You Understand Less As the Pages Turn

By Eric Martin, on November 6th, 2009

Back in 2006, a wise man said this:

It’s time to admit that no amount of American lives can resolve the political disagreement that lies at the heart of someone else’s civil war.

And yet, three years and a rather precipitous political ascent later, that same person – now President Barack Obama – is contemplating just how many more troops to add to Afghanistan’s roiling civil war – that would be on top of the 21,000 additional troops already deployed by Obama. Nader Mousavizadeh (via) is right about the nature of the conflict in Afghanistan, and our ability to impose a solution through enduring military occupation:

Two conclusions are inescapable from the fiasco of Afghanistan’s presidential elections and the McChrystal assessment: There is no electoral solution to Afghan government’s crisis of legitimacy, and there is no military solution to the challenge of the Taliban. And when observing the current Afghan conflict not from the perspective of America’s post-9/11 intervention, but from Afghanistan’s own quarter-century of warfare, a third conclusion becomes still more apparent: What we confront is not, in fact, an insurgency but rather a civil war — one whose resolution can only be found in a new decentralized Afghan politics based on the enduring, if ugly, realities of power there, and not through another decade of Western military intervention.

If there is one lesson to be drawn from the withdrawal of Hamid Karzai’s main rival from the second round of the elections — and his own subsequent appointment as president for another term — it is that the ability of outsiders to influence the existing politics of Afghanistan is now near zero, even when the object of our entreaties is a politician whose very existence has long depended entirely on Western support and funding. Like a patient rising from a hospital bed after a near-death experience only to rob his doctor blind on the way out the door, Karzai has conclusively demonstrated that his utility to Western interests — as well as to the Afghan people whom he’s grossly robbed of a chance for representative government — is over.

As previously discussed on this Site, while much of the US-based discourse on Afghanistan frames the discussion in terms of defending the “Afghan people” and “Afghan nation” from the Taliban, in truth, the Taliban are a multifaceted, multi-ethnic coalition of cobbled together factions that are, by most accounts, almost entirely comprised of Afghans. In fact, the term “Taliban” has become a euphemism for any and all groups opposed to the Karzai government and NATO forces. The euphemism has been so liberally applied that the current compilation of opposition fighters commonly referred to as “Taliban” in government and media reports is, in actuality, almost entirely non-Taliban.

Nearly all of the insurgents battling US and NATO troops in Afghanistan are not religiously motivated Taliban and Al Qaeda warriors, but a new generation of tribal fighters vying for control of territory, mineral wealth, and smuggling routes, according to summaries of new US intelligence reports.

Some of the major insurgent groups, including one responsible for a spate of recent American casualties, actually opposed the Taliban’s harsh Islamic government in Afghanistan during the 1990s, according to the reports, described by US officials under the condition they not be identified.

“Ninety percent is a tribal, localized insurgency,’’ said one US intelligence official in Washington who helped draft the assessments. “Ten percent are hardcore ideologues fighting for the Taliban.’’

US commanders and politicians often loosely refer to the enemy as the Taliban or Al Qaeda, giving rise to the image of holy warriors seeking to spread a fundamentalist form of Islam. But the mostly ethnic Pashtun fighters are often deeply connected by family and social ties to the valleys and mountains where they are fighting, and they see themselves as opposing the United States be cause it is an occupying power, the officials and analysts said.

In other words, the conflict in Afghanistan is a civil war. The civil war has ethnically tinged roots that reach past to the days preceding the US invasion. Robert Naiman had an informative piece on the subject which, itself, paraphrased some recent Times articles:

Writing in the New York Times Magazine on August 9 of this year, Elizabeth Rubin explained how many of the current “cast of characters,” including Hamid Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah, Muhammad Fahim, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and the Taliban – and their competing ethnic allegiances – have a joint history going back to the pre-US invasion civil war:

“To understand why everyone was so shocked that [President] Karzai chose [Muhammad] Fahim as his running mate, you need to know a little of the personal history between the two men…Back in 1994, the mujahedin factions who fought off the Soviets were supposed to be cooperating in a coalition government. Instead they were deep in a civil war…

One of these factions belonged to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, today an outlawed insurgent but then prime minister and head of a large, mostly ethnic-Pashtun political party. Another belonged to the man who was then Afghanistan’s president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, leader of a largely Tajik party… Karzai was deputy foreign minister and trying … to play conciliator … But Rabbani and his men began to suspect that Karzai was plotting something with Hekmatyar. Rabbani’s head of intelligence was none other than Muhammad Fahim…

In 1996, after the Taliban captured Kabul and threw out the mujahedin factions, Karzai briefly considered becoming an ambassador for the Taliban government. After all, the Taliban were mostly, like Karzai, Kandahari Pashtuns; he knew many of them. But the position went to someone else…

With the overthrow of the Taliban, the ethnic Tajiks who made up the bulk of the Northern Alliance considered themselves the victors. At the Bonn Conference held in Germany in December 2001 to create the future Afghan government, the Northern Alliance Tajiks demanded and got the most important ministries. Given Afghanistan’s demographics, [i.e. the fact that Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group] everyone knew they needed an ethnic Pashtun as president, and Abdullah Abdullah, who was then with the Northern Alliance, pressed the case for Karzai.”

This history is key to understanding the present conflict. Prior to the U.S. invasion, there was a civil war underway between the largely Pashtun Taliban government and the largely Tajik Northern Alliance insurgency. In its campaign to overthrow the Taliban government, the U.S. allied itself militarily with the largely Tajik Northern Alliance. As Rubin noted, that U.S.-Tajik alliance had a major impact on the post-2001 Afghan government, with key positions in the government going to one side in the civil war.

In an op-ed in the Times in August, Selig Harrison, a former Washington Post bureau chief in South Asia, wrote that this impact persists to the present day:

“…One of the basic reasons many Pashtuns support the Taliban insurgency is that their historic rivals, ethnic Tajiks, hold most of the key levers of power in the government.

Tajiks … largely control the armed forces and the intelligence and secret police agencies that loom over the daily lives of the Pashtuns. Little wonder that in the run-up to Thursday’s presidential election, much of the Taliban propaganda has focused on the fact that President Hamid Karzai’s top running mate is a hated symbol of Tajik power: the former defense minister Muhammad Fahim.

Fahim and his allies have been entrenched in Kabul since American forces overthrew the Taliban in 2001 with the help of his Tajik militia, the Northern Alliance… A clique of these Tajik officers …took control of the key security posts with American backing, and they have been there ever since… [...]

…a former adviser to the European Union representative in Kabul told me that …’the intelligence services are still basically seen as anti-Pashtun and pro-Northern Alliance because the power structure in the directorate is still clearly dominated by the original Northern Alliance group,’ and above all because ‘they also have control of the prosecution, judicial and detention branches of the security services.’ [...]

…one United Nations official recently said … ’70 percent of the army’s battalion commanders are Tajiks’… It doesn’t help that many of the army units sent to the Pashtun areas consist primarily of Tajiks who do not speak Pashto.”

As even the McChrystal report concedes, there is no military solution to this conflict (that is, before McChrystal goes on to request tens of thousands more troops, natch). However, the “political solution” – one of the sacraments at the heart of counterinsurgency mysticism - is not achievable with the current crop of politicians and political structures. Mousavizadeh offers what is at least a plausible way out considering how limited the options are:

This leaves the West with a stark dilemma. We can proceed to invest a government we ourselves have called fraudulent with an authority that few Afghans are willing to grant it, hoping it will eventually eschew the corrupt behavior that has sustained its power to date. Or we can make the unquestionably more difficult decision and insist, as a condition of our continued support, that a new political compact be put in place. [...]

It is time to help Afghans resolve their civil war in the only way that is likely to help, and not further hinder, their search for security and stability. Painful as it is, the time has come to set aside the illusion of Afghan democracy and implement a new federal power-sharing agreement between those Afghans willing and able to provide security and governance in a sustainable manner for the Afghan people. The best chance we have of achieving minimal Afghan objectives at an acceptable cost to the West is by establishing a new Loya Jirga — drawing on the shrewd diplomacy of the 2001 Bonn Conference and the persistent muscle of the 1995 Dayton Agreement, but looking forward as a New Afghanistan Conference.

This new Loya Jirga would be best jointly convened by Lakhdar Brahimi (on behalf of the United Nations), and Richard Holbrooke (on behalf of the United States). It can be done quietly, or it can be done publicly, but it must be done, and soon. In Brahimi, who led the negotiations at Bonn, this initiative would have a diplomat with unparalleled standing among Afghans actors and the key external actors in the region, including Saudi Arabia. Holbrooke, the architect behind Dayton, would not only bring the full backing of the United States, his involvement would also signal a shift away from a military solution to the politics of peacemaking and send an unmistakable message to Afghans that the days of occupation are numbered. Perhaps most importantly, the new Loya Jirga would ensure that the new politics of Afghanistan will be truly owned and enforced by Afghans, including reconcilable elements of the Taliban, and their neighbors, for whom caring about the nation’s fate never will be a matter of choice.

It won’t be easy. A Brahimi-Holbrooke convened Loya Jirga solution to the Afghan civil war will demand a compromise with the high ideals of the early intervention; a redrafting of the Afghan Constitution to allow for a decentralized structure of governance; a granting of provincial power to leaders and warlords with less than clean hands; a de facto reduced commitment to human rights and women’s rights; a greater involvement of neighbors whose motives are mixed, and not necessarily aligned. While this solution would initially require a substantial troop presence, over time it will place responsibility for security among provincial and tribal leaders and the militias under their command, leading to a steady withdrawal of Western troops.

Mousavizadeh deserves credit for formulating policy proposals based on a wisdom that Obama seemed to grasp not so long ago: we can’t shoot our way to victory in someone else’s civil war, nor can we prevail by backing a weak faction in that fight.

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