Afghanistan Read online

  During the course of this war, many qawms had new leaders (pushed forward by the war), access to foreign aid, new patrons (in the form of the resistance political parties and Pakistan), and a sense of larger community coming from the participation in jihad that was also a war of national liberation. Listening to foreign radio broadcasts such as the Voice of America, BBC, and Deutsche Welt also changed the focus of many Afghans away from the purely local. Larger ethnic, regional, and linguistic identities were encouraged by the qawms’ patrons, either Peshawar-based mujahideen or Kabul-based pro-Soviets. Outside resources such as US aid to the mujahideen or Moscow’s aid to Kabul were alike used to build new patronage networks to make possible this change.

  Qawms were mobilized—normally through patronage—and politicized by all sides, generally along ethnic or regional lines. In some areas—with the notable exception of much of Pushtun Afghanistan divided by tribe—disparate qawms were unified through the emergence of regional leaders and shared patronage networks. This was seen especially in Dari-speaking Afghanistan. Ahmad Shah Massoud moved from the commander of the anti-Soviet resistance in the Panjshir Valley to the foremost regional resistance commander in northern Afghanistan in this way.

  The transition of many of Afghanistan’s qawms from the politically mobilized and often militarized elements of 1978–2001 has, since then, been challenging. The political, economic, development, and religious actions to re-integrate them into a peaceful Afghanistan did not affect much of rural Afghanistan where the grassroots lived. Pushtun qawms have given their loyalty to the insurgents in many districts.

  Parties and Warlords

  Afghanistan is today defined by conflict, and these conflicts are about power. Those that would use power must use it in the context of Afghan institutions and concepts—including patronage—in a way that is perceived as legitimate. Because use of power by the state is often weak or ineffective, parties and warlords play an important role in decisions and actions, either legal or illegal, that affect the entire population. Neither parties not warlords were part of traditional Afghanistan. But they shaped it in the years of conflict in 1978–2001. Their strengths and their limitations have the potential to further affect Afghanistan’s current conflicts.

  Party organizations were not permitted under Afghanistan’s Golden Age experiments with parliamentary democracy. Those that emerged were, by definition, part of the two (then-illegal) oppositions, Islamist and Communist.

  In 1978–2001, the party in Afghanistan was a social as well as a political institution. In Afghanistan, the political mobilization and polarization that accompanied the conflicts of 1978–2001 created another level of identity: that of the political party. The party was the institution used to carry out mobilization through militarization, and it facilitated awareness of inter-ethnic differences and intra-ethnic commonalities. In this period, the party became an alternative source of patron-client relations. This largely reinforced and hardened pre-existing patronage networks, and in some instances it replaced them.

  In 1978–92, Pushtuns dominated one of Afghanistan’s two Communist parties and six of the seven Peshawar-based Sunni resistance parties (with the others dominated by Dari-speakers but including substantial Pushtun membership), creating organizations in Afghanistan that cut across tribal lines. The Hezb-e-Islami (HiH) of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (a detribalized Pushtun from Kunduz) became the most powerful of the six Peshawar-based Pushtun parties in 1978–92. It had the highest priority for Pakistani aid and a strong top-down organization. HiH was able to overcome many of the divisions inherent in tribal and religious networks in the other parties. Hekmatyar himself perceived the party as adapting the tactics of a Leninist “vanguard part” to Islamism.

  In 1978–92, Pakistan backed only a single Sunni predominantly Dari-speaking major resistance party among the “Peshawar Seven,” Jamiat-e-Islami Afghanistan (JIA). This brought together the disparate Tadji geographical groups—Panjsheris, Heratis, Badakshis, and others. JIA’s Islamist ideology had to extend to both traditional and revolutionary politics and religious orientation among Dari-speakers because there were no separate parties for them, unlike the Pushtuns.30 Ahmad Shah Massoud, who started as the charismatic leader of anti-Soviet resistance in his native Panjshir Valley in 1978 (he had previously led a Pakistani-funded revolt there against Kabul in 1975), was in later years able to use the JIA to help build what became the Northern Alliance.31

  The Taliban of 1994–2001 lacked an effective party organization but continued the party-originated move toward militarization as they attempted to politicize and, more lastingly, ethnically unify Pushtun Afghanistan and lead it in civil war against their opponents.

  Post-2001 Afghan political parties were largely identified with the ethnolinguistic and ideological polarization associated with the decades of conflict. This contributed to the 2004 decision by Hamid Karzai—over international objections—to employ an electoral system intended to marginalize political parties in parliamentary elections. However, once the parliament was operating, parties proliferated; by 2008, there were 104 registered. But none has emerged as a viable, strong force, whether independently or as part of a recognizable coalition. “Afghanistan politics are very personalized; institution building has been taken hostage by personalities,” in the words of Ambassador Mahmoud Saikal.32

  In 2008–10, there were political parties on both sides of Afghanistan’s conflicts. The post-2001 Taliban has moved away from the party model of organization. HiH remains a part of the insurgent coalition, although Hekmatyar’s model has reportedly shifted to that of the Lebanese Hezbollah, embracing armed struggle while not ruling out political participation.

  In the absence of effective state authority in much of Afghanistan, “warlords,” who combined both local authority and armed force without the check of being part of a legitimate state structure and had emerged from the 1978–2001 conflicts, were important post-2001. Warlords are not a traditional Afghan institution. There is no agreement as to who are warlords. Ahmad Shah Massoud, the defense minister and de facto military leader of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, the mujahideen-based regime that tried to rule from Kabul in 1992–96 and was assassinated by Al Qaeda immediately before the 9/11 attack in 2001, was characterized as a warlord by many (especially Pushtuns), but in death he has become the national hero of post-2001 Afghanistan.

  The absence of effective governance at the grassroots level post-2001 has ensured that warlords remain a part of Afghanistan’s institutions. In much of Afghanistan, leadership figures from the 1978–2001 conflicts remain in de facto power, with or without the color of state authority. They frequently practice non-inclusive and extractive politics that are resented by their involuntary network of clients; other clients see them as the only viable alternative to what they perceive as a non-responsive over-centralized state that has little effectiveness outside of Kabul.

  A Different Country

  Influencing all of the conflicts that define Afghanistan is the fact that it is fair to conclude that Afghan society is overall inherently collectivist and Islamic, religious in its orientation and deeply conservative. Afghan cultural conservatism is at heart a survival strategy. Its effectiveness is demonstrated by the fact that many of Mountstuart Elphinstone’s 1815 observations are valid today. It is based on the assumption that, at the end of the day, outsiders—Soviet, British, Arabs, American—will go home or vanish to smoke and the Afghans will be left with what they have always had: their land, their faith, and each other.

  Foreigners who are trying to push change on polite but resistant Afghans may find cabinet ministers with doctorates from Western universities and village elders untroubled by literacy alike in their ability to deflect unwanted change while assuring the outsiders of their gratitude for wishing the best for Afghanistan. Neither ministries in Kabul nor shuras in remote villages are configured for bold and decisive change. Both are conservative institutions, aiming first to preserve the interests of stakeholders (which us
ually center on patron-client relations).

  For Afghan government institutions and ministries, change is often resisted, a task made easier by a system that often combines the least responsive elements of traditional Afghan ways and Soviet-imposed central planning. Afghan government ministries tend to be profoundly conservative institutions. Not only do they defend their bureaucratic turf, as government institutions do worldwide, but they perceive a vital interest in blocking any change that they cannot control or that threatens the networks—especially the patron-client relations—which is how such organizations tend to operate in an Afghan context. “Lots of Kabul ministries mean nothing to people in the sticks. Further out [of Kabul] not much governance is going on,” in the words of one UN official.33

  Reconciling change with Afghanistan’s conservative culture has been problematic. Rural Afghans are suspicious of change. Change has usually brought them nothing but grief and distanced them from the true path of Islam and an honorable life. But even conservative rural Afghans will support change if they are shown that it is consistent with their beliefs and goals and that it is effective. Only then will they take ownership and, most reluctantly, take responsibility for change. At the national level, the Afghans have taken ownership of the constitution and the parliament. They have generally accepted that female members of parliament and provincial councils are a good and useful thing, like female doctors. The grassroots may take pride and ownership over Afghanistan’s Constitution, the Loya Jirgas and 2004 and 2005 elections, have been appreciative of schools, healthcare, and their cell phones (over 6.5 million in service by the end of 2008); but many, not limited to the uneducated rural majorities of all ethnolinguistic groups, were horrified at television showing Bollywood movies or Afghan women singing. Terrorists and insurgents have been quick to exploit this as examples of the infidel invader’s aim of subverting Islam.

  Elites have all too often seen change as a source of personal enrichment to provide security against the day when the outsiders go home and they may have to go back into exile. Yet many individuals—including President Karzai—still appear to be foreign creations. Traditionally, those pushing the hardest for change were urbanized educated middle class and elite Afghans, but this group was largely destroyed, marginalized, or driven into exile in 1978–2001 and has not managed to reconstitute itself as a viable Afghan political force (in terms of patronage and ability to get things done) since then. Despite the return of a number of exiles with access to foreign support, including those at the highest levels of government, they are still a much less powerful force than they were prior to 1978; they rely on their patrons, the international community and the aid donors, for their positions and what internal influence they possess.

  Conversely, rural Pushtuns often appear to be most conservative element of Afghan society, though this differs greatly from place to place and tribe to tribe. Yet detribalized Pushtuns—often without the intermediating effect of tribal leadership and extensive kinship-based patronage networks—have in the past backed radical or extremist leaders, Communist and Islamist alike. Those Afghan ethnolinguistic groups without tribal divides tend to be more open to change, but even these are deeply conservative. Rural Badakshis are closer to rural Pushtuns in their worldview than they are to educated urban Kabulis, even though they share the Dari language and lack the Pushtun’s tribe and clan organization. Ties of family and kinship provide legitimacy. Afghans disparage another Afghan by saying “Who was his father?” (Part of President Karzai’s strength is that his father, a chief of the Popalzai tribe of Durrani Pushtuns and a large landowner in Kandahar province, was widely known.) This attitude influences Afghan life and politics today, and leads to a deeply conservative cast to a society that tends to be shared even by those—such as Communists or Islamists—otherwise devoted to radical change.

  When top-down change seems to threaten Afghan culture or the Afghan or Pushtun way (“Afghaniyat” or Pushtowali), it has historically been resisted. King Amanullah in the late 1920s implemented change without securing support from elites. The result was years of bloody civil war. The Khalqi government in 1978–79 set about remaking Afghanistan using the bloodiest methods of their Soviet patrons’ history. They had no need to legitimate themselves or rally Afghan support: the tide of history (and Moscow) was with them. The result was the largest national rising of the twentieth century, with Moscow feeling compelled to intervene militarily. The challenge facing those working to implement change in Afghanistan post-2001 is how to ensure that their efforts are not seen as following these unacceptable models. It is hard to get Afghans to take ownership, harder still to get them to take responsibility (reflecting the society’s collectivist and qawm-based roots).

  Since 2001, the Afghan insurgents have sought to portray themselves as defenders of culture as well as religion and nationality. Even more disconcerting for the conservative connection of Afghan culture to legitimacy has been the post-2001 non-Muslim foreign presence, with military convoys running farm carts off roads, the presence of unveiled women, and drinking. The negative cultural impact of the foreign presence in the eyes of many Afghans—even if they accept the security rationale for its presence—has made the association of President Karzai and the current Kabul government with the West a political liability. Cultural resentment of much of the negatively perceived impact foreign presence is, like Afghanistan’s conservatism itself, shared by its ethnolinguistic groups, even those who originally welcomed the foreign presence and still see it as preventing a return to a disastrous civil war.

  Cultural conservatism has presented the insurgents with a powerful weapon in the battle of ideas. They present Karzai as a current “Shah Shuja” (the nineteenth century ruler installed by the British before the First Anglo-Afghan War who was overthrown by a Pushtun revolt). Karzai is presented as being as much of a foreign tool and no more of a Pushtun than was Najibullah, the hated former secret policeman installed by the Soviets who was able to use Moscow’s gold to govern from 1986 to 1992. Karzai’s reacting to foreign pressure has also undercut his links to cultural legitimacy. When an Afghan accused of apostasy was allowed to leave the country under foreign pressure rather than be tried for what is a crime under Sharia law, it appeared to the conservative grassroots that Karzai represented the foreigners’ belief systems, not their own, even if they were in favor of Afghanistan abiding by international agreements on human rights.

  To the extent that the struggle inside Afghanistan is seen in terms of cultural values instead of reconstruction, it has undercut progress. This conservatism has led Afghans to reject—often violently—social change imposed top-down without securing support from a broad base of institutions, groups, and individuals and showing deference, respect, and support of Afghan sources of legitimacy and values. Conservatism has led some in Afghan society—especially rural Pushtuns—to reject the changes in governance and life to emerge since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and oppose the foreign presence.

  Yet the Western dichotomy of conservative and radical change is difficult to apply to Afghanistan. The original Taliban of 1992–96 succeeded for many reasons, including the fact that they could legitimate themselves to Afghanistan’s Pushtuns in pre-existing social terms, a basically conservative action. The original Taliban was able to use the links of existing networks and patronage, especially that of the Pushtun clergy and tribal leaders, to legitimate themselves while at the same time creating radical change, especially in Kabul, Herat, and elsewhere outside their heartland. Yet the Taliban imposed radical change in religious practice, including their insistence on men growing beards, and gender relations, including their insistence on prescribing a dress code enforced by extrajudicial violence, banning women from the public sphere in general and in working outside the home in particular. The only previous Kabul regime in Afghanistan’s history that had attempted that degree of radical change, using the force of state power to determine how each Afghan must treat the women in his family, was the polarizing Khalqis
of 1978–79, who had Afghans of all ethnolinguistic groups in arms against them within months. The Taliban were able to use a combination of armed force as well as money and connections supplied by Al Qaeda and other outside allies to enforce this radical change. But even the Taliban’s fighting men were outraged at the sight of Afghan women being beaten for transgressing the dress code, one reason why few were willing to fight for them once it became apparent that the US had intervened against them in 2001.

  The collectivist orientation of traditional Afghan society has led to suspicion of the free market economy that has emerged since 2001. Since then, the appearance of goods (unaffordable to most Afghans) from the world market and the large houses built in Kabul or in the Panjshir valley have given Afghans much scope to exercise the propensity for envy that Mountstuart Elphinstone first noted back in 1815. Similarly, resentment of the West, coupled with envy of its material gains, dates back to the nineteenth century but required satellite television and DVDs in every village in Afghanistan to become a powerful force cultural force post-2001.

  The post-2001 media revolution in Afghanistan resulted in a flood of new newspapers and television and radio stations. DVDs have arrived in even the poorest villages, giving people the ability to compare their quality of life to that of the outside world. The political implications of this media flood are enormous. If, prior to 2001, the average Afghan was content to interact with a distant world through shortwave radio broadcasts, they have since then had to contend with a much greater engagement with an outside culture that does not reflect Afghan culture and does not appear to value it, reflected in the appearance of satellite television and bootleg Bollywood movies that both fascinate and, often, repel the rural and uneducated majority. Afghanistan’s insurgents have been able, in some areas, to transform this cultural unease into active or passive support for their cause. The first time the Afghan parliament overrode a presidential veto, in September 2008, it was to sustain a law restricting media rights, vindicating the cultural concerns of the grassroots while, conveniently, limiting press scrutiny of elite activities.