beyond its birthplace around Kandahar and the Pakistanis saw an opportunity to displace Indian and pro-Soviet influence in the rest of Afghanistan. Although Pakistani support helped the Taliban grow and prosper, most Afghans agree that the movement was not created so much as exploited by Pakistan.

  Today, the Taliban justice system draws on the movement’s reputation for harsh predictability and consistency: it attracts people with the promise of fair dispute resolution, just and enforceable mediation, and the prevention and punishment of crime and corruption. One locally famous example occurred in Wardak province in November 2009:

  Local people said they supported the Taliban because the police never tackled the criminal gangs smuggling drugs, running prostitutes and kidnapping local businessmen. In Wardak, a Taliban-controlled province south of the capital, the insurgents last month seized four men involved in kidnapping the son of a wealthy Kabul tea merchant. The kidnappers told their victim to pretend he was their nephew if they met anyone on the way to their safe house in a remote area. But Taliban soldiers at a checkpoint noticed his expensive shoes, jeans and leather jacket, and arrested the gang. Four bodies were then left swinging from a tree in Maidan Shah, the provincial capital. A note pinned to one read: “The same fate awaits others who choose to kidnap for a living.” The Taliban caught the kidnappers, tortured them and executed them in public. The tea merchant donated $US200,000 to the Taliban as a gift for his son’s release. The story quickly spread through the districts around Highway One. “It proves the Taliban have no problem with ordinary Afghans—they only have a problem with those Afghans who work in high government positions, who run crime in this city,” said Karimullah, 40, who owns a shop selling flour, oil and rice.14

  Note that it wasn’t simply the punishment of crime that mattered here. The Taliban publicly announced a set of rules, as laid down by Mullah Omar (who has banned kidnapping for ransom), and then arrested, tried, and executed a gang who had broken these rules. Via placards on the executed kidnappers’ bodies, they sent a message of consistency, predictability, and order, by which they distinguished themselves from corrupt officials. The locals clearly understood this—as Karimullah’s comment shows, they got the point.

  In contrast, Afghans whom I asked (during fieldwork in December 2009, the year of the Wardak kidnapping) about their perceptions of the national police or the government court system, just laughed and said that government courts take months to resolve the smallest dispute, cost thousands of dollars in bribes, and render judgments that always favor the most influential power brokers, who can simply ignore the judgment anyway if they don’t like it.15 By contrast, the Taliban come from the local area, so they understand the issues people are dealing with. Their justice is free of charge, judgments are rendered quickly (sometimes in as little as half an hour), and unlike the Afghan National Police, who are often seen as corrupt and in the pay of local elites, people expect that the local Taliban underground cell will consistently enforce the court’s judgment. “Many people don’t like the Taliban,” a businessman from Kandahar told me, “but at least you know what you’re getting: they’re consistent and fair. You know what to expect from them.”16

  Predictability is the basis for secure dispute resolution and thus for social stability—something that’s deeply attractive to a population buffeted by decades of instability and desperately worried about the future. Indeed, Taliban courts seem to spend a lot of effort on what we might call civil or commercial, rather than criminal, law: they issue birth certificates, mediate divorces and resolve inheritance disputes, and have been known to issue land title deeds, perhaps recognizing that this is one of the few ways in which a community can gain a recognizable, enforceable, and secure claim to its property. As the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto showed in The Mystery of Capital, his study of property ownership in poor societies, secure title to assets is often one of the strongest desires of poverty-stricken populations, whose possessions are normally unregistered and unrecognized by the state.17 Acquiring title to their land can transform people’s feelings of security and well-being—in de Soto’s home country of Peru, Shining Path guerrillas gained significant popular support early in the conflict by taking local people’s side in land reform issues of this kind.

  But the attractiveness of Taliban dispute resolution is the bait in a fish trap. When the Taliban court has reached a verdict, both parties to the dispute are obliged to sign, or make their mark, on a court record held by the local underground cell. This record allows enforceability, but it also puts those who sign it at the mercy of the Taliban. By recognizing the Taliban court’s authority to resolve disputes, our hypothetical elder has literally signed onto their broader agenda. The local Taliban have his name and signature on their court document, and at any time they can make a claim on his allegiance or blackmail him by threatening to expose his involvement to the authorities.

  Moreover, suppose the Taliban court rules in the elder’s favor. He’s now becoming locked into a system of incentives controlled by the Taliban. He holds his land title or has access to grazing land or irrigation water on the basis of their authority. He must now acknowledge that authority in other matters, or else he’ll simply be undermining his own claim to the valuable disputed asset that he now holds on the authority
of the Taliban. If the Taliban come to his village seeking to recruit men as part-time guerrillas in the local area, or asking for money, or seeking information on government activity, this elder will find it impossible to refuse them, whatever his private view of their cause. At the same time, he has of course technically broken the law by turning to the Taliban to have his dispute resolved, and thus is further alienated from the police and the government. As long as the Taliban court’s judgment is fair and consistently enforced, he has no incentive to oppose the Taliban and every incentive to support them, regardless of his view of their ideology.

  As Professor Stathis Kalyvas pointed out in his groundbreaking 2006 study, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, we tend to intuitively assume that insurgents become strong in a particular area because people support their cause or agree with their ideology, but actually the exact opposite is the case. Kalyvas showed in a comprehensive series of case studies that armed groups in civil war don’t become strong because people support their ideology; on the contrary, people start supporting a given group’s ideology in places where that group is already strong. Kalyvas argued that as conflicts continue, people increasingly collaborate with whatever actor controls their area, “because political actors who enjoy substantial territorial control can protect civilians who live in that territory—both from their rivals and themselves—giving survival-oriented civilians a strong incentive to cooperate with them, irrespective of their true or initial preferences.”18 In other words, people support armed groups in places where those groups are already strong enough to impose an incentive structure (or system of control) that provides predictability, order, safety and stability. Support follows strength, not vice versa. This is a critically important observation, to which we’ll return shortly.19