Afghanistan Read online

  Empires do not last once they lose their sheen of invincibility, their prestige, and, above all, their faith in themselves. It was easy for them to turn away from Afghanistan and consider its land and people outside the frontier. But no great power can fight a small war. Afghanistan’s role in the final collapse of the Soviet Union has been described as “the fateful pebble” that caused the stumbling colossus to finally collapse.9

  Failure in Afghanistan may have contributed to the end of empires, but that says less about what is intrinsic to Afghanistan than it does about the limitations of empires. The Soviets were not the first to fall. The First Anglo-Afghan War (1838–42) started with a spectacular British defeat, however redeemed by subsequent military success, that was one of the many factors that helped bring down the rule over India of Britain’s Honorable East India Company. In 1857, all the Indian regiments that had previously been sent to avenge the initial British defeat in Afghanistan either mutinied or were disbanded.10 The Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919 contributed to starting the crisis of the Indian Empire that was to bring about the eventual end of the British raj. It is uncertain whether NATO could survive failure in its current mission in Afghanistan.

  Afghanistan demonstrated that these outsiders lacked the will, troops, or capability to deal with a problem that seemed peripheral. None of the empires that stumbled over Afghanistan considered it important. It was not the source of revenue, nor of strategic bases and leverage, nor were there constituencies at home insisting Afghanistan be preserved. More importantly, they were unable to use the tools of diplomacy, penetration, or trade and had to rely on foreign troops to create their desired outcome in Afghanistan. Because of this, their wars became costly in terms of money, lives, and especially prestige.

  The fact that the US and its coalition partners have demonstrated that the motivation of their post-imperial commitment to Afghanistan is not so that they can control resources or create a buffer, but rather so that they can enable Afghans to rebuild the country so it will not represent a haven for terrorism and a center of instability as it was before 9/11, does not reduce what they have at stake in the conflict. If anything, it increases it.

  If the West fails here, the Afghans that had supported, trusted, and worked to rebuild their country along with them will fail, harder and lethally. Success in driving out the outsiders will likely attract resources to fight the government they supported in Kabul from both neighbors fighting proxy wars and Islamic radicals seeking to create a society that fits their doctrines. Coalition disengagement from the conflict in Afghanistan will inspire other hard men elsewhere in the world to look to their Korans and Kalashnikovs to go and make their own version of the future. It will not be the Sunni equivalent of the Iranian revolution, where Sunni-Shia divisions and national borders provided natural firebreaks, but something different and potentially more dangerous. Consider the fact that, by 2008–10, the Taliban movements of both Afghanistan and Pakistan had evolved into political-military movements far different from the one that had emerged, with the encouragement and support of the government in Islamabad, in the borderlands decades before. The emergence of groups such as the “Punjabi Taliban” in Pakistan and the resilience of Al Qaeda suggest that the hard men’s cause and their ability to adapt may well continue to have appeal to those in the region and worldwide who oppose a status quo that appears unresponsive and oppressive.

  The long record of failures in dealing with Afghanistan must give pause to any Westerner looking at a commitment that includes the use of substantial numbers of troops. But if there is a time certain for disengagement, the supporters of the insurgents and the terrorists will wait until the US and the coalition go home. The security situation of 2008–10 required more foreign troops to prevent a near-term collapse; but these forces, unlike those of past empires, have come not to conquer but rather to prevent a conquest of Afghanistan by terrorists and insurgents.

  That, of course, is not how the hard men see it. To them, it is their land and their faith. Foreigners may have something to add as a source for technology and trade, but have nothing to teach about honor or Islam, which is what really matters. To them, these foreigners are no different from conquerors. That is why, in 2005, the Afghan Taliban issued a fatwa (a religious edict) ordering the death of all “infidels” and others supporting the Afghanistan government. Even those aid providers who had worked with the pre-2001 Taliban and tried to distance themselves from coalition military efforts have been portrayed, increasingly, as on the side of darkness with the Zionists and Crusaders. The Taliban had no interest in exempting those non-governmental organizations building things like clinics or schools. Much as these organizations would have liked to have claimed neutrality, to the hard men they are also very much the enemy.11

  Failure in Afghanistan in the current conflicts would be much like having failed in Germany or Korea in the Cold War. The price for losing the Vortex’s conflicts would be paid by the losing “empires”: the US, NATO, the UN and international organizations, and the world order as a whole. But the real cost would fall heavily and painfully on those who must live there. If Kabul is ever once again in the hands of current Afghan insurgents, their terrorist allies, and their foreign backers, it will not bring peace to Afghanistan. It will mean renewed civil war and misery for the Afghans and a powerful blow to US credibility. Losing in Pakistan is likely to mean continued conflict in Afghanistan. That would be hell indeed for Afghans and Pakistanis. In repeated elections, they have firmly rejected the ways of the Vortex. They have voted for responsible and democratic government, despite the efforts of their own elites to limit and corrupt the process. The hope expressed in those votes, and in the support demonstrated for the new Afghan government and the coalition post-2001, has not yet faded beyond recall. Hope was brought into Afghanistan by the US-led coalition intervention in 2001 and, though much diminished, remains there still. Whether the future of Afghanistan—and Pakistan as well—will reflect this hope or the vision of the hard men remains to be determined.

  PART ONE

  LANDS IN THE VORTEX

  CHAPTER ONE

  AFGHANISTAN: A COUNTRY DEFINED BY CONFLICTS

  “To sum up the character of the Afghans in a few words: their vices are revenge, envy, avarice, rapacity, and obstinacy; on the other hand they are fond of liberty, faithful to their friends, kind to their dependents, hospitable, hardy, frugal, laborious and prudent; and they are less disposed than the nations in their neighborhood to falsehood, intrigue, and deceit.”

  —Mountstuart Elphinstone,

  An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, 1815

  This one-sentence description is of value today, not just sentimental Orientalism. Today, there is still something remaining of the “Old Afghanistan,” though nothing has been untouched by the conflicts of 1978–2001. Despite the current impatience of foreigners and Afghans alike, rebuilding will likely be the task of a generation, and whether it will be completed or not depends on the outcome of Afghanistan’s conflicts and the commitments of its foreign friends.

  Land and People

  Afghanistan is a country of enormous complexity. Isolated by its mountainous terrain and limited infrastructure, Afghanistan is rich in culture, has multiple languages and ethnicities, and has a long unique history of Islamic religious practices and much else. It is harder to generalize about diverse and divided Afghanistan than just about any other country of comparable size and population. Those, usually foreigners, who insist on defining any one fact as “this is how it is in Afghanistan,” are likely to be misleading themselves. Attempting to understand Afghanistan means realizing the importance of its nuances and context.

  Afghanistan is located at the intersection of three critical regions—Iran and the Gulf; central Asia; Pakistan and the subcontinent—and is where global currents meet and interact. China (and the Pacific Rim) even shares a short land border with Afghanistan in the remote northeast Wakhan corridor. Yet Afghanistan is still distinct from all the regio
ns it borders, even though it is influenced by—and has the potential to influence—all of them.

  Afghanistan’s remote location on the eastern periphery of the Iranian plateau and mountainous terrain has limited control by outsiders.12 The mountains divide and isolate Afghanistan. The Hindu Kush bisects it. The Safed Koh lines the border with Pakistan. The tallest peaks are those of the Pamirs, in the extended finger of the Wakhan Corridor that stretches to the Chinese border. The territory is generally arid.

  A relatively small percentage of the surface area—mainly in river valleys—is suitable for agriculture, which requires irrigation. Afghanistan is vulnerable to multiyear droughts, including a severe one in the early 1970s and another one prior to 2001. Both of these droughts hurt the legitimacy of the then-current governments in Kabul, which demonstrated they could do little to alleviate the hardships of affected Afghans. A drought in 2008 helped worsen a pre-existing food shortage, as Pakistan and Kazakhstan, the region’s primary food exporter, had already cut off food sales to Afghanistan to keep their own domestic prices down. The percentage of Afghans telling pollsters they were unable to afford food increased from 54 to 63 percent in 2007–09.13 This, along with soaring energy costs. created even more hardship and sowed the seeds for more unrest.14 Afghanistan’s politics are shaped by its geography.

  Afghanistan’s cities—some of great antiquity—provide regional markets. They are linked by trade routes that also stretch back for centuries. Kabul, the capital, with its surrounding area, has been the historic center since the eighteenth century. Afghanistan can be geographically divided into regions around the major cities. The Northwest includes the ancient Silk Route city of Herat and the Hari River. The North, around the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, includes the northern plains. The Northeast stretches from the Shomali plain north of Kabul to distant and mountainous Badakhshan. The central Hazara Jat is effectively surrounded by mountains. In the South, Kandahar is the major city. In the east, Jalalabad and Khost are the major regional centers on trade routes with Pakistan.15

  Since 2001, no effective Afghan national economy has emerged to tie these seven diverse and disparate regions together. As a landlocked country, the importance of the port of Karachi as Afghanistan’s most important link to the world has meant that the relationship with Pakistan is critical to the economy and future of Afghanistan.

  The failure to have an effective Afghan national economy post-2001 and the continued economic reliance on Pakistan reflects that the port of Karachi is vital as Afghanistan’s link to the outside world and that Afghanistan lacks infrastructure and established relationships with other countries that would provide an alternative path to markets. Afghanistan has no railroads (though Iran has an ongoing project to build a spur of its national system to Herat). The limited road system has, as a result, taken on a great deal of importance. What foreigners call “the ring road” links Afghanistan’s major cities and runs to the international borders. It runs south from the old Soviet border at Termez in Uzbekistan, through the Salang Pass tunnel under the Hindu Kush, down to Kabul. From there it follows the path of the traditional trade routes, running south through Ghazni to Kandahar, then west to Herat and north to the border with Turkmenistan. The ring is closed by a secondary stretch linking the western and eastern north-south routes, through Mazar-e-Sharif. There are also paved routes linking Afghanistan’s cities with foreign trading partners. The road from Kabul through Jalalabad reaches the Pakistani border at Tor Kham and from there runs through the Khyber Pass to Peshawar, capital of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Grand Trunk Road that leads over the River Indus to the Punjabi cities Rawalpindi and Islamabad, capital of Pakistan. Kandahar is linked by a paved road that crosses the Pakistan border at Spin Boldak, where it runs through the Bolan Pass to Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. Another road connects Herat with Iran. The rest of the country relies on secondary roads.

  Afghanistan’s population has grown to about 30–33 million, from 15–20 million in the 1970s. The high rate of growth has made the demographic “youth bulge” that affects many Middle Eastern countries even more pronounced in Afghanistan, with about 4.5 million young men aged 15–29 and about 6.7 million boys under 15; 45 percent of all males are under 15, two to three times the percentage in developed countries. In the absence of a recent census—the most recent attempt was in 1979, and security concerns have halted post-2001 plans—all population figures, especially those associated with ethnolinguistic groups, remain politically charged estimates.

  The population patterns have not recovered from the effects of the conflicts of 1978–2001, which saw Afghans becoming the world’s largest refugee population (especially in Pakistan and Iran) and internally displaced many of the more than 75 percent of the population that had lived in rural areas. The numbers of Afghanistan’s internal refugees, despite terrible living conditions, led to a considerable increase in urbanization. Even the heavy fighting in Kabul in 1992–96 did not reverse this trend.

  Afghanistan’s human resources, like its natural ones, remain tremendously underdeveloped. Afghanistan’s level of human development is less than any of its neighbors. An estimated two thirds of the population is illiterate. In Pakistan, only the FATA—where male overall literacy is estimated as less than 30 percent and female literacy at fewer than four percent—is worse off than Afghanistan.

  The worldwide Afghan diaspora, while highly motivated and devoted to Afghanistan, is relatively small and lacks resources or political influence in the countries they now largely call home. The ties of blood and affection to Afghanistan are limited, in most developed countries, to small communities of exiles and refugees and to that still-smaller group of foreigners that care about or have an interest in its people and future.

  Recent UN development indices have shown Afghanistan near the bottom, ranking 174 out of 178 countries in the 2007 Global Human Development Index.16 The most important activity is agriculture, with the most profitable crop being the illicit cultivation of opium, which has become concentrated in five southern provinces. Specialty agricultural products (raisins and pomegranates), wheat, and other grains are also widely grown. Afghanistan’s undeveloped natural resources, including natural gas and copper, may prove valuable in the future, given outside investment and a functioning infrastructure, all now blocked by the conflict and the political weakness in Kabul. US-provided surveys post-2001 have identified what could become valuable industries if a suitable infrastructure is provided. China has started to make investments in natural gas and copper development.

  Ethnolinguistic Divisions

  While in no significant way homogenous, Afghans nevertheless possess a strong sense of national identity that coexists with correspondingly strong Islamic faith and equally strong overlapping and non-exclusive ethnolinguistic, tribal (especially among Pushtuns of which clan or sub-clan identification is often strongest), qawm (affinity group), local (e.g., Panjsheris, from the Panjshir valley), and kinship identities. The Western estimates used to produce ethnolinguistic maps and percentages of population associated with each group have to be used with great care.

  There is no one consensus among Afghans on what constitute specific ethnic, religious, or racial groups. Afghans all share some aspects of identity with cross-border groups in their neighbors from all three of the adjacent regions: shared language, religion and religious practice, literature, culture, and, in some cases, tribal structure. But the Afghans generally do not perceive themselves as the unredeemed part of a secessionist group. If others from across the border wish to join them, great, but few want to leave. Afghanistan is not the former Yugoslavia.

  The Pushtuns (also called Pathan, Pashtun, and Pukhtun) are primarily Sunni (with a few Shia tribes, mainly in Pakistan). Pushtuns are the world’s largest tribal grouping, a tribally subdivided, clan-based society. The Pushtuns have been historically the dominant group in Afghanistan. The most credible Western estimates (such as those produced by the U
N or the CIA Fact Book) are that Pushtuns currently represent about 38–43 percent of the population of Afghanistan, although some estimates put the percentage up to ten percent greater than these. However, it is an article of faith among the government and elites of Pakistan and Pushtuns around the world that Pushtuns are an absolute majority in Afghanistan.

  Afghan Pushtuns are divided into at least four major tribal subgroupings: Durranis, Ghilzays, Ghurghustis, and the Kharoshtis and Eastern Pushtuns. Each of these is divided further into families of tribes and tribes, each tribe divided into khels (clans) and sub-clans. Afghan’s Kuchi nomads, a much smaller group, are also ethnic Pushtuns. Pushtuns primarily speak the Pushtu (also called Pashto) language. While there are significant dialect differences between Pushtu-speakers, they all are mutually intelligible. Complicating the ethnic division is the fact that many ethnic Pushtuns are actually primarily Dari-speakers that use Pushtu as a second language.

  The Pushtuns have ties running across the Durand Line, which has proven important for the continued conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Afghanistan’s approximately 13.8 million Pushtuns have 26.6 million counterparts in Pakistan, with the heartland in the FATA, North West Frontier Province (NWFP), and Baluchistan, but with substantial populations throughout the country in major cities, especially Karachi. In Pakistan, Pushtuns run the nationwide “transport mafia,” “lumber mafia,” and other economic activities, making use of their ethnic trading connections.

  The largest group of Afghanistan’s Persian (Afghan Dari and Iranian Farsi are like British and American English) speakers are Tajiks. Tajiks are defined as Sunni (with some Ismailis), Dari-speaking, and make up an estimated 20 percent of the population. The relatively recent rise of a distinct Tajik ethnic identity shows how these definitions are not fixed in Afghanistan. Many Afghans have said “we only learned we were Tajiks from the BBC.” Before that, they were self-defined, perhaps as Heratis, Panjsheris, Badakshis (the natives of Badakhshan province, described by Marco Polo as “Muslim and valiant in war”), or multiple identities.