Out of the Mountains

by David Kilcullen

  Now Mullah Salaam began his pitch, with his elders looking on but remaining silent, acting as living props who indicated, by their mere presence, the district governor’s influence and prestige. Their role was to demonstrate allegiance to him, while he in turn would act as an intermediary, using their support to prove his influence, and so garner resources from the government that he would in turn distribute to them. Mullah Salaam had come over to the government side a few weeks before, he said, along with all the elders from his district, because he wanted the best for his people. He explained that he needed to protect his district and its population from all comers—the Taliban, the government, the drug traffickers, the British currently occupying his area, everyone. To do this, he needed resources that would be under his personal control. He was happy the British had driven off the Taliban, and he was happy that he had been appointed district governor, but he needed either a permanent garrison to take care of his district or weapons to arm his own fighters. He wanted to establish his own local police (arbakai) to secure his district. And he needed contracts—reconstruction contracts, aid projects, transportation and supply contracts—to bring wealth to his people. He and the elders would see to it that any assistance was fairly distributed, he promised.

  After half an hour of inconclusive discussion, as we stood to leave, he grabbed my hand tightly. “Give me American troops to protect my district,” he said. “If I can’t have Americans, I want my own weapons back so I can protect my people myself.” Explaining that I was just a low-level diplomat with no influence over the military, I asked what would happen if neither of those options was possible. “If I can’t have my own weapons, I’ll accept the Afghan Army in my district, and if I can’t have the army, then I’ll accept the Afghan Police—but only as a last resort.” I asked why his own government should trust him with new weapons when he’d been so recently aligned with the Taliban. Didn’t he still have his own weapons? Had he really switched sides so completely? Since when did the Alizai take orders from Kabul, anyway?

  He smiled at me, perhaps marveling at my idiotic naïveté.

  “I wasn’t with the Taliban before, and I’m not with the government now. I’m just trying to take care of my people. Before, I thought we were better off with the Taliban. Now I think we’re better off with the government, but that could change.”

  Clearly, terms such as pro-Taliban or pro-government are meaningless as a description of a local leader such as Abdul Salaam Alizai. For one thing, these terms represent not fixed and unchanging inherent identities that predict a person’s behavior but rather labels that can be acquired and discarded at will. For another, these labels—while they might make sense in the externally imposed construct (what anthropologists might call the etic framework) of counterinsurgency theory—are virtually irrelevant at the local level, where every elder furthers his own interests and those of his group, and partners with whatever outsider he needs to—Taliban, government, or other—in order to advance those interests. A change of sides didn’t indicate a change of loyalty, for each local leader’s loyalty was only ever to himself and his primary group. Anything else was just window dressing.

  Just consider Mullah Salaam’s personal history: he was originally a Taliban military leader, and then a provincial and district governor for the Taliban regime. Next he was a prisoner of, then an ally of, then head of the bodyguard for, the new regime’s governor, who happened to be his tribal relative and personal rival. Then he fought with the Taliban to throw that governor, and the British, out of his district, and after that he turned against the Taliban once more, welcomed the British back, and became district governor himself. Now he wanted a payoff from the government for his “loyalty,” when it should be abundantly clear that Salaam’s loyalty was to nobody but himself, his subtribe, and his subdistrict. As far as he was concerned, the dominant feature of any external intervener—Taliban, British, Kabul government, American, anyone—was precisely that it was an external actor, to be allied with or opposed on a pragmatic basis, only to the extent that such an alliance served his or his district’s local interest and furthered his ability to defeat his tribal and economic rivals.

  A few months after this meeting, after the Taliban had targeted him twice for assassination, Mullah Salaam found himself in an open dispute with the British Army once more. As Jerome Starkey reported:

  A former Taliban commander who swapped sides last year has accused his British allies of jeopardising security and undermining his authority in a row that has plunged their relations to an all time low. Mullah Salam was made governor of Musa Q ala, Helmand, after British, American and Afghan forces retook the town in December. His defection was the catalyst for the operation. But the British fear his warlord ways are hampering their efforts to win over local people, and driving them back into the hands of the insurgents. Mullah Salam says British soldiers are wrecking his attempts to bring security by releasing people he arrests and underfunding his war chest—which he claims is for buying off insurgent commanders. . . . The top British diplomat at the headquarters, Dr Richard Jones, said: “He likes to feather his own nest.” . . . Lieutenant-Colonel Ed Freely, who commands the Royal Irish troops training Afghanistan’s army, said: “He appears less interested in governing his people than reinforcing his own personal position of power.” . . . The British believe he taxed his own villagers more than a ton of opium at the end of the poppy harvest. They also suspect his militia of stealing land, money and motorbikes, and beating people who can’t pay. Mullah Salam denies the allegations. “If I see anyone in my militia doing these things I will shoot him,” he said, revealing his own brand of Taliban-style justice.69

  Even by the baroque standards of Afghan tribal leaders, Mullah Salaam has a reputation for eccentricity and drama. But—as we’ve seen—his words and actions in this case were utterly typical of the behavior of local leaders in environments such as insurgencies, civil wars, and failed states, in feral cities such as Mogadishu, in marginalized urban settlements such as the Kingston garrison communities, or in periurban slums such as those of Mumbai.

  We often (consciously or otherwise) tend to regard such marginalized and excluded populations as passive, supine recipients of government intervention and international assistance, or as victims of groups (such as an insurgents, gangs, or criminal networks) that governments regard as illegitimate. We think of the population as lacking in agency, simply a beneficiary or victim of the actions of others—like a silent-movie heroine tied to a railway track, helplessly awaiting rescue.

  As Mullah Salaam’s case shows, nothing could be further from the truth: not only are noncombatant civilians in these environments extremely active and highly influential, but they are in many cases masters of manipulation and experts in leveraging the presence of rich, ignorant, gullible outsiders in order to get what they need, outsmart their rivals, and survive another day. Indeed, any community leader who is still alive and in a position of authority today in Afghanistan, after thirty years of war (or in Tivoli Gardens, after sixty years of gang domination, or in Mogadishu, after twenty years of state collapse) is, through natural selection alone, almost certainly an expert in manipulating and balancing external interveners and local armed groups. For this reason, to examine the relationships between nonstate armed groups and populations solely through the lens of the normative systems that armed groups create is to miss at least half of the interaction that generates competitive control.

  Domination, Resistance, and Manipulation

  The great Professor James C. Scott of Yale University, writing in 1976, described subsistence farmers in Southeast Asia in the following terms: “There are districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.”70 Scott, the father of an entire genre of political ethnography sometimes known as “resistance studies” or “subaltern studies,” explains that peasant pop
ulations—precisely because they live on the subsistence margin, where the downside risk of failure is so much greater than the upside potential for success—tend to be extremely risk-averse. One year’s crop failure can push a peasant family below the starvation threshold, forcing family members to sell capital assets (such as land or livestock) to survive, reducing them to supplicant status in a village, or forcing them off the land entirely, so they never recover their independence. For this reason, over generations, marginalized populations have become experts at fine calculations of risk and tend always to minimize risk, maximize predictability, and limit the influence of outsiders such as governments. They value predictability, even at the expense of overall profit, and have developed what Scott calls a “safety-first principle” that embodies a series of “classical techniques for avoiding undue risks often at the cost of a reduction in average return.”71

  Scott cites as an example of this risk-aversion behavior peasants’ resistance to government interventions designed to improve their lot; another is their reluctance to embrace agricultural innovations such as higher-yield but less reliable strains of rice.72 He argues convincingly that this behavior isn’t limited to Southeast Asia but can be seen in precapitalist or subsistence farming populations across the planet; in his later work he examines marginalized and excluded urban and periurban populations and shows that a similar calculus of risk-minimizing resistance permeates the behavior of urban as well as rural groups.73 Scott argues that populations on the margin typically prefer the kinds of patron-client relationships that we observed in Tivoli Gardens—predictable arrangements whereby better-off members of a community sponsor its weaker members—even though such relationships are often exploitative, involving long-term dependency and what Jamaican commentators such as Obika Gray call “benefits politics.”74

  Like Scott, Karl D. Jackson, in his classic study of traditional authority and religion during the Darul Islam insurgency in West Java in the 1960s, showed similar patterns of patron-client relations in village and periurban populations in Indonesia.75 My own fieldwork with the same population in the same area almost thirty years later showed that these patterns can be remarkably persistent once established: once locked into an incentive system, it can be extraordinarily difficult for a population to break out of established behavior patterns of this kind.

  In the presence of an insurgency, criminal network, or gang conflict—bringing the risk of violence, death, and major property damage into the equation—the downside risk of miscalculation becomes dramatically higher, but so do the potential upside benefits. Aid agencies, police, military forces with emergency funds, and government and nongovernment “experts” of all kinds (most of whom are entirely ignorant of local conditions but have vast amounts of money, little time, and less accountability) flood into a local area, looking for allies and creating enormous opportunities for profit and benefit. Local elites (such as Mullah Salaam, as we have seen) can see outsiders as a source of revenue and influence as well as of risk.

  Moreover, since outside military or law enforcement interveners often bring with them heavy weaponry and enormous coercive firepower, well beyond anything that the local community can muster, they can radically alter the local balance of power among competing armed actors and can therefore become a game-changing resource for any local player who can successfully manipulate them into destroying his or her enemies. Any coalition soldier who has worked in Afghanistan or Iraq, or indeed any inner-city police officer or counternarcotics agent, can give dozens of examples of populations trying to use the police or military as a tool to smash local rivals, reporting their local adversaries as “insurgents,” “criminals,” “terrorists,” or “militia” to persuade security forces to target them, or settling scores by informing on each other.

  Like Scott’s marginalized peasants and periurban populations, communities in a high-risk environment such as an insurgency, a garrison neighborhood, or a slum that’s experiencing high levels of violent crime become expert at navigating a complex and ever-changing set of choices, always seeking to maintain safety, minimize risk, maximize profit from external interveners, improve their position vis-à-vis local rivals, and resist or exploit external control. Indeed, one reason effective normative systems attract support from such populations is that—as Stathis Kalyvas showed, and as the Taliban decree I quoted earlier illustrates—normative systems create predictability and order, reducing transaction costs for populations and minimizing the risk of a potentially fatal miscalculation. My own observations in places as variable as Pakistani refugee camps, port cities in New Guinea and Indonesia, East Timorese coastal towns, Sri Lankan displaced persons’ camps, and cities such as Mogadishu, Kandahar, Tripoli, and Baghdad suggest that population survival strategies in these environments fall into seven basic categories: fleeing, passivity, autarky, hedging, swinging, commitment, and self-arming. Let’s briefly examine each in turn.

  Fleeing—an extreme response to chaotic violence—occurs when populations react to the danger of their situation simply by leaving an area. For unencapsulated nomads or tribal pastoralists (such as the Bedu of Iraq, the Kuchi of Afghanistan, or Somali clans), fleeing to avoid government influence or escape violence is an entire way of life: as I’ve noted elsewhere, desert tribes run when mountain tribes would fight.76 Pastoralists’ wealth is mobile, residing in their flocks, and thus movement away from threat is a natural response. But for agriculturalists or, even more so, urban dwellers, fleeing an area is an extreme step. Their wealth is in the land, in their business, or in their residence, and moving away may mean that they can never come back and that local rivals will seize their property. Thus, whole families rarely leave a violence-affected area—but individuals may emigrate, move to the city, or move to another district. The flows of rural-to-urban migration that we noted in Chapter 1, along with the patterns of emigration and diaspora formation in the Somalia and Jamaica examples in Chapter 2, clearly illustrate this tendency.

  Passivity occurs in populations that have been traumatized by extreme violence or where local elites have been killed or driven off by conflict. This approach manifests itself in an extreme reluctance to take any kind of action or to accept responsibility for any decision whatsoever. Some neighborhoods (muhallas) in Baghdad in 2007 exemplified this survival strategy. These areas were subjected to atrocious sectarian violence and were left largely to their own devices in 2005–6. As a result, community leaders in these muhallas were highly reluctant to take any initiative in rebuilding or securing their communities: the carnage of the preceding year, on top of decades of Ba’athist oppression, had taught them that the most dangerous thing they could possibly do was to take responsibility for their own actions. Indeed, the people left in charge of these neighborhoods after the intense violence of 2005–6 were often the least decisive leaders—the active players had been weeded out, or had exposed themselves by taking the initiative to protect their communities and had been killed, often in ways that traumatized the community or were specifically designed (by groups such as AQ I) to discourage such independence.77 Those who survived sought to hide behind the excuse that the coalition or the insurgents had forced them to take a particular action. This strategy of appearing helpless, while clearly well adapted to minimizing downside risk, was ineffective in generating benefits or support from the government or the coalition. Over time, some communities moved past this approach to a hedging or swinging strategy, but others—often the most marginalized and traumatized periurban communities—never did.78

  Autarky, in this context, is an extreme from of armed neutrality, a strategy of self-sufficient independence that denies allegiance to anyone or anything outside the local level. It’s sometimes expressed as a “plague on all your houses” attitude toward the government and nonstate armed groups alike, or—more subtly—in the kinds of independence-maximizing strategies we saw in the case of Mullah Salaam or the Somali clans. If fleeing is the default strategy of desert noma
ds, then armed neutrality is the natural strategy of mountain people. The behavior of the Waygal Valley elders before and during the battle of Wanat (described in the introduction) typifies the behavior of mountain populations, who for terrain reasons can’t flee the encroachment of government or external armed actors, are tied to particular pieces of land, and must therefore stand and fight to resist outside influence. Autarky, as a strategy, can be effective in minimizing risk (through the deterrent effect of armed neutrality) and generating benefits for a local population. It needn’t be purely defensive, and may manifest itself in externally aggressive behavior aimed at deterring interference. In particular, the ability to raid or prey on other local groups or passing travelers—especially for populations who sit astride key flows in an urban metabolism, as do the Kenyan gangs discussed in Chapter 1, or who control a major port or airport, as does the Shower Posse—can force outsiders to buy off an autarkic group, or allow a marginalized group to maintain its autonomy.

  Hedging, one of the commonest survival strategies in conditions of competitive control, consists in simultaneously supporting all sides. Like a bettor laying an across-the-board bet on a horse race, or a corporation giving campaign donations to both parties in an election, a population that adopts a hedging strategy seeks to minimize risk by paying off all sides—while maximizing the potential for benefits by ensuring it supports the winner, whoever that may be. This strategy is popular precisely because it simultaneously lowers risk and heightens the prospect of profit. But, like cheating on a mafia don, it can be risky if one particular armed actor discovers the population has been supporting another, and so it is often conducted subtly. For example, some Afghan families have one son fighting with the Taliban and one in the Afghan Army—not because their loyalties are confused but as an insurance policy against a victory by either side. They can support each side as needed but can also maintain plausible deniability. Similarly, urban populations who pay protection money to a local gang but also pay off the police are adopting a hedging strategy—but they can always claim that the money was extorted by force. In this context, playing the victim and deemphasizing autonomy can be a useful tactic to support a hedging strategy.