Afghanistan

  In Afghanistan, the assault on Pushtun leadership carried out by the Communists soon after they seized power was bloody and had a lasting impact. Non-Communist sources of authority in Pushtun Afghanistan—tribal leaders and major Sufic religious authority figures among them—were in many cases killed or arrested as feudal remnants by the Afghan Khalqi regime in 1978–79. Those tribal leaders who avoided murder by the Khalqis were forced into exile in Pakistan, along with their tribes. There, they found a Pakistani official policy of marginalizing them, ensuring that authority would be with either the Pakistani government or Afghan religious figures. Many Afghan Pushtun tribal leaders were threatened with violence. As a result, they tended to leave Pakistan for the West—often using their superior connections and access—and were in many cases the spearhead of the worldwide Afghan diaspora. Their connections with grassroots Afghans, either fighting the war at home or in the refugee camps, suffered as a result, as did the perceptions of the legitimacy of those who had gone into exile returning to claim positions of authority.

  In part because alternative leadership figures were killed or forced into exile, in much of Pushtun-speaking Afghanistan in 1978–92, the ulema of Pushtun Afghanistan, especially local mullahs, became the primary decision-makers. Seven political parties are operating in refugee camps inside Pakistan. These parties are subject to Peshawar law and Pakistani authority, yet they are operating as part of a shura of Muslim clergy, even though many members of these parties only nominally abide by ulema law and their view of Islam is closer to Pushtun folk traditions and Deobandi-influenced madrassas, customs that are common in the FATA region, where many of these men studied prior to the fall of the Taliban in 2001. In the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, the refugee Afghan clergy had access to religious patronage networks—often funded by foreign money—that allowed them—not the nominal tribal leaders—to benefit their own clients among their tribe or group. Many of the surviving Afghan Pushtun leaders, while their nominal clients were in the field waging jihad or in the refugee camps, did not share this experience with them, but went instead into exile in Peshawar or to the west, taking advantage of their superior contacts with high-level patrons. Those secular leaders—whether tribal chiefs or army officers—who went to Pakistan ended up largely peripheral to both the direction of the conduct of the war in Afghanistan and to humanitarian efforts, both cross-border and in Pakistan. During the war against the Soviets, Pakistan’s government and international aid organizations made decisions of resource allocations on behalf of the predominantly Pushtun Afghans in Pakistan rather than the Afghans making their own decisions.

  The Pakistanis were able to do this because Sunni Afghan political leadership was largely controlled by the seven Peshawar-based parties, all dependent on Pakistan. The great fear in Pakistan during the war against the Soviets was that the Afghans, fighting men and refugees, would remain if the Soviets managed to consolidate their rule in Afghanistan and that they could link up with discontented elements of Pakistan’s Pushtuns to mount an armed challenge to Pakistan’s political authority on the model of “Black September” in Amman in 1970 (when Zia was Pakistan’s military attaché to Jordan). Part of his lesson was that, having seen secular Palestinian organizations try to overthrow the secular Jordanian monarchy, religious links need to be stressed if Muslims were not to kill each other but unite against a common enemy, which to Zia was the threat created by the Soviet thrust into Afghanistan and the continuing security competition with India.

  Inside Afghanistan, during the 1978–92 conflict, tribal shuras in the border provinces of Paktia, Paktika, and Kunar found themselves unable to defend their home territory against extractive activity, especially clear-cutting of trees, by cross-border entrepreneurs linked to the transport and timber mafias in Pakistan. These often made alliances with local Pushtun “tribal entrepreneurs” that did not represent a majority leadership view but were important figures because of their access to money. Such figures became more important on the Pakistani side post-2001 as the traditional leadership came under attack.

  Tribal entrepreneurs with a limited claim to tribal primacy but with important outside contacts that allowed access to networks extending outside the Pushtun borderlands (ore even worldwide) have emerged to become major insurgent leaders, such as Jaluladin Haqqani in the 1980s and Behtullah Mehsud post-2001. These leaders received financial support from the Pushtun diaspora, anxious for change in their homeland.

  These events brought crime into the Pushtun world, where it remains important to the present. Most of this is connected with narcotics traffic, but it has its roots in the “timber mafia” and the “transport mafia” in Pakistan, dominated by ethnic Pushtuns, who have become important players since enriching themselves as a result of Afghanistan’s 1978–92 war against the Soviets. By 2008–10, crime and insurgency had become increasingly integrated across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

  The rise of the Taliban culture and especially the insurgency in Pakistan has seen a redoubled assault on secular and tribal Pushtun leadership. The widespread killing of maliks and tribal elders (khans) by transnational terrorists, especially Al Qaeda and the IMU, in cooperation with the Pakistani Taliban started soon after 2001. South Waziristan saw an especially bloody campaign of murder and intimidation. This contributed to the rise of what would become the Pakistani Taliban. The victims were replaced as decision-makers by shuras of nominal ulema that were the backbone of what would become the Pakistani Taliban, much as their Afghan counterparts had been during the rise of the Afghan Taliban in the 1990s.

  The mullahs that emerged as leadership figures among Pakistan’s Pushtuns are not all ignorant venom-spewing preachers. Many are well educated and have access to a range of governmental and non-governmental support networks. The Pakistani Pushtun mullahs that have emerged as the leadership figures in the FATA and, subsequently, the NWFP have to compete with the entrepreneurial tribal jihadi leaders, most notably Behtullah Mehsud, who targeted and killed Wazir tribal elders who would not go along with being superseded.

  After 2005, in many areas of the FATA, alternative malik systems emerged. These new maliks remained the tribe’s interface with the government of Pakistan but were selected by a tribal shura, rather than by the government. The government of Pakistan, in 2008–10, remained committed to trying to use the old system of political agents and maliks in a FATA now marked by an intense insurgency and with many areas controlled by the insurgents and off-limits to the government. This approach has had success in some areas. In mid-2009 the Wazir tribe in Waziristan was being rallied by pro-government maliks to oppose the rival Mehsud tribe that was linked to the Pakistani Taliban through their then-leader Behtullah Mehsud.

  These changes in Pakistan’s Pushtun leadership reflected a decades-long process that has, in the Vortex, created a leadership vacuum. This vacuum has, since the 1970s, been filled by other than traditional secular Pushtun leaders. By 2008–10, it was increasingly being filled by two competing new Pushtun leaderships. One is the secular and religious leaders, radicalized by the Taliban culture but not limited to the Pakistani Taliban. The other is the secular leadership represented by the democratically elected Pushtuns who sit in Pakistan’s parliament or the parliament of Pakistan’s NWFP. The previous source of secular Pushtun leadership in the form of tribal chiefs and the malik system has effectively been sidelined in much of the FATA—although in some tribes, such as the Wazirs, increased government support had revitalized them by mid-2009. By 2008–10, the conflict between these two groups of Pakistan’s Pushtun leaders and their competing vision of the future for Pakistan’s Pushtun had assumed great importance for both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

  Born in the Vortex: The Rise of the Afghan Taliban

  The original Afghan Taliban was much more than a Pakistan-supported Pushtun movement to seize state power in Afghanistan or a fundamentalist Sunni religious movement that sought to transform political Islam, although it was both of those things. In part, the or
iginal Afghan Taliban represented the nexus of the bazaar, madrassa, and mosque of southern Afghanistan, cut out of the context and put down in the harsh terrain and refugee camps of the FATA, Baluchistan, and the NWFP.

  During the war against the Soviets in the 1980s, the Afghan Taliban was a strong element in the local indigenous resistance to the Soviet invasion, especially in Helmand and eastern Kandahar provinces. However, they declined later in the war as the resistance became more dependent on external support from Pakistan and direction by Peshawar-based parties. The Taliban was transformed in 1994 as a fundamentalist reaction to the failure of the post-Soviet mujahideen government to bring either social justice or order. In 1992–94, support from Pakistan to revive an alterative to the situation in southern Afghanistan where trucks were being stopped and detained—or at least forced to pay bribes—at multiple checkpoints led to the revival of the Taliban. They also represented a response to what was seen as a lack of social justice in southern Afghanistan, with Pushtuns, under the nominal authority of the post-Soviet Islamic State of Afghanistan, extracting resources from local inhabitants. Tribal feuds and disputes were waged with no recourse to effective outside authority. But it was not until 1996 that the Taliban was able to fully displace the Hezb-e-Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (HiH) as Pakistan’s chosen instrument of policy in Afghanistan.

  The original pre-2001 Afghan Taliban emerged not from old Afghanistan or from traditional Pushtun culture, although it drew elements from both; rather, its roots were in the refugee camps along the Pakistani border in the 1980s. The Taliban culture grew in the 1980s with the marginalization of much of traditional Afghan Islam in the refugee camps in Pakistan. These were dominated by the “rupee mullahs,” who used rupees—foreign funding—to buy sound-amplification systems to literally drown out those with otherwise greater religious authority. To this was added, in the 1980s, a mixture of Pushtun tribal conservatism, poorly understood Deobandi reformism from the subcontinent, and Wahabi fanaticism associated with support from Arabia and the Gulf. The Taliban’s gender policies reflected the realities of the camps, a totally cash-based economy. Traditional subsistence agriculture and herding, which depended on women, was limited or impossible. Male heads of families signed the roll for rations. The economy was unlike that of rural Afghanistan, where female labor was valued because it was necessary. The depopulation of much of rural Pushtun-speaking Afghanistan by the Soviets, along with accelerating the pre-1978 trend of a shift away from an economy based on subsistence agriculture to one based on cash transactions and top-down distribution reflecting the impacts of patronage networks, paved the way for the rise of the Taliban culture.

  Apologists for the Taliban—in both their Afghan and Pakistani forms—claim that “the Taliban culture is simply Pushtun culture.” But the Taliban differed significantly from traditional Pushtun life in key issues such as religious practice, with the Taliban stressing Wahabi-influenced Deobandi-origin practices against the Sufic-influenced traditional Pushtun practices. The Taliban stressed the power of the mullahs rather than the Pushtun balance of tribal, secular, and religious authority. In what became their most controversial policies, both in Afghanistan and internationally, the Taliban made female absence from the public sphere a religious obligation, while Pushtun traditional society realizes that without women’s work in a society dependent on subsistence farming and herding, everyone starves. In the final analysis, Pushtuns value independence and the Taliban proved willing to be used by outsiders such as the ISI or Al Qaeda to achieve their goals.

  The original Afghan Taliban differed from the 1978–92 Afghan resistance that fought against the Soviets, even though all of the present Taliban leaders are former mujahideens. They were able to use the networks created by the ISI, international Islamic NGOs (whose numbers and significance greatly increased over the course of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan), Pakistani religious parties, the “Afghan Arabs,” and the Pushtun diaspora. The most important were the networks of Pushtun religious figures, educated at the same Deobandi-inspired madrassas in the FATA.

  The origins of the madrassa network in the FATA go back to the early years of the twentieth century and were seen by many Deobandi clerics as a way of creating a generation of ulema out of reach of British law or “modernizing” elements of Islam from the subcontinent. The growth of the madrassa network—also reflecting the failure of Pakistan to put in place an effective state school system in the FATA—was accompanied by a rise of Deobandi-influenced mullahs. Their practices started to displace the Sufic-influenced Islam traditional among the FATA’s Pushtuns even before the 1978–2001 conflicts. This was made possible by funding from elsewhere in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf. This also led to increasing tension with the FATA’s minority population of Shia Pushtuns in the 1980s, forcing them to seek support from Iran in response.

  It is often stated that the Taliban were welcomed by the population of Pushtun Afghanistan in 1994–96, who saw them as deliverers from local tyrants and criminals and absent rule from a Kabul government of limited capability and legitimacy, dominated by Panjsheris whose control of state power was seen as a departure from Afghan ways. As with much that is “common knowledge” about Afghanistan, this sentiment is not true.55 It is an accurate description of some parts of Kandahar province, where the crime situation was compounded by the tribal dynamics, the presence of potentially valuable prey (the truck traffic from Pakistan), and the unwillingness of the then-ISA government in Kabul to upset the dysfunctional local situation because it needed the support of those in charge. Even had the ISA wished to remove the local leadership from power in 1992, they lacked an effective way to execute their will.

  In much of Pushtun Afghanistan, however, the Taliban had to use armed force or, more often, a mixture of force and persuasion to gain power. This is why it was only in 1996 that they were able to seize the momentum that took them from Logar (where they absorbed most of HiH’s forces that had been waging the civil war, including those that had intensively rocketed Kabul) to Jalalabad to Kabul, despite having seized Kandahar two years before. The key change between 1994 and 1996 was that Pakistan’s ISI had made the decision to drop HiH as their chosen instrument of Afghanistan policy and replaced them with the Taliban.

  The pre-2001 Afghan Taliban essentially offered a competing system that connected elements of the Pushtun Sunni religious leadership with shared links to Deobandi-based madrassas in Pakistan. These networks linked primarily the non-Sayid ulema from southern Afghanistan that had studied there, Durranis and Ghilzays alike, with former students (talibs) from these madrassas. These networks competed with the longer-established traditional religious authority of Sufic brotherhoods. These had been especially important in southern Afghanistan but, like all traditional Afghanistan institutions, had been weakened by the impacts of the war and exile in Pakistan.

  The 1990s Afghan Taliban was the ulema, especially non-sayid, of Pushtun Afghanistan in arms, often able to use mullah-to-mullah ties that could cross ethnolinguistic barriers. The original Taliban’s supporting networks also included tribal leaders (reached through kinship ties), bazaar merchants, hundi/hawala bankers, weapons dealers, land speculators, and small industrialists. Access to Pakistani government support helped it access more powerful interconnected interests—the transport mafia, oil smugglers, timber mafia, the increasingly-important narcotics mafias (linked through Pakistan to international markets), and their own networks of dependent growers (increasingly important under Taliban rule), and smugglers of consumer goods (the bara bazaar network in Pakistan).

  This cemented the link between the nominally “law and order” Taliban and criminals. While the Taliban came to power in southern Afghanistan in 1994 with their reputation burnished by clearing away checkpoints on highways and suppressing extraction from local inhabitants, their links to the different mafias operating cross border-trade soon spread to narcotics cultivation and other criminal activity. As a result, the Taliban seemingly attracted ever
y fugitive from the Islamic world in 1994–2001, aware that no extradition warrants were being served. This trend accelerated after 2001. By 2008–10 the activities of criminal groups, especially banditry and kidnapping, in southern and eastern Afghanistan were indistinguishable from the Taliban insurgency. Indeed, much of the criminal activity has been by individuals and groups that claim to also be Taliban.

  The Afghan Taliban believe that the government in Kabul rightfully belongs to Pushtuns and the Durand Line is no barrier to those who need to retrieve this prize, kept from them by non-Pushtuns, infidel foreigners, and takfir Afghans. The Taliban offered a return to the Pushtun nationalist vision of “Afghanistan as the lands of the Pushtun.” While the 1994–2001 Taliban welcomed non-Pushtun Sunnis and appointed some to positions of titular (but not significant) authority, their insistence upon submission to their own authority effectively ensured that, in practice, non-Pushtun Afghans had no greater rights in Afghanistan—and in practice much less—than those associated with any other Muslim.