A Local Strategy
The Taliban’s tribe-and community-based strategy is a purposeful, grassroots effort to take advantage of a government vacuum in rural areas—especially Pashtun areas. The Afghan and international governments have failed to counter the Taliban at that level. The war will be won in Afghanistan’s rural villages, not in the cities. The reality is that the United States is stuck in Afghanistan and Pakistan because it is not in America’s national security interests to abandon the region. But as violence levels continue to increase, Afghanistan is at a critical juncture. Rather than banking on stability entirely from the top down, as Amanullah Khan and the Soviet-backed regimes tried and failed to do, it would be more prudent to develop a bottom-up strategy.
What would such a strategy look like? General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has already indicated that it should be predicated on a core tenet of counterinsurgency: protecting the local population.23 Both insurgents and counterinsurgents need the support of the population to win. As the last chapter argued, protecting the Afghan population will require building more competent Afghan army and police forces, countering corruption at the local and national levels, and targeting Taliban and other insurgents in Pakistan.
It is critical to neutralize senior Taliban leaders in Baluchistan Province, where most of the senior Taliban officials reside, since neither the United States nor Pakistan governments have conducted serious operations there. It is telling that many Taliban leaders have moved their families to such Baluchistan cities as Quetta. The Pakistan government leaves them alone and, in a number of cases, elements of the government provide active support. The Pakistan government would almost certainly respond unfavorably to capturing or otherwise targeting senior Taliban officials in Baluchistan. In October 2009, Pakistan Frontier Corps forces halted the movement of nearly eight hundred trucks along Highway 4 from Quetta, Pakistan, to Spin Boldak, Afghanistan, because of the possibility of U.S. airstrikes in Baluchistan. “I interpreted this as a signal from the Pakistan government that it was demonstrating leverage over the United States, and wasn’t afraid to use it,” one senior U.S. military official told me. “What better way to show it than halting logistics supplies going to NATO military bases.”24 In previous weeks, there had been some unconfirmed media reports that U.S. president Barack Obama supported targeted strikes in Baluchistan.25
Instead, a more effective counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan needs to “go local,” as one Afghan government cabinet minister put it to me.26 Since late 2001, the United States has crafted its Afghanistan strategy on the assumption that stability will be achieved by building a strong central government. While this is an admirable long-term objective, as a strategy it is fatally flawed.
In many countries where the United States has engaged in state-building, such as Germany and Japan after World War II, U.S. policy makers inherited a strong central government that allowed them to rebuild from the top down.27 Even in Iraq, Saddam Hussein amassed a powerful military and intelligence apparatus that brutally suppressed dissent from the center. But Afghanistan is different. Power has often come from the bottom up, especially in Pashtun areas of the country, the focus of today’s insurgency. It is striking that when considering Afghanistan’s recent history, we often turn to the failed military exploits of the British or the Soviet Union. Just look at the list of books that many newly deployed soldiers to Afghanistan are urged to read, such as Lester Grau’s The Bear Went Over the Mountain and Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin’s The Bear Trap, which document some of the searing battlefield lessons that contributed to the Soviet defeat. A better—or at least equally relevant—focus needs to be spent on understanding what factors have contributed to Afghanistan’s stable periods.
The Musahiban dynasty, which included Zahir Shah, Nadir Shah, and Daoud Khan, ruled Afghanistan from 1929 to 1978. It was one of the most stable periods in modern Afghan history, partly because the Musahibans understood the importance of local power. Many U.S. policy makers have not grasped this reality. Even Afghans have had to learn this lesson the hard way. Amanullah Khan, who ruled Afghanistan from 1919 to 1929, tried to create a strong central state in the image of Ataturk’s Turkey and Reza Shah’s Iran. This proved disastrous. The central government’s attempt to push into rural areas sparked social and political revolts, first in Khowst in 1923 and then in Jalalabad in 1928. By 1929, local rebellions became so serious that Amanullah was forced to abdicate, and Afghanistan deteriorated into several months of anarchy.28 Masses of rural Afghans today still reject a strong central government actively meddling in their affairs. In southern and eastern Afghanistan, which are dominated by Pashtuns, many consider the central government a foreign entity.
“My allegiance is to my family first, then to my village, sub-tribe, and tribe,” one tribal elder from Kandahar told me earlier this year. The government played no meaningful role in his daily life.29
I have often been struck by the disconnect between the center and periphery when traveling through areas where, as recently as this year, some villagers had never heard of President Hamid Karzai, who has led the country since 2001. In a few cases, they even thought the U.S. military forces I was traveling with were Soviets, not realizing that the Soviet army withdrew in 1989. The lessons of Amanullah Khan were not lost on the Musahibans. While they managed to build a strong army and competent government technocrats, they exempted many Pashtun tribes from military service and established a fairly effective tribal engagement strategy in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Zahir Shah supported village-level defense forces, called arbakai, to establish order in eastern Afghanistan. These village-level forces were used for defensive purposes and organized under the auspices of legitimate tribal institutions.
The result was clear: Law and order were established by a combination of local institutions and a central government. When rebellions occurred, as they sometimes did, the government could temporarily move into rural areas and crush them. The Soviet-backed regimes never learned the Musahiban secret, and they tried to establish order entirely from the top down. The United States and much of the international community made a similar mistake beginning in 2001, conceiving of success as emanating only from a powerful central government. But this reflects a quintessentially Western understanding of the nation-state. “I’m afraid we are still looking for the solution only in Kabul,” a senior U.S. government official recently told me. “It is a false hope.”30
After the overthrow of the Taliban regime, the United States and its allies began building an Afghan national army and police force. They also supported presidential elections in 2004, parliamentary elections in 2005, and presidential elections in 2009. The 2009 elections were marred by substantial fraud in which nearly one million votes for President Karzai and another one hundred thousand for Abdullah Abdullah were thrown out. But there were no systematic efforts to engage tribes, sub-tribes, clans, and other local institutions as the Taliban were doing.
Community Defense
The United States must beat the Taliban at the local level. Tribal, religious, and other local leaders in Afghanistan best understand their community needs, but they are often under-resourced or intimidated by the Taliban and other insurgents. Yet some Afghan officials still cling to a solution that involves only the central government. “Effective development and governance cannot happen apart from credible security,” wrote Mohammad Ehsan Zia, Afghanistan’s Minister of Rural Rehabilitation and Development. “Security is the precursor to the government’s ability to deliver essential services, which ultimately leads to winning the trust of the population…. Afghans need a viable national police force in which the legitimate use of force is firmly, and solely, in the hands of the government.”31 But many others disagreed, including the head of Afghan police. “We need to subcontract security in some areas to local villagers,” Minister of Interior Mohammad Hanif Atmar told me. “And then let Afghan and coalition forces target insurgents in between.”32
&
nbsp; A review of local security forces in Afghanistan provides several important lessons. The first is that community defense forces need to be tied to legitimate local institutions, especially village-level shuras, which include tribal, religious, and other leaders. This means empowering legitimate institutions that have historically contributed to local security and the rule of law. It also means preventing local forces from becoming hijacked by warlords. The last three decades of warfare in Afghanistan have been littered with efforts to establish forces under the control of warlords, whose fighters are loyal to them and not to local communities. Another lesson is that local forces need to be small, defensive, and geared toward protecting local villages. In some areas of eastern Afghanistan, Zahir Shah even provided land to communities that established arbakai.
A final lesson is that the Afghan government needs to manage the process. The objective should be to help tribes, sub-tribes, and communities provide security and justice. When tribes rebel against the government or fight each other, government and coalition security forces can mediate the disputes or disrupt uprisings. Ultimately, a successful Afghan strategy will require building more competent Afghan army and police forces that can provide order in urban areas and along key roads, as well as finding ways to reintegrate insurgents into Afghan society. But it will also require effectively building and managing community defense forces in rural Afghanistan.
In some areas, local tribes and villages have already tried to resist the Taliban but have been heavily outmatched. They should be carefully supported, especially when it comes to security and providing justice for grievances. In areas of eastern Afghanistan, such as Kunar and Nangarhar provinces, some tribes have lost faith in local police forces that they perceive as corrupt and incompetent. In such northern provinces as Kunduz and Baghlan, locals have created forces because they fear a spreading Taliban insurgency and seek additional protection. “I haven’t seen the potential for such a backlash against the Taliban since 2001, when they were overthrown,” one U.S. government official told me recently on a visit to southern Afghanistan. “But we need to monitor this carefully and properly to have a chance of turning this war.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MANY BOOKS ORIGINATE with an epiphany, that illuminating moment when an idea first strikes the writer like a bolt of lightning. Mine came in a rather unkempt setting. I had lunch in January 2007 with Bruce Hoffman, a colleague and friend, at The Tombs, a drab, windowless pub in Washington, DC. I had been thinking about writing a book but had made little progress in narrowing down a rather inchoate set of ideas. Bruce convinced me that my repeated trips to Afghanistan put me in an enviable position to write about Afghanistan and its recent history. A great deal of ink had been spilled about Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion. But Afghanistan, the initial front in America’s global war on terror, had been pushed to the backburner. It was sage advice.
Writing any book is a struggle, what John Mearsheimer, my graduate school adviser, likened to getting up every day and wrestling with a bear. This book was no different. But the process was facilitated by the kindness and help of countless individuals. Several read drafts of the manuscript and provided excellent comments, including Peter Bergen, Daniel Byman, James Dobbins, Bruce Hoffman, Arturo Munoz, Ronald Neumann, David Phillips, and Obaid Younossi. Several others served as explicit or implicit tutors on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and their respective histories, especially Barnett Rubin and Ahmed Rashid. Still others were helpful in broader discussions on counterinsurgency, including Austin Long, Christine Fair, Steve Hosmer, William Rosenau, and John Gordon. And Peter Crowley educated me on the finer points of Alexander the Great’s incursion into Afghanistan.
Several key people served behind the scenes but had extraordinary input in the book. One of the most significant was Tom Mayer, my editor, who put the manuscript through a grist mill and turned the research and ideas into something digestible. My agent, Eric Lupfer, was patient, tirelessly helpful, and excited from the beginning about the book. Kathleen Brandes copyedited the book from her perch in Spruce Head, Maine, not far from my undergraduate alma mater. Don Rifkin and Devon Zahn gave the book careful attention and should be applauded for getting this complicated project done under tight deadlines. My assistants, Nathan Chandler and Joya Laha, were extraordinarily helpful throughout the research, writing, and editing phases.
The book would not have been possible without the ability to interview a range of policymakers, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Comptroller and Under Secretary of Defense Dov Zakheim, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlin, CIA Station Chief in Islamabad Robert Grenier, CIA Station Chief in Afghanistan Graham Fuller, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald Neumann, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan Lieutenant General David Barno, and countless others. I also owe a debt of gratitude to those Afghanistan officials that I interviewed—such as Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, Minister of Interior Ali Jalali, and Afghan Ambassador to the United States Said Jawad—who worked tirelessly for their country during such trying times.
One of the most fruitful parts of the book was presenting drafts and ideas to a range of academic and U.S. government audiences, as well as those from foreign countries and international organizations. Within the United States, I gave presentations to audiences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgetown University, New York University, Heritage Foundation, Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security, RAND Corporation, and George Washington University. Students in my summer 2008 Georgetown University course on counterinsurgency were particularly helpful in pointing out problems with the manuscript.
I would also like to thank those individuals who gave me their precious time and energy from the U.S. Department of Defense, State Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation, White House, and U.S. intelligence community. Others from Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, United Nations, European Union, and NATO were also generous with their time and knowledge. Many requested that I not thank them by name, so they remain anonymous.
Finally, I would like to thank my family. My parents (Alec and Sethaly) and three brothers (Alex, Josh, and Clark) have been supportive during the writing process and jumped to my wife’s defense whenever I had to travel to Afghanistan or other war-torn places. I owe a particularly heartfelt debt of gratitude to my wife, Suzanne, and daughters, Elizabeth and Alexandra. They have been my daily solace and joy, and I dedicate this book to them.
NOTES
Introduction
1. Central Intelligence Agency, CIA World Factbook 2007 (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2006).
2. Edward Walsh, “Staff Sgt. Robert J. Paul Killed Sept. 8 in Afghanistan,” The Oregonian, September 12, 2006, p. B1.
3. Cecilia Rasmussen, “Army Reserve Sgt. 1st Class Merideth Howard, 52, Alameda, Killed in Blast,” Los Angeles Times, October 1, 2006, p. 14.
4. Alexander Downer, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Australia, Address to the 61st Session of the United Nations General Assembly, September 21, 2006 (New York: Australian Mission to the United Nations, 2006).
5. President Karzai Calls the Terrorist Attack on the Funeral Ceremony of Hakim Taniwal an Animosity Against Islam and the People of Afghanistan (Kabul: Office of the President, Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, September 11, 2006).
6. President George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, United States Capitol, Washington, DC, September 20, 2001 (Washington, DC: White House Press Office, 2001).
7. David M. Walker, Global War on Terrorism: Observations on Funding, Costs, and Future Commitments (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2006), p. 7.
8. Central Intelligence Agency, CIA World Factbook 2007 (Washington, DC: Central Inte
lligence Agency, 2006). Figures were in purchasing-power parity. Only 27 out of 229 countries had a gross domestic product over $430 billion.
9. Transcript of Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing for ISN 10024 (Khalid Sheikh Muhammad), March 10, 2007, U.S. Naval Base Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, pp. 17–18.
10. On the overthrow of the Taliban regime, see Gary Schroen, First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005); Stephen Biddle, Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, November 2002); Gary Berntsen and Ralph Pezzullo, Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al Qa’ida (New York: Crown Publishers, 2005); Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002).
11. Henry A. Crumpton, “Intelligence and War: Afghanistan 2001–2002,” Jennifer E. Sims and Burton Gerber, eds., Transforming U.S. Intelligence (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005), p. 177.
12. Berntsen and Pezzullo, Jawbreaker, p. 312.
13. On the definition of insurgency, see Central Intelligence Agency, Guide to the Analysis of Insurgency (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, n.d.), p. 2; Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Joint Publication 1–02 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, 2001), p. 266.
14. I use insurgency as roughly synonymous with what is often called civil war, which can be defined as “armed conflict that pits the government and national army of an internationally recognized state against one or more armed opposition groups able to mount effective resistance against the state.” Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 31. Also see, for example, Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 5; James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political Science Review, vol. 97, no. 1, February 2003, pp. 75–90.
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