by Tamim Ansary
Kabul University added branches of learning and institutes devoted to particular academic topics. An Afghanistan research center began to collect and digitize historical documents, which they are now putting on the Internet, making them available to scholars anywhere in the world. A new private university was launched in Kabul, and it was not cheap, but there were Afghans who could now afford not-cheap.
The constitution had promised freedom of the press, and, despite a few well-publicized incidents of attempted censorship, the media flourished. Private newspapers, magazines, and radio stations were born. One family of exiles returning from Australia established the eminent TOLO (Sunrise) TV station. Then came Ariana TV, and Shamshad, and numerous local stations, not to mention dozens of independent radio stations.
And of course exiles, NGOs, foreign governments, and the Afghan government continued to push for schools and more schools and still more schools, in all the cities, in all the towns, and in the rural areas as well. Everyone agreed that education was the key. To quote a woman who approached me at a meeting in Los Angeles in 2002, shortly after the events of 9/11, “If only we could teach those Afghans.” When I asked her what she thought we should teach those Afghans, she wrung her hands and lamented, “Just . . . everything!”
33
The Tipping Point
AT LEAST TO THE END OF 2005, THEN, IN THE RACE TO A TIPPING POINT, chaos and order were running neck and neck. Bridges were bombed, clinics sabotaged, innocents murdered; but also, bridges were built, cell phones proliferated, new schools opened up, and even remote villages began to participate in national elections. In 2006, chaos began to inch ahead. On this point, casual observers and policy experts seem to agree: 2006 marked a turning point. And, for the Talibanist insurgency, schools turned out to be the key: 2006 was the year of school burning.
Many people speak of schools as if they are a neutral good. Surely, the thinking goes, all parents want their children to get educated, but such thinking also assumes that there is universal agreement on what educated means. Schools are an instrument for transmitting ideas; when a war of ideas is under way, building a school is an act of war. In Afghanistan, when good-hearted, well-intentioned people built schools in rural areas roamed by smoldering insurgents, they were putting undefended structures in a war zone and filling them with the softest of targets: children. In 2006, the Talibanist insurgents realized what an opportunity this afforded.
Perhaps they had not dared to attack schools before this time for fear of crossing a line that would seriously, permanently alienate them from the people they hoped one day to rule. Between 2002 and 2005, however, a propaganda war softened the field. In that period, relentless propaganda from the Quetta Shura and from the Pakistan madrassas created what might be called “education anxiety.” Parents who were themselves illiterate were told that, if they sent their children to schools endorsed by the West, their kids would turn against Islam. The propaganda referenced what had happened in the sixties and seventies to rural children who had gone to government schools: they had turned into Communists, climbed into Soviet warplanes, and come back to bomb their own villages, their own families. Now (said the propagandists) the very people who were littering the streets of Kabul with half-empty whiskey bottles and selling hard pornography in the bazaars and teaching girls to walk around half-naked in public and airlifting mountains of pork into Bagram were demanding that they be allowed to “teach the children.”
Into the anxiety stirred up by this campaign, the Talibanists launched their attacks. In mid-December 2005, they killed a teacher at the gates of his school in Helmand Province. The following month, they beheaded a high school teacher in Zabul Province. That month, they burned down schools in Kandahar, Helmand, and Laghman Provinces. In the months that followed, more teachers were brutalized, and more schools were attacked, burned down, or badly damaged.1 At Ghaffar Lakanwal’s school in Khost, for example, insurgents piled all the desks in one room and set them ablaze. In Nadi Ali, Kharoti’s Green Village Schools came under siege. By the end of the year, more than two hundred schools across southern and southeastern Afghanistan had closed: parents, it seemed, just weren’t willing to put their children on the front lines.
The school attacks began to drain away that aroma of hope. Suddenly, the future looked bloody again. Insurgent violence spiked in the south, along the whole border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2007, Helmand province clocked 751 violent outbreaks, from assaults to murders to jailbreaks.
If that year was bad, the next was worse. The attitudes driving the insurgency spread like a flesh-eating infection. By “attitudes” I mean the generalized sense that attacking anyone associated with the foreign project in Afghanistan was laudable—government officials, US personnel, NATO personnel, UN personnel, NGO staff, relief workers, what have you.
The Talibanist campaign began to acquire a structure. Ideologues and “shuras” outside the country emanated an ideology that acted as a solvent and a cement, giving the heterogeneous “movement” a sense of solidarity and making it possible for men of diverse backgrounds and ethnicities, scattered across a landscape, in no direct communication with one another, to form a uniform sense of who they were and what they were fighting for. This sense was all the easier to evoke because it came out of traditional, tribal Islam, the deeply familiar social system of rural Afghanistan and the one set of ideas on which the rural masses mostly agreed, whatever their differences.
Network heads like Haqqani, Mansur, Hekmatyar, and Mullah Toor (the Black Mullah) mapped out grand military schemes that required coordination among many commanders and their networks. These leaders coordinated with counterparts in Pakistan, where similar networks of Talibanist insurgents were taking shape (to the extent that an amoeba can be said to take a shape), networks like the one led by Beitullah Mehsud and his family in the Swat Valley. The network heads secured financing, managed money, and distributed arms.
Below them emerged a layer of operational commanders in the field, professional militants and full-time hit men whose sole occupation was insurgency. These men moved from village to village, getting food and shelter from the villagers, striking targets of opportunity, and retreating to Pakistan to recuperate and get fresh weapons.
The full-time insurgents had a far larger pool of part-timers to call upon in any locale, fighters who operated only in their home district. When they weren’t fighting, these men were farming or doing other standard rural chores. They fought only when they and their friends concocted some scheme or when they got the call from some respected authority like the Quetta Shura to help out an operation in their district.
The insurgency depended almost entirely on murders, assassinations, and small-scale hit-and-run attacks. This style of warfare neutralized the advantages enjoyed by an enemy with more troops, more money, more weapons, and better technology. Talibanists did sometimes attack police stations and other defended locations, and for such operations they could convene as many as one hundred part-time fighters on two or three days’ notice. Even then, however, after launching a surprise attack, they typically fought for only a few hours and then dispersed, before NATO air support could arrive.2 Once they slipped away, they became indistinguishable from the general populace—in part because most of them were the general populace. The Soviets, in their time, had faced exactly the same problem. And the British before them.
By 2008, “the Taliban” were designating certain of their commanders “officials” of a shadow government. Men were appointed shadow mayors of towns, shadow police chiefs, shadow directors of districts, shadow governors of whole provinces. It’s not clear that these shadow administrators did any actual administering. The mere fact that the insurgency had officials gave it the feel of a mature alternative to the Bonn project—as if a new government was ready to step in and start running things the moment Karzai and his foreign friends were driven out.
Most importantly, “the Taliban” developed an alternative to the government judicial sy
stem.3 Talibanist mobile courts began to roam the landscape (like the assizes of old England). They weren’t directed from above—they didn’t have to be. These courts were based on a judicial system that already existed. It had been developed over the course of fifteen centuries. The laws were very specific, they were already on the books, and the books were innumerable. All those who could lay claim to some scholarly prestige—and that was just about anyone whose name included such honorifics as mawlawi, mufti, or qazi—could assert authority to dispense justice in accordance with the Shari’a. For that matter, anyone titled mullah could do the same, even though mullah does not technically denote sufficient scholarship to legislate or judge. In a pinch, even someone known to be a hajji (which only means the person has made the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once) could call himself qualified to dispense justice. If the people accepted his judgments, then he had the authority he claimed, because that’s how Islam works at the ground level. Not that all these judges actually knew the Shari’a. What they knew were the embedded judgments and customs of the people among whom they lived.
In areas affected by the insurgency, people with disputes to settle had a choice, therefore. They could go to the nearest government court, where they might have to pay a bribe to have their case heard and where the size of the bribe would probably determine the outcome, or they could wait for a mobile Taliban court to come to their district and take their case to that panel of judges.
Rural people began to seek adjudication increasingly from Taliban courts not just because they might be killed (by insurgents) if they went to the government court but also because, even in the most uncorrupted government court, the judgment would be based on a code of law that contradicted the customs, mores, entrenched power relationships, and deepest prejudices of the people seeking judgment. For example, if a man had given a distant relative a quantity of opium in exchange for his twelve-year-old daughter and then the relative had sold the opium for cash but failed to turn over the girl because the girl herself objected—well, a Taliban judge would understand the plaintiff’s grievance; an honest, upstanding government judge, by contrast, acting in accordance with enlightened laws promulgated at the capital, might say, “You sold your daughter to this guy? In exchange for opium?!! Forget who’s got the grievance, you’re both going to jail!”
The insurgency poisoned life in the countryside. In 2007, when the UN tried to do a survey of attitudes toward the government in Paktika, a province abutting the Pakistan border, its researchers could not even get into many districts.
The war came creeping into the cities too. Suicide bombers hit a sugar factory in the industrial city of Baglan, killing seventy-five people. In January 2008, four gunmen wrapped in explosives attacked the Serena Hotel and killed a guard before two of them were killed and the other two captured. The death toll was not dramatic, but the target! The Serena was the hotel of choice for international businesspeople in Kabul. One month later, suicide bombers in Kandahar blew themselves up in a crowd of spectators watching a dogfight and killed about a hundred people. That July, someone drove a car bomb into the Indian Embassy and killed fifty-eight people, most of them local Afghans. The media speculated that the Taliban were responsible. As I said before, well, duh.
By this time, the Taliban had come a long way toward establishing a revenue system based on a 10 percent tax collected on all profits, especially from farmers. The only agricultural product worth discussing at this point was opium, and, in the leading opium-growing areas, this product had gone through a bizarre metamorphosis. It was no longer just a crop that people sold for money. Opium had turned into money. People were using it as a currency, to pay for even trivial consumer goods such as clothes and groceries.4 Opium went through this transformation because it had every quality a substance needs to function as currency. It was (for all practical purposes) imperishable, it was precisely quantifiable, it was universally negotiable, and the supply was limited: the only way to have opium was to produce it or be involved in the economic system within which it was traded. Like any good currency, therefore, opium brought (some) stability and order to economic interactivity.
With a system of taxation in place, a network of shadow administrators, a rapidly developing (mobile) court system, and (a simulacrum of) a currency of its own, the Taliban could plausibly claim to be functioning as an alternative to the Karzai government, at least in the provinces. I say “claim” because they had no obvious mechanisms in place to actually run a country. What they did have, pretty certainly, was the power to make Afghanistan ungovernable.
The Talibanist insurgency thus came to present the same challenge to NATO and the United States as the Mujahideen insurgency had posed for the Soviet Union in the 1980s and as Afghan tribesmen had posed for Britain in the Anglo-Afghan war of a century earlier. The British gave up on trying to defeat the insurgency of their time and simply pulled out of Afghanistan the moment they found someone to whom they could hand the reins, a man tough enough to dominate the country yet canny enough to act as Britain’s partner on international, strategic matters. America would be wise to do the same if it could only find a man like Abdu’Rahman, but no one on the Afghan political scene right now seems to fit that description.
34
Obama’s Surges
WHEN BARACK OBAMA WAS CAMPAIGNING FOR THE PRESIDENCY IN 2008, he kept saying he would withdraw American troops from Iraq and send them to Afghanistan. I know that many people who voted for him took this saber-rattling as a rhetorical attempt to look just as tough on terrorism as his opponent. They assumed that if he won he would start wrapping up all of America’s foreign military involvements.
They were mistaken: apparently Obama meant what he said. He came to office with four clear insights, and he meant to act on them. His first insight: Afghanistan mattered more than Iraq; his second, Afghanistan was not just a cleanup operation but a real shooting war; his third, the United States and its allies were losing this war; and, finally, America had to get out of this place but without letting the house catch fire on its way out, or else the whole neighborhood might go up in flames.
Obama was the first US president to take official if muted note of Pakistan’s treacherous role in the Afghan drama. He also recognized the problem centered in the territory straddling the eroding border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. In fact, he and his advisors began speaking of this territory as Af-Pak, treating it as a single entity that could be considered separately, in some sense, from the two states flanking it. On all these counts, the new president was correct: he saw the problem.
Good. Now—what was the solution?
Obama decided to send in more troops. This was not exactly a visionary break with the past. The troop count in Afghanistan had been rising steadily throughout the Bush years. The number of US combat troops in Afghanistan stood as follows at the end of each year of the George W. Bush administration:
• 2002: 5,200
• 2003: 10,400
• 2004: 15,200
• 2005: 19,100
• 2006: 20,400
• 2007: 23,700
• 2008: 30,100
Notice a trend? These numbers refer only to fighters actively enrolled in the US military. The war effort was also aided by private firms providing support services to the US military; their work force kept increasing too. By December 2008, they had 71,555 employees in Afghanistan.2
Other countries had troops there too, under NATO command, providing security throughout the country as the ISAF. In 2006, overall command of the war officially passed into NATO hands, by which time these countries, from Canada to Australia, had escalated their military presence as well. Great Britain, for example, was now contributing five thousand soldiers to the effort.
At the start of Obama’s first term, NATO nations including the United States had a total of 56,000 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. When you add private contractors, the number reaches 127,000. Even that number is deceptive, because it leaves out yet another militar
y force operating in the country, the private security firms (not to be confused with the private military contractors who support the US military effort with such services as cooking, laundry, and maintenance). The private security firms were purely military operations, accountable only to their clients: they protected people and companies for money. Nearly a hundred of these firms sprouted in Afghanistan, and at their height they fielded about 40,000 operatives.
So when Obama decided to send more troops to Afghanistan he wasn’t exactly making a radical break with existing policy. In the Bush years, the troops had been increased without fanfare to avoid undercutting the message that Afghanistan was almost fixed now, well in hand.
With Obama, the message changed. Obama said Iraq had been a mistake, the real enemy was in Af-Pak, and he would go after this real enemy. Shortly after his inauguration, he announced seventeen thousand more troops for Afghanistan. I couldn’t help noticing that this number coincided with the size of the British community that had fled Kabul in 1842 and had come notoriously to grief in the Hindu Kush passes. But the president soon blunted the symbolic force of that number by adding another four thousand soldiers to his escalation.
Obama also sacked Bush’s military commander and put a swashbuckler named Stanley McChrystal in charge. McChrystal was not some smooth operator who won his stars schmoozing in Washington. He was a man’s man and a soldier’s soldier, the kind of guy who slept four hours a night and ran several miles every morning before breakfast. The men he commanded reportedly revered him because he subjected himself to even greater rigors than he demanded of them. In Iraq, he had distinguished himself by hunting down and killing the notorious terrorist al-Zarqawi. It was hoped that in Afghanistan he could work a similar miracle with regards to Osama bin Laden.