It’s instructive to contrast the Taliban-as-government of 2001 with the Taliban-as-insurgent of 2011. A decade of conflict has changed the movement’s approach, forcing it to focus much more on local-level administrative and governance activities, designed to put in place a Hezbollah-like spectrum of coercive, administrative, and persuasive tools to control and mobilize the population. These include the mobile court system, as we’ve seen; a public safety structure at the village level that seeks to prevent and punish crime; an ombudsman or accountability committee that investigates accusations of corruption or abuse by the Taliban itself; a system of provincial, local, and district shadow governors; a published code of conduct (layeha) that states the rules and obligations incumbent on Taliban commanders; a taxation system; an economic and agricultural policy; a series of small-business assistance programs; and even infrastructure projects. Vajid Mojdeh, a former Taliban foreign ministry official who monitors the movement, argued in 2010 that the Taliban “have totally changed. They’ve totally put behind them their international agenda of spreading Islamist revolution and now are just focused on Afghanistan. . . . There’s a new generation. They are familiar with computers. They communicate with text messages. They’re in favor of education.” Unlike the Taliban of the 1990s, he said, “they are no longer all illiterates.”60 Mojdeh pointed to changes in the Taliban policy on education for women, inoculations, and school curricula. He’s not an impartial observer, of course, but this still suggests a significant evolution in the Taliban’s approach over time. The intent—to establish a predictable rule set and thus control the population—doesn’t seem to have changed, but the methods have expanded to fill almost the entire spectrum of competitive control, from persuasion to coercion.
State Versus Nonstate Normative Systems
Insurgents such as AQ I, the Taliban, and Hezbollah are not, of course, the only actors who are trying to corral, control, or manipulate a population: governments do exactly the same thing, using rather similar methods. In this context, governments can be considered as owners or proponents of a wide-spectrum normative system.
This also is a critical point, because it means that populations are confronted not with one system of control but with several—the insurgent’s, the government’s, and the systems of social control that occur naturally within the population itself, based on locality, kinship or economic ties. Indeed, in a real-world situation the members of any given population may confront several actors, all of whom are trying to control them—multiple different insurgent groups, competing government officials, foreign occupation forces, organized crime networks, and governments of neighboring countries. The way populations deal with and exploit this situation is discussed in detail in the next section. For the moment, all we need to note is that in order to understand which of the possible options a population is likely to choose, we must understand both the initial attractiveness of each option and the strength of the incentive spectrum that locks the population in once the choice is made.
But comparing the strength of state systems of control with those of insurgents, tribes, gangs, smuggling networks, and so on is extremely difficult if we think in terms of organizational structure, since state and nonstate systems are so structurally different. For example, although populations in rural societies usually meet the state only in the person of police officers, district officials, and tax collectors, modern states have relatively elaborate bureaucratic, legal, military, and administrative structures. These involve many employees, buildings, and facilities, organized into a large, obvious, permanent footprint that includes everything from mobile police patrols, roving courts, and itinerant officials through district administrative centers, government branch offices, checkpoints, provincial offices, and so on, right up to the ministries themselves at the level of the central state.
By contrast, nonstate armed groups tend to lack such a permanent and obvious structure—they often deliberately seek invisibility, in fact—and although they may field a comprehensive shadow governance system, this is neither overt nor necessarily large-scale. Such a system usually works in a nonobvious “underground” manner that makes it hard to observe and even harder to compare with competing structures. The well-developed, overt structure that Hezbollah has created is a rare exception in this context: the vast majority of nonstate armed groups have nothing of the kind.
For example, we might look at an Afghan district and count the number of school buildings, state-employed teachers, and children attending school as a means of gauging the strength of the Afghan education ministry in that area. These are all relatively obvious and easy to count, especially the number of school buildings, one reason why this is such a popular measure of performance for aid agencies and governments providing assistance in Afghanistan. There are problems with this metric, by the way—it measures inputs (expenditure on education) rather than outcomes (how many teachers and students in schools) or impact (changes in literacy levels or the effectiveness of programs). But at least the number of schools is an observable though partial negative measure of government presence, since if there are no schools in an area, there’s clearly little influence by the government education ministry.
But measuring the strength of a nonstate armed group in this structural way is deeply problematic. The Taliban don’t build school buildings. Nor do they establish many of the other obvious statelike bureaucratic or administrative structures that governments create. Even their intimidation may not be obvious—in 2009, after killing a few teachers and burning schools to send a message, Taliban in some parts of Afghanistan began letting children go to school unhindered, so that if we were to try to gauge Taliban influence over the school system in these areas through the number of teachers or students being killed or school buildings being burned, there would be nothing to see. And yet, of course, nobody in these districts had the slightest doubt as to who was in control—some I talked to even said that they were grateful to the Taliban for “allowing” their children’s education.61 Likewise, according to U.S. officers in a district in eastern Afghanistan, the Taliban didn’t interfere with school attendance but did dictate the curriculum: at a school in the village of Chawni, “the Taliban recently posted a letter on the wall detailing the curriculum that was to be taught. ‘So here they get money from the government, books from the government, and they think it’s perfectly legitimate to teach what the Taliban tells them.’”62
How then can we compare the strength of a nonstate armed group to that of the state—an essential activity, if we want to understand which actor is becoming dominant in the competition for control? As Bernard Fall suggests, we need a functional model rather than a structural one, and we need to think in terms of competitive systems of control. Joel S. Migdal suggested just such an approach in his 1988 study, Strong Societies and Weak States.63 Migdal argued that you could understand state effectiveness by measuring capability across four clusters (or subsystems) of government activity—“the capacities to penetrate society, regulate social relationships, extract resources, and appropriate or use resources in determined ways.”64 The distinguished analyst and Afghanistan-watcher William Maley applied Migdal’s model in his history of state collapse in Afghanistan, The Afghanistan Wars, demonstrating its applicability to both state and insurgent capabilities.65
This functional approach lets us compare the strengths of various incentives and control systems. Though they don’t own and operate school buildings, the Taliban do run underground indoctrination programs. They penetrate the school system and attempt to regulate the behavior of people in it, so that their ideas are reflected in the school curriculum and individual teachers are pushing the insurgent line in the classroom, and they try to intimidate teachers and students, using threatening text messages on cell phones or threatening notes on school buildings or the houses of teachers. They extract resources from the school system through extortion or by taxing teachers, parents, and local businesses, and they app
ropriate those resources to their own programs.
To summarize, it’s worth referring back to the systems of competitive control we observed in the previous chapter—in particular, the “System” in Tivoli Gardens, Kingston. Like the Taliban system of local courts, the informal justice system in garrison communities creates a mechanism for dispute resolution, mediation, and enforcement that makes populations feel safe, creates order, and generates predictability. At the persuasive end of the spectrum, the parties and community events sponsored by the gang, the political participation of the community in the JLP’s electoral process, and the subjective feelings of respect, affection, and prestige that built up over time created a resilient, wide-spectrum system of competitive control for Christopher Coke’s group. In the administrative part of the spectrum, the ability to access government contracts, social services, housing, health care, and food supplies provides incentives for the population to support the posse, while locking them into dependence on the gang’s largesse. And at the coercive end of the spectrum, the gang controlling each garrison has the demonstrated capacity to kill informers, fight off rivals, and punish those who transgress its rules. It also polices its own members in order to maintain internal discipline and external predictability. Thus, at the hyperlocal level, we see exactly the same pattern of competitive control at work in the gang environment of Kingston as we saw in the Taliban, Hezbollah, and AQ I. This, along with the mafia, street gang, prison gang, and drug trafficking network examples mentioned earlier, suggests that the mechanism of competitive control isn’t restricted to insurgency or civil war but is rather a universal aspect of the way in which nonstate actors control population groups.
There’s one very obvious difference, however, between what the Shower Posse achieved in Tivoli Gardens and what the Taliban has attempted to establish in Afghanistan, and this is the transnational network—initially an international protection racket, then a drug trafficking organization—that the Shower Posse created by exploiting the urban, networked, littoral environment in which it operated. In particular, as local levels of violence spiked in the 1970s and people escaped to the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, these emigrants created urban networks that connected the Kingston garrisons to cities across the planet. As they remitted money back to the gang to ensure protection for their families still in Jamaica, members of the diaspora created the basis for a transnational system of competitive control. This has also been seen with Hezbollah and with insurgencies such as the Tamil Tigers, both of which exploited large diaspora populations to generate international support networks, and with Kenyan and Nigerian organized crime, as well as with the Russian, Italian, and Albanian mafias, Latin American narcos and street gangs, and Chinese snakeheads (people smugglers) and Triads (transnational organized crime networks). As coastal urbanization and connectedness increase, transnational networks of this kind, tapping into the flows of urban connectivity between home populations and diasporas, will increasingly be able to create transnational systems of competitive control that mimic the functions of the state and compete with governments. Indeed, they’ll be even better able to compete with national governments, which will be tied to one particular territory and limited by national sovereignty and international law, while transnational networks will be increasingly able to skip between jurisdictions at will, avoiding governments whenever the pressure on them gets too great.
Before we move on to look at the elements of this international connectivity, however, we must first examine the other side of the coin—the way that populations attempt to manipulate and control armed groups.
IV. Population Survival Strategies
March 19, 2008
Office of the Independent Directorate of Local Government, Kabul
Mullah Abdul Salaam Alizai sat at the head of the long teak-veneer table in the conference room of a run-down Afghan government office in Kabul. He was a big man in every sense—big-boned, haughty, with a magnificent scented black beard and a black turban, dressed in traditional garb right down to his curly-toed slippers, every inch a tribal chief. His gaze casually took in, assessed, dominated, and dismissed the room. Only a few weeks before, he had been a pro-Taliban commander in his home district of Musa Q ala, in the northern part of Helmand province in Afghanistan’s southwest.
As a leader of the Alizai, the dominant Pashtun tribe in Musa Q ala district, Mullah Salaam had allied with the Taliban and had been a military commander during the Taliban regime of 1996–2001. The Taliban appointed him governor of Uruzgan province, and he later served as governor of Kajaki district in Helmand. After the coalition invasion of 2001, Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, the newly appointed governor of Helmand province, imprisoned Mullah Salaam for several months: although (or rather, because) Sher Muhammad was also an Alizai, his rivalry with Salaam was intense and personal. Sher Muhammad and Abdul Salaam hailed from competing subtribes, and while Salaam was pro-Taliban, Sher Muhammad was one of the former mujahideen commanders we’ve already discussed, who sought to divide Afghanistan among themselves after the defeat of the Soviets, and then fought each other and the Taliban during the civil war of the 1990s.
After his release from Sher Muhammad’s prison, Mullah Salaam returned to his compound at Shah Karez, eight miles east of Musa Q ala, and became a member of the tribal council. On the surface, he had reconciled with the new government—he even served for a time as head of Sher Muhammad’s bodyguard—but in February 2007 he switched sides. The British Army had moved into Helmand in force in July 2006, bringing intense fighting to Musa Q ala, interfering with poppy cultivation and other agriculture, and causing major disruption to licit and illicit business. By late 2006, realizing they were overstretched, the British had agreed to a cease-fire under which both they and the Taliban would withdraw from Musa Q ala district center, leaving it under the protection of the tribal council.
After biding their time and gathering their forces through the winter, in the spring of 2007 the Taliban broke the truce and moved in to seize the town. Salaam sided with the Taliban, leading his Alizai fighters in support of the insurgents as they took the rest of the district. But after a few months Salaam changed sides once again. He’d become disillusioned when, in his words, Taliban leaders had “shown lack of respect for the tribal council.” After secret negotiations with British officers and with Michael Semple, an Irish diplomat who was later expelled from Afghanistan by the Karzai government for making direct contact with Taliban leaders, Salaam switched sides once more to support the government in late 2007. Since his latest change of sides, his efforts to rally the local population in support of the government and against the Taliban had earned him appointment as Musa Q ala district governor—which was why he was in Kabul now, looking for concrete rewards in the form of weapons, money, protection, and contracts for people in his district.
Now Mullah Salaam surveyed the room confidently, gazing around at the eleven elders from his district (mostly Pashtuns, with one Hazara) who had made the long journey to Kabul to show their solidarity with him, along with a collection of officials of the Independent Directorate of Local Government (IDLG), the part of the Afghan government that is (in theory at least) responsible for district and local administration. Mullah Salaam and his elders had come to put their case for support to the IDLG leadership. Headed by Jalani Popal, President Karzai’s cousin, IDLG was working to bring essential services and government presence to local populations across the country, creating local governance centers and appointing district governors, in order to solidify President Karzai’s control over the Afghan countryside. This effort was codified two years later as the District Delivery Program, which Popal described at the 2010 London Conference (displaying his, or perhaps his speechwriter’s, superb mastery of international development terminology) as aiming “to establish or improve the visibility of the Government by holistically engaging the governance system at the district level to ensure that the basic level public services are av
ailable directly to communities.”66 More concisely, an official from Nangarhar province described the program to me as “the re-elect Karzai campaign.”67
I was at the table as a visiting official from Washington, D.C., along with a small field team. We were conducting a theaterwide campaign assessment for the U.S. secretary of state, traveling to different parts of the conflict area, talking to local populations and key officials, trying to get a feel for the state of the war and, more important, the reach and effectiveness of the Afghan government. Things didn’t look good, to say the least. At this time NATO’s campaign plan included a governance line of operation, which declared that the coalition’s governance objective was “to extend the reach of the Afghan government.”68 The problem with such a strategy of government extension was that it lacked a comparable governance reform element. If your strategy is to extend the reach of a government that is corrupt, abusive, ineffective, and alienates the people, then the better you execute that strategy, the worse things are going to get—which is exactly what was happening.
Then, as now, the problem in Afghanistan wasn’t fundamentally a military one: the Taliban, for all their ferocious reputation, were no match for NATO in military terms, and they’d been solidly defeated several times over in campaigns around the country since 2001. But because there was no viable, effective, nonabusive government to replace them—or, putting it in competitive control theory terms, because the Afghan government couldn’t muster a wide-spectrum normative system to compete with that of the Taliban—the insurgency always returned, because it did things that the people needed and that the government either could not or would not do. Active sanctuary in Pakistan—including advisers, money, weapons, training support, and protection from U.S. interference—certainly helped, but ultimately even Pakistani support wouldn’t have allowed the insurgency to continually recover from its military losses had the insurgents not also had a robust normative system that could outcompete the government’s. Like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Taliban could and did bounce back from a series of military defeats by using capabilities in the other parts of the persuasion-coercion spectrum.
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