by Tamim Ansary
The Karzai government moved rapidly to establish an Afghan National Army (ANA) and an Afghan National Police (ANP) force, and this was obviously the right thing to do: the alternative would have been instant chaos. But “rapidly” meant giving guns and authority to thousands of unvetted men and sending them into the field with a vague directive to stop evildoers. Inevitably, many of these new security forces behaved as if their guns and badges entitled them to special privileges. One day, for example, an army officer working for the national intelligence service came to a fabric merchant, Abdul Karim of Ghazni, to buy some cloth. He demanded a deep discount, the merchant refused him, and the officer then accused Abdul Karim of fronting for al Qaeda and took him to prison. There the poor man was beaten. He got out, finally, by paying 10,000 rupees, but the whole debacle took him away from his shop for a year, by which time his business was all but ruined.3
The cloth merchant’s case was not special. Episodes like this became routine. To make matters worse, the army and police forces were staffed disproportionately by Tajiks and Uzbeks, because those ethnic groups dominated the victorious Northern Alliance. Although they hailed from the north, they were stationed mostly in the south, because that’s where the unrest was thought to be, and those areas were predominantly Pushtoon. So Tajiks and Uzbeks were given state authority and sent with guns to impose order on restive, defeated Pushtoons, which did not help promote a single, unified Afghan society.
As resentment built up, every story about the depredations of the new regime grew legs and wings. People coming back from Kabul reported seeing empty liquor bottles littering the streets. One mullah in a rural area west of Kabul built a fiery Friday sermon around reports of boys and girls in the capital having casual public sex and of public indifference to the outrage. This, he said, was what Kabul had come to: it was “a piece of Europe” now. Rumors began to circulate that the Americans were raping old men in Bagram. Such outlandish stories were easy for rural Afghans to believe because by this time many had seen or heard about the photos taken at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, one of which showed a female American prison guard walking a naked Muslim man on a leash like a dog and another a pile of Muslim men forced to lie naked on top of each other, heaped up like cordwood.
In August 2003, Mullah Farooq and his associates decided the grass was dry enough, the time had come to light a match. Did they attack a military convoy? No. A US base camp? No. A government installation? No: they killed two relief workers employed by the Red Crescent Society (a Muslim version of the Red Cross). Broad outrage greeted this horror, but the outrage only served Mullah Farooq’s cause. He wasn’t out to win any popularity contests. He wanted to make himself known. What mattered was not how much disapproval his act incurred but how many people heard about it. The murders put him and his little group on the map. People now knew there was something to fear in their own neighborhood.
A few months later, in the fall of 2003, two men on motorbikes shot and killed a French relief worker, twenty-nine-year-old Bettina Goislard, who was there on a UN project to resettle fifty thousand displaced persons (internal Afghan refugees). Her work could hardly have been more charitable or more cherished. The infuriated locals caught the killers, beat them, and turned them over to the government for trial. You might suppose this reaction would have led Mullah Farooq and his group to reconsider their strategy. But no: they perceived—quite correctly—that any stretch of days going by with no traumatizing events served the cause of the Kabul government and its foreign sponsors. Any frightening act of brutality, no matter who committed it, undermined public confidence in a positive future and weakened civil authority. Chaos was the intermediate stage needed to discourage and drive out the foreigners, before the insurgents could reimpose law and order—their law, their order.
The United States, NATO, and the Karzai government contributed in a sense to Farooq’s cause. One month after the assassination of Bettina Goislard, a NATO air strike destroyed a building thought to house a suspected Taliban leader. Instead it killed nine children and some random guy who had nothing to do with the Taliban. This action engendered the same revulsion as the killing of Goislard and fueled a sense of moral equivalency: the Taliban were killing innocent charity workers; the United States and its allies were killing innocent children. What was the difference?
When the United States killed civilians by mistake, it admitted its error and compensated the families of the victims, but the compensation itself became a problematic practice. The thing is, US defense personnel knew that in Afghanistan, among Pushtoon tribes, murder cases were sometimes settled by the murderer’s family working out a payment to the victim’s family. This may have led all too easily (I suspect) to the notion that compensation for wrongful death was a business transaction. I met one earnest young analyst at a training session in Washington, DC, who told me what the standard payment was for such cases in Iraq—he’d studied up—and he wanted to know what “the going price” was in Afghanistan.
But payment for wrongful death is not a “going price” kind of deal. It’s part of a complex network of social mechanisms that regulate tribal interactions. This particular mechanism provides an escape clause from the endless blood feuds set in motion by another social mechanism, the deeply felt obligation to avenge injuries to one’s kin. Each settlement is a complex negotiation among personalities within a cultural setting. From the US point of view, the payments must have settled the matter because they were accepted. In fact, the payments may have only complicated the resentments people felt about their kin being killed by a foreign power in their own land.
In July 2004, Afghan police stumbled upon a private prison in a residential neighborhood of Kabul set up by Jack Idema, a former Special Forces operative “gone rogue.” He was working with a partner, Brent Bennet, and a third man, Edward Caraballo, who was there to film their exploits. When busted, they were holding eight Afghan men captive in their house of horror. Three were strapped to a ceiling by their feet, hanging upside down. Idema and Bennet had been “interrogating” their prisoners for days. God knows what information they expected to get. The United States disavowed any connection to Idema, but the disavowals had begun a week or two before the private prison was discovered, suggesting that some US officials may already have known what Idema was up to. (Of course, it’s also possible that they simply found him weird and unsavory.)4
The Karzai government was trying hard to establish a normal administration in places like Andar, the rural district that Mullah Farooq called home. It appointed governors for the various districts, it staffed up the police forces, and it established municipal centers and courts to dispense government functions. Various NGOs came into Andar and similar areas to restore water supply systems, build health clinics, and provide other improvements that people desperately needed and wanted.
But the new insurgents honed a strategy to blunt the good these development efforts might have done. They didn’t hurl themselves directly at the Karzai government or the foreign forces. They attacked carefully chosen individuals, one at time, like wolves picking off strays. Sometimes these were government officials; more often, they were just people who had cooperated with the government or expressed a willingness to embrace the new order. The government might muster troops to defend an area or a town or a district or even a building. But one policeman? One clerk? Hardly. Which left the targeted individual swinging in the breeze.
Take the case of Abdul Hakim, who worked with the police in Ghazni. He didn’t have an important job, just some obscure position connected to the police department. Mullah Farooq sent letters warning him to quit his job. He also slapped “night posters” on his walls describing what would happen if he didn’t quit. Hakim stood firm. Then one day his oldest son was coming home on leave from the army, and unknown assailants killed him within sight of his father’s door. A few weeks later, Abdul Hakim’s younger son was “arrested”—that is, kidnapped—and “tried” as an American spy. He was found guilty and execut
ed. Abdul Hakim got the message.5
When a private construction company tried to build a road through Mullah Farooq’s district, his men sabotaged the project repeatedly. Farooq let it be known that he wasn’t against a road; he was just against outsiders working in his district without his permission. NGOs and private companies realized they could save themselves a lot of grief simply by getting in touch with Mullah Farooq before they came to his area and securing his approval. It cost them nothing and ensured that they would be able to do their work safely, so why not? But when outsiders sought Mullah Farooq’s permission to work in his district, they tended to validate him as the ruler of that little district.
Mullah Farooq was not important. He was just one man and his reach was limited. Within a couple of years of the American intervention, however, hundreds of Mullah Farooqs were sprouting in Afghanistan. They were autonomous players acting on their own initiative—but then again they weren’t. They had kin who knew people who knew the kin of others like themselves. They formed connections with these others, came to cooperative arrangements, and made agreements. Gradually, the multitude of Mullah Farooqs coalesced into networks directed by bigger figures whose leadership was the sort familiar to these parts, a leadership based on prestige acquired through traditional channels and built on reciprocal obligations deriving from many years of favors done and hardships shared as well as tribal and familial links.
One of the biggest networks operated in the southeast under the direction of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a prominent figure from the days of the Mujahideen. In the 1980s this man had received large shipments of money and arms from the CIA to help him fight the Soviets. In the first Mujahideen government, he had served as minister of justice (alongside Hamid Karzai, who was a deputy foreign minister in that same cabinet). After the Taliban were overthrown, Haqqani declared himself a member of the Taliban and began fighting Western forces. He pronounced Mullah Omar his spiritual commander in chief and claimed that Omar had appointed him military commander for the whole southeast region. His son Siraj, a famously ruthless advocate of suicide bombings and beheadings, served as his second-in-command.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, that most grizzled survivor of the old days, came back too, from Iran, where he’d been in hiding. Hekmatyar had been the main darling of the CIA and of ISI in the old days, but now he too declared that he had joined the Taliban. In practice, this meant reactivating his old Hezb-i-Islam organization. Hekmatyar didn’t dominate any single region the way Haqqani dominated the southeast, but Hekmatyar had national reach. He established “islands” of control throughout the country, in other people’s territories. He was a player again.
Mullah Omar, along with the high honchos of his regime, had regrouped in Quetta, a city just east of the Afghan border, and set up a shura—a council. Supposedly, Mullah Omar was still in charge of the whole insurgency, although he never appeared in public. His pronouncements came through spokesmen; and, since the spokesmen sometimes contradicted one another, there was no telling whether they really spoke for Omar or just for themselves. To remedy the problem, Mullah Omar named two men his official spokesmen—but he did so through spokesmen. The two men were named Zabiullah Mujahid and Dr. Hanif. Henceforth, only their statements would have the amir’s imprimatur.6 But these men communicated with the media only by phone from undisclosed locations, and no one knew what they looked like either, so they might have been many men using the same two names. If so, there was no telling which of their statements authentically came from Mullah Omar.
None of this really mattered because Mullah Omar wasn’t an actual operational leader so much as an idea. If he had interacted with real people, directing the insurgency in person, he might have commanded the obedience of many, but he would surely have made some enemies as well. Nobody can please everybody. By staying out of sight and issuing only grand, thematic directives, he became a mythological figure that each person could fashion into the leader he wanted. People bitterly in conflict with each other could thus both claim Mullah Omar as their spiritual leader. After all, doing so didn’t commit them to any specific course of action.
Whatever its overall authority, the Quetta Shura supposedly directed insurgent operations throughout southern Afghanistan. I say “supposedly” because the shura’s actual administrative control is debatable. On the ground, whole networks of insurgents claimed to be acting under the direction of the Quetta Shura but seemed pretty autonomous in practice. At times these networks worked together, but at times they competed for control of drug routes and such.
One network leader, Mullah Akhtar Osmani, collected taxes for the Taliban as part of his massive smuggling operation. He was killed by a NATO air strike in 2007, possibly because his whereabouts were leaked to NATO by another network leader, the notorious Mullah Dadullah, whose ferocity so frightened even his friends and associates, they called him “the Butcher” (a reference to his predilection for chopping off heads with an ax). Dadullah reportedly directed several hundred subcommanders (each with his own semiautonomous group), but Dadullah himself was killed by British Special Forces, possibly after his movements were leaked to NATO by rival drug lords within the Quetta Shura.7 His brother Mansur inherited the network, but he was captured by Pakistani agents, allegedly at the behest of Mullah Baradur, who held high rank in the Quetta Shura, possibly even the number two position. (Mullah Baradur himself was arrested by ISI in February 2010, but may have been released nine months later.)
The media frequently ascribed acts of violence in Afghanistan to “the Taliban.” The charge was misleading, I think, to the extent that it implied a single organization with an established hierarchy. Perhaps, in 1996, when the Taliban first swept southern Afghanistan, they were an organization loosely answering to this description. But, after the American intervention, a new insurgency best described as “Talibanist” gradually took shape. Today, the term “Taliban” casually lumps together all sorts of figures from drug-mafia captains to local religious zealots to foreign Jihadist radicals to former honchos of the Mujahideen movement that fought the Soviets.
Tom Coghlan of the London Times provides an illustration. On June 18, 2006, a car carrying associates of a Karzai government official, Amir Dado, was attacked near Kandahar, and Dado’s brother was killed. Thereupon, a wave of violence swept the district, and by the end of the day more than forty of Amir Dado’s relatives had been killed. Was this a Taliban operation?
Well, sort of. Amir Dado had been a brutal warlord before the Taliban took over, one of those criminals whose depredations had fueled the rise of the Taliban in the first place. After the American intervention, he was among the many warlords who reasserted themselves. Too weak to oppose them all, the Karzai government expediently appointed some of them to official posts in areas where they held power anyway.
Dado was also a member of a tribe that had long been locked into a struggle for dominance with two other local tribes, a feud that dated back to ancient times. In recent days, the struggle among these tribes had evolved into a fight for control of the local drug trade. Amir Dado’s tribe gained advantages from his having a position in the Karzai government, a fact resented by the rival tribes.8
So, when anti-Dado gun battles spread across the area that day, it was partly a popular uprising: locals hated Amir Dado from the old days. It was also in part a localist uprising against the central government and also in part an episode in a long-standing feud among three tribes and also in part a battle over drugs and money. But also, in part, it was a blow struck by the Pakistan-based Quetta Shura, in their campaign to reassert their control of Kandahar. So it’s accurate to “trace” this battle to “the Taliban,” but the significance of doing so dissolves once one deconstructs the term “Taliban.”
Antigovernment violence gathered force throughout 2005, but in this period the government also made progress. An elected president began his first term. An elected parliament went to work. New companies sprang up in Kabul. Elegant guesthouses opened for business in many
cities. Five-star hotels like the sophisticated Serena went up in Kabul, providing classy accommodations for the international businesspeople flocking to Afghanistan from all parts of the world. In cities such as Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, and Herat, the foreign community could dine out and not just on Afghan fare such as kebabs and palow but cuisines ranging from Thai to Italian. In 2005, an American fellow who had just come back from Kabul told me Afghanistan was much better now: “You can buy beer on the street,” he gushed. In Kabul shoppers could visit a mall that looked not so different from malls in Santa Monica, and, in the posh neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khan, foreigners could buy groceries at a Western-style supermarket.
Consultants to the Kabul ministries began to sort through the tangled archives of land ownership in the country. They organized and digitized these records to facilitate the exiles’ reclamation of their properties, for, over the years, each change of government had given a whole new set of officials a chance to seize desirable houses and falsify documents to support their claims of ownership.