Current Intelligence - REVIEWS http://www.currentintelligence.net/reviews/2010/9/6/insights-fr...

Insights From the Afghan Field

September 6, 2010
Anatol Lieven in Abdul Salam Zaeef, Afghanistan, Alex Strick van Linschoten, Antonio Giustozzi, Books, Felix
Kuehn, Hurst & Co. Publishers, Taliban

Security policy in Afghanistan may be powered by sublimated imperial nostalgia, but most
of the really valuable practical memories and lessons of empire have long since been
forgotten. Veteran journalist and author Anatol Lieven reviews three recent books that
illustrate what we should have known about the Taliban.

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Image: Flickr/U.S. ArmyIF

BOOKS LIKE the ones under review had appeared in 2002, and been read by Western
commanders and officials, they might have changed the course of the Afghan War. Even today,
should a US administration ever be able to disentangle itself from the Karzai government and
nerve itself to open serious negotiations with the Taliban, such works will be indispensable to
understanding the people on the other side of the table.

Antonio Giustozzi’s edited volume Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field is
a superb collection of essays by leading researchers, among them Gretchen Peters on the
Taliban’s taxing of the opium trade, Thomas Ruttig on the Haqqani network, and Claudio Franco
on the Pakistani Taliban. Empires of Mud: Wars and Warlords in Afghanistan, on the other hand,
is Giustozzi’s own study of what has been in effect – God help us – “our” side in Afghanistan: the
regional and local commanders whose rule the Taliban overthrew after 1994, and whom the US
brought back to power in 2001 under the façade of democracy.

My Life With the Taliban is the memoir of Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, edited by two
Kandahar-based western journalists, Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn (and in the
interest of disclosure, I should note that I am supervising van Linschoten’s PhD at King’s College
London). Zaeef was a member of the Taliban since its founding elements first came together in

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Kandahar in the early 1980s to fight the Soviets and Communists. Under Taliban rule he was a
minister and finally ambassador to Pakistan, before being imprisoned at Guantanamo and
elsewhere between 2002 and 2005. He has now made his peace with the Karzai administration,
and in his book criticises aspects of Mullah Omar’s leadership; but he undoubtedly remains close
to the Taliban in sentiment, and above all absolutely detests the US presence in Afghanistan.

But the people who shaped Western policy in the first crucial years after the overthrow of the
Taliban did not have these books available to them, and knew precious little about Afghanistan.
Thus despite the British Empire’s long and bitter history on the Afghan frontier, the British
government and military in 2007 were totally unaware of how their military presence in
Afghanistan would look to ordinary Pashtuns. As Mullah Zaeef writes (and as British journalists
say is a close reflection of Pashtun views in Kandahar and Helmand):

Another strategic mistake [by the US] was to allow the British to return to the south, or Afghanistan in general. The
British Empire had fought three wars with Afghanistan, and their main battles were with the Pashtun tribes in
southern Afghanistan. They were responsible for the split of the tribal lands, establishing the Durand Line. Whatever
the reality might be, British troops in southern Afghanistan, in particular in Helmand, will be measured not only on
their current actions but by the history they have, the battles that were fought in the past. The local population has
not forgotten, and many believe, neither have the British. Many villages that see heavy fighting and casualties today
are the same that did so some ninety years ago…The biggest mistake of American policy makers so far might be
their profound lack of understanding of their enemy.

The notion that the British army is in Afghanistan to seek revenge for 19th century defeats is of
course absolutely grotesque, but that is not the point. The point is that ordinary Afghans do
indeed believe this – and the British security establishment ought to have known that they would.
That we did not know this is a shattering illustration of the fact that while British policy is in the
end powered by sublimated imperial nostalgia, most of the really valuable practical memories and
lessons of empire have long since been forgotten.

The Ghastly Masquerade

The battlefields of Afghanistan are real enough,

God knows, for the poor devils who fight and die Empires of Mud: Wars and
there; but as so many fatuous statements about
Afghanistan suggest, for great sections of Western Warlords in Afghanistan
government, politics, media and public opinion
engagement in Afghanistan has been above all one
of the largest and most expensive exercises in Decoding the New Taliban:
collective narcissism that the world has ever
known, and Afghanistan itself a landscape of the Insights from the Afghan Field
mind, onto which Westerners could project a
variety of agendas and fantasies. As Antonio
Giustozzi writes, “Every age has its follies; perhaps My Life With the Taliban
the folly of our age could be defined as an
unmatched ambition to change the world, without
even bothering to study it in detail and understand it first.”

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It would be nice to pin all the blame for this on Bush, Blair and their supporters, but this tendency
spread much more widely and is much more deeply rooted in contemporary Western culture. An
enormous range of groups and interests jumped onboard the US intervention in Afghanistan. In
the first years after 2001, literally thousands of government departments and contractors, but also
high-minded NGOs swarmed around the bloated feast of Western “aid to Afghanistan” – I would
say like hagfish or hyenas, but at least those useful scavengers have the grace not to proclaim
their righteousness and generosity to the heavens in between mouthfuls. The result has been to
entangle Western discussion of Afghanistan in great webs of deceit and self-deceit.

Thus the desire to bring democracy, freedom, “good governance” and an improvement in the
status of women to Afghanistan were laudable goals in themselves, but the result has been a
ghastly masquerade, involving descriptions of the present Afghan government and political
system not one of which corresponds to reality. Meanwhile the equally laudable desire to bring
development to Afghanistan has ensnared us in calculations of “progress” which are virtually
Soviet in their misrepresentation of the facts and the experience of ordinary Afghans.

European NATO governments have had to tell their populations that their troops are in
Afghanistan because Afghanistan is a threat to them – something that Richard Barrett, former
head of counter-terrorism at the Secret Intelligence Service, has now declared is “nonsense”.
More candid British and European officials and generals have always admitted in private that the
only really important reason is to help maintain the alliance with the US because Europeans are
incapable of guaranteeing their own defence against a future resurgent Russia, or even the peace
of the Balkans. This dependency-driven contribution is publicly called “saving NATO”, and in
turn logically justifies Europeans doing the absolute minimum necessary in Afghanistan to keep
the US committed to Europe.

The British military is also fighting for the sake of American patronage, to which it attaches an
almost sacred importance (while complaining about its patrons all the time). In the British
military’s case, however, there is another important motive with no necessary connection to
Afghanistan: the maintenance of its own self-image as a fighting force, and the prestige of the
military in British public life. This in turn feeds into a wider British obsession with great power
status, derived above all from the enduring sense of loss of the empire.

Unlike the Georgian and Victorian builders of that empire, however, their descendants in the
British elites have shown little desire to back up their desire for a great national role with personal
commitment or sacrifice. This is not of course true of the British Army – but its gallant sacrifices
have been made as part of what overall is a profoundly decadent national spectacle. It is not that
the British military and their reputation for courage and endurance are unimportant; but if these
assets are to be tailored to our real resources and collective national will, then they are assets that
can only be used in Europe or in small scale expeditionary operations like Sierra Leone. As
Afghanistan has demonstrated, any other large-scale operations demand a degree of commitment
of which the British public today is not capable.

The Obama administration and US military for their part are fighting above all. as a senior officer
told me, “not to win, but not to lose”. In other words, not for real victory, which neither they nor
anyone else can define, but for anything that can be presented as victory, so as to avoid the
humiliation of defeat, the consequent emboldening of all America’s enemies, and – not least – a
potential Democratic loss in the next Presidential election. . And the US Republicans are doing

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just the same in reverse, seeking to turn Afghanistan into a US political battlefield on which the
Democrats’ hopes of re-election can be crushed.

Post-Colonial Caricatures

If in all this Afghanistan itself has often seemed to disappear, it is not surprising that the Taliban
have also done so, to be replaced by hateful cartoon figures (to accompany the good cartoon
figures of the “democratically-elected Afghan government”, “Afghan civil society” and so on).
This process has caused me a certain wry amusement: more than 20 years ago, when I was a
Pakistan-based journalist covering the Mujahedin war against the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan, with rare exceptions we also dealt in caricatures.

But then, of course, the guerrillas – in many cases the fathers of today’s Taliban - were the
cartoon freedom-fighters and the government in Kabul the caricatured stooges of a foreign
occupying power. The Western journalists covering that war were very often admirable for their
physical courage, but taken as a whole the picture of Afghanistan that we presented was shocking
in its propagandist ignorance of Afghanistan and its failure to present the facts of what was in
reality not a simple war of Soviet occupation and resistance, but an Afghan civil war into which
the Soviet Union had been dragged by its support for one side. Then as now, most of us were not
really interested in Afghanistan itself, or the Afghans themselves. As for much of the wider
Western publics, Afghanistan at that time was no more than a Cold War fantasist’s computer
game avant la lettre.

All the same, almost nine years after the US intervened in Afghanistan, the shortage of serious
books on Afghanistan in general and the Taliban (as opposed to the plethora of books on
“terrorism”) is somewhat astonishing – fine works by scholars like Gilles Dorronsoro, journalists
like David Loyn, anthropologists like David Edwards and historians like B.D. Hopkins
notwithstanding.

The same is true of many other parts of the world. Thus almost 20 years after the fall of the Soviet
Union, and despite tens of millions of words written on Georgia by journalists, analysts and
propagandists (often one and the same thing) no serious book on post-Soviet Georgia exists –
with the result that prior to the Georgian-Russian war of August 2008 the West stumbled towards
an alliance with Georgia without the slightest real awareness of what it was getting itself into.

This systemic ignorance marks a difference from the era of European empires, as opposed to the
quasi-imperial ventures of today. Thus Edward Said was quite right in arguing that 19th century
European ethnographic, historical and cultural studies of Asian peoples were closely related to the
drive for European empire over the peoples concerned. However (in large part because of his
concentration at bottom on specifically pro-Zionist studies) he missed two features of these
studies which are of crucial importance compared to the present and which mean that these works
in many cases remain the ultimate empirical foundations of all subsequent studies (like Robert
Montagne’s study of the Berbers, for example).

The first is that it was scholars (or scholar-officials or scholar-soldiers) working in the field,
among the peoples they were studying, who carried out the research for these works. This had at

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least some effect in modifying the fantasies that they could project onto their subjects. The second
was that precisely because their research was meant to serve the cause of empire in a very
practical way, and was carried out by servants of empire working in situ, it could not divorce
itself wholly from facts.

If knowledge is to be effective power, knowledge has to be basically accurate. Ignorance of and

indifference to the culture and views of colonised peoples led to mistakes and revolts like the
1857 rebellion which could and did cost colonial scholar-officials their professional reputations
and often enough their lives. Niall Ferguson – to take the most famous example of a neo-imperial
academic - runs absolutely no risk of either, no matter what he writes about places that he has
never visited. His work, like that of the neo-conservatives, is very strictly imperialism as spectator
sport.

The Hippo and the Turtle

Intense study of Afghan society, culture and politics are so important because they are so very
different from those of the modern West – though in some cases, not entirely from the West of the
Middle Ages. This means not just that our state institutions have found it extremely difficult to
engage with Afghan realities, but that it takes an enormous leap of knowledge and imagination
for Western officials to apprehend those realities at all, or to design strategies to deal with them.

An allegorical painting of this process might show an attempted marriage between a Western
hippopotamus and an Afghan turtle (a turtle because of the remarkable toughness and
impermeability of Afghan traditions) – with the interesting, if not entirely aesthetically pleasing
twist that the bashful reptile has also been compelled by intense Western pressure to dress itself as
a hippo, and the Western hippo-narcisso-pygmalion for a while was even convinced of the reality
of this transformation – even as the turtle continued in plain sight to pursue its old turtle-like
ways. Or to put it more prosaically, the West created the thin façade of an Afghan state in the
image of itself, convinced itself that this flimsy object had real being, and then fell into
paroxysms of rage and disappointment when our Afghan allies acted according to the traditions
and the realities of their own society, and not according to our precepts.

Thus if you strip out all the guff about Hamid Karzai being “democratically elected”, being
committed to “development” and “progress”, and indeed being (in any Western sense) “head of
the Afghan government”, what we can see in Karzai is a weak Afghan leader pursuing the
immemorial strategy of weak Afghan leaders: that is to say, balancing between powerful local
forces, maintaining a general hegemony by playing them off against each other, and managing
them as far as possible by the distribution of patronage – including, under the new dispensation,
sharing out the heroin trade.

Of these local forces, among the most important over the past generation and especially since
2001 have been those figures loosely grouped by Western comment and reporting under the
pejorative heading of “warlords” (in Afghanistan, all leaders of military formations are called
kumandan, or “commander”), the subject of Giustozzi’s latest book.

The Soviet Union and the Afghan communists had to deal with them and seek their support. The

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Mujahedin regime after 1992, and the Northern Alliance which fought the Taliban, largely
consisted of warlords. Only the Taliban succeeded in abolishing their power in many areas. Under
the Karzai administration and the Americans, warlords have ruled much of Afghanistan. When
the West withdraws, it is likely that much of Afghanistan not taken over by the Taliban will be
ruled by US-subsidised warlords, though they will probably call themselves generals of some
more-or-less fictitious Afghan national state.

One of the narcissistic fictions of which liberals have been guilty over Afghanistan is the belief
that the re-emergence of the warlords after 2001 was the product of Bush administration folly or
wickedness, and that strong and viable liberal and democratic alternatives existed, on the basis of
which it would have been possible to build a strong and progressive Afghan state without a
massive and very long-term Western presence.

Folly and wickedness there undoubtedly was, but as Giustozzi’s work on the warlords shows,
once the decision had been made not just to overthrow the Taliban but to exclude them from any
share in power, the choices available to Washington were limited and unpleasant. Giustozzi’s
basic conclusions concerning the nature and future of the state in Afghanistan are grim but
convincing. “In the case of Afghanistan,” he writes, “the problem is still state formation more
than state building. Gradually I came to think that the formation of a ‘modern’ and ‘diplomatically
recognisable’ state in Afghanistan has little chance of succeeding unless it relies on the
establishment of an international protectorate, with all the difficulties that come with that.

Giustozzi’s point about state formation is a crucial one. The West’s approach in Afghanistan has
been to try to transfer the structures of fully-developed modern statehood to Afghanistan – and
not just that, but accompanied by the trappings at least of a specific form of such statehood: that
of modern Western democracy. If, however, as Giustozzi suggests, Afghanistan is at an early
stage of state formation, then any parallels (however inexact) in European history would have to
be sought not in the recent past but many hundreds of years earlier. Giustozzi draws for some of
his insights not on contemporary political science but on the period of Charlemagne.

Some parts of Machiavelli are also a pretty good guide to the realities of warlordism, though the
setting of contemporary Afghanistan is far poorer and less developed than that of 16th century
central Italy. In Afghanistan as in Italy, at different times warlords have either undermined the
state or laid its foundations. As Giustozzi points out, both the mid-18th century creator of
“Afghanistan”, Ahmad Shah Abdali, and the late-19th century founder of the modern Afghan
state, Emir Abdurrahman, would probably be defined today as “warlords”. “The warlords of the
late 20th century,” he notes, “like the kings of the 18th and 19th centuries, all had to prioritise the
primitive accumulation of power, to be attained primarily through both the monopolisation of
large-scale violence and the centralisation of patronage.”

Giustozzi’s work is thus an extremely important contribution to the academic literature not just on
warlordism but on state formation in general. Its greatest value, however, lies in its magnificently
detailed and textured examination of local power in Afghanistan as it has developed since the
retreat of the Afghan state after 1979, and its almost total collapse in 1992. As the Afghan state
retreated from many areas in the 1980s, a number of factors came together to ensure that – unlike
in Vietnam, Algeria and elsewhere - the forces of the anti-communist and anti-Soviet rebellion
would not be able to form state-building mass parties led by regular political cadres. Of these

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factors, two above all were critical: Afghanistan’s deep ethnic, tribal and regional divisions, and
the very limited extent to which a sense of the modern state or of modern political mobilisation
had penetrated into the mass of the population.

Warlords From the Dark Ages

Thus when I visited parts of Afghanistan controlled by the Mujahedin in the late 1980s, the first
thing that struck me was the total disappearance of the state – “with all its works and all its empty
promises”, as I wrote at the time – and the fact that neither the Mujahedin nor local Afghan
society had made any attempt to recreate its local institutions. What they had restored were local
traditional forms of justice, consultation and compromise – but these were derived either from the
Pathan code of the pashtunwali or the Shariah, which long predated the state.

What this experience left me with, and what is strongly reflected in Giustozzi’s work, is that the
state as it is now understood – whether in modern democracies or modern authoritarian systems –
is not a natural growth that springs up spontaneously in any soil. It needs a long, long process of
cultivation. As the Vietminh and other left-wing guerrilla movements demonstrate, this
cultivation can well be carried out by anti-state forces, but only if they draw on old local state
traditions and also possess an ideology and ideologically-derived party structure which are
dedicated to the control and development of the state.

Very little of this was present in most of the Afghan resistance of the 1980s. Instead, a
combination of local revolt, the undermining of traditional structures of elite and tribal allegiance
and control by the war, and the flood of weapons from the US and its allies produced a situation
in which across much of the country, the commanders of local armed rebel forces exercised most
local power.

As the war went on, more and more villagers fled either to the cities or across the borders to
Pakistan and Afghanistan, and more and more Arab and US money arrived for commanders to
pay their men, so more and more Mujahedin fighters ceased to be part-time warriors based in
their home villages and became full-time soldiers owing their first loyalty to their commanders.
These in turn generally owed formal allegiance to the leaders of Mujahedin parties based in
Pakistan (the “seven dwarves”, as even their US sponsors called them in private) who controlled
the flow of Arab money and US weaponry, but in effect functioned as independent princes – and
could always change their party allegiance if they felt hard done-by.

However, the collapse of central authority led to the development of opium poppy cultivation and
the heroin trade, thereby giving local commanders their own source of income – something that
remains of great importance today. It is should be noted, moreover, that most commanders had
emerged not through hereditary prestige but through a rough and violent form of meritocracy.
Men lacking in courage, resolution, ruthlessness and leadership skills have not lasted long as
commanders in Afghanistan. Within its own specific – and unpleasant – context, their authority
was a natural thing.

After the collapse of the communist government in Kabul in 1992 (due to the defection of
warlord-led militias when their Soviet subsidies disappeared), warlords took power across most of

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Afghanistan. With US backing, the Karzai administration has succeeded in reducing some of their
power, but often only in order to replace them with warlords closer to Karzai.

However, it is very important to differentiate in terms of warlordism between the Pashtun and
other parts of the country. In 1992-94, except where Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami party
exercised control, power was divided among a multitude of petty warlords squabbling among
themselves, looting the population and commanding very little support from the local population,
at least beyond their immediate clans.

Among the non-Pashtun ethnicities, things were rather different. Warlords might emerge as the de
facto leaders of a local ethnic group in its struggles with the Pashtuns and other ethnic rivals. This
was true of one of Giustozzi’s principal case studies, General Abdul Rashid Dostum and his
Junbesh Uzbek militia (and, I would say, of the late Ahmed Shah Masoud’s leadership of the
Panjshiri Tajiks, though for reasons that are not quite clear to me Giustozzi does not consider him
to have been a warlord). While they have been far from nationalist leaders in a modern state-
building sense, this local ethnic support gave some of the northern warlords a solidity and
durability denied to the Pashtun warlords.

In consequence, while the Taliban swept away the latter with remarkable ease after 1994 (to the
overwhelming applause of the local Pashtun populations, sickened by their marauding), they had
a much harder struggle to conquer the north of the country, and had not wholly succeeded when
9/11 occurred and brought the US down on their heads. With the US unwilling to deploy its own
forces, and unable to do so in the timeframe demanded by the Bush administration, the Americans
used the warlords of the Northern Alliance as ground forces. Those ground forces then very
naturally seized the power abandoned by the Taliban and took the opportunity to dispose of their
local rivals and regain control of the reviving heroin trade.

Unwilling to launch new military operations against former US allies in support of a strong
central state, the West, in Giustozzi’s words, “busied itself finding as many distractions as
possible” in “reconstruction”, “development”, “electoral processes” and so on, which had no
chance of ultimately succeeding in the absence of effective state authority.

As Giustozzi points out, however, certain warlords – notably Ismail Khan in Herat – have also
played an embryonic state-building role in the areas they control. Should the Afghan central state
and army wither again in the aftermath of a US withdrawal, anti-Taliban warlords backed by US
arms and money will in effect run small semi-independent statelets or principalities across much
of Afghanistan. Nonetheless, they will still owe formal allegiance to some kind of state
administered out of Kabul, and may share local power with its representatives or even
conceivably with the Taliban.

This brings us to another distorting intellectual shadow being cast over our understanding of
Afghanistan (and other societies): that of Max Weber. He famously defined the monopoly of
armed force as a key characteristic of the modern state. The fact that most states through history
have not fulfilled the criteria of modernity has not stopped Western analysts applying it
unquestioningly to Afghanistan, since the modern state is the only kind of state that most of them
know or can imagine. They have forgotten that for great parts of human history states have not in
fact held monopolies of armed force – and yet have functioned with a degree of efficiency in their
circumscribed fields, have co-existed fairly peacefully for long periods with other armed groups

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on their territory, and have allowed sections of the economy and culture to flourish. Or to put it
another way: Afghanistan is often called a “medieval” country as if this were an insult. It would
in fact be a compliment – if only it were true. In many respects, Afghanistan is in fact closer to the
European Dark Ages than to the European – or Muslim – Middle Ages.

An Impenetrable Enemy

If our allies in this war are so complicated and unreliable, what of the Taliban? What are the
chances of the US being able to split them, and make peace with their “moderate” elements? Can
there be a settlement with the movement as a whole, involving the exclusion of at least an open
presence of Al Qaeda from areas controlled by the Taliban, and some kind of division of
Afghanistan into spheres of influence? Failing that, when the US withdraws, will the Afghan
National Army be able to beat them back from the main towns, as it did with Soviet backing in
1989-92? Or will the Taliban sweep to power in the Pashtun areas, or even the whole country?

These are the questions on which the whole future of Afghanistan, and perhaps the political future
of the United States will hinge; yet our governments and militaries lack the knowledge of the
Taliban that would be necessary to start formulating even tentative answers to them. Having
roundly blamed the West for a lack of real interest in the subject, it is only fair to add that another
reason for our lack of knowledge is that the Taliban are not at all easy to know. They do not
exactly encourage research by journalists and scholars. Exceptionally dedicated journalists like
David Loyn and Christian Parenti have managed to interview some of their commanders, and
Graeme Smith of the Globe and Mail organised a very interesting opinion survey of several dozen
ordinary fighters, but such efforts have been rare and partial. As for the Taliban’s own statements,
both their style and content are rhetorical, hortatory and formulaic, making it extremely hard even
for Afghans, let alone Westerners to detect whether they might all the same contain the possible
seeds of compromise.

This impenetrability is true to an extent even of Mullah Zaeef’s book, by far the most valuable
work in translation to have emerged from the Taliban, and which should be on the shelf of every
policymaker, analyst or commentator dealing with Afghanistan. It is literally invaluable; yet it
must be admitted that it is invaluable in something of the same way that a Sassanian royal
declaration would be to a historian of ancient Persia: containing enormous lacunae; damnably
hard to follow; and comprehensible only with the help of other sources and scholarly exegesis.

I shudder to think of the work that Linschoten and Kuehn must have had to do in order to make it
reasonably logical in terms of structure, reasonably accessible to Western audiences and
minimally frank on certain key issues; and even so it contains enormous gaps. A scholar of
Afghanistan 3,000 years from now with only this as his source would be hard put to understand
9/11 and the US response, since there is almost no mention of Al Qaeda; would not know where
the Taliban got their arms during the 1990s, since there is no mention of Pakistan’s role in
supplying them; and would only be able to pick up the role of ethnic tensions in modern Afghan
history, and the role of Pashtun feeling in Taliban support, from occasional veiled hints.

Where this book is most valuable is in its evocation of the world of the Taliban: their deep
rootedness in the society of rural southern Afghanistan, as worked on by the experience of war,

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displacement and the Pakistani refugee camps of the 1980s. Mullah Zaeef himself was the son of
a small village mullah in rural Kandahar. One passage about his childhood: “My younger sister
died in Mushan, although I am not sure what she died of. There were so many deaths in the
villages in 1971 and 1972, after a drought, and some families lost their entire harvest…”

So much for the paradisiacal portrait of pre-Soviet Afghanistan drawn by Afghan liberals and
believed by naïve Westerners. Memories like this help explain the mixture of distrust and
indifference with which many ordinary rural Afghans regard their own state. In its entire
existence, it has quite simply never done anything good for them or their families. Hence too the
willingness to regard either the Taliban (in the Pashtun areas) or some local warlord as a
preferable alternative to the state, or at least one that could not be worse.

Contrary to the widespread canard that the Taliban were created (as opposed to supported later)
by Pakistan in the mid-1990s, Zaeef records the origins of the movement in a network of local
resistance to the Soviets led by local Mullahs in Kandahar province and the Pakistani refugee
camps in the early 1990s (and taking their name of course from an institution which as Zaeef
points out is almost as old as Islam itself, that of religious students). It is this leadership by a
cadre of small local mullahs rather than great tribal chieftains which may give the Taliban their
remarkable staying power compared to the Pashtun revolts of the past, which tended to flare up
quickly and widely but then sink down again equally quickly after suffering reverses. They are
also – it hardly needs saying – extremely tough. Mullah Zaeef describes his comrades suffering
wound after wound and yet returning to the fight

After the fall of Kandahar to the Mujahedin in 1992, this network came together again and gained
mass support in response to the appalling behaviour of the local Mujahedin commanders. In the
southern Pashtun countryside at least, standard Western official language about the Taliban
“penetrating” or “infiltrating” local society is therefore misleading. They are local society.

A striking feature of Zaeef’s book is its strong Afghan nationalism (mixed up with Pashtun
allegiances which he does not discuss and may not even be fully aware of). This comes out
among other ways in his intense loathing of the Pakistani state. He writes: “Pakistan, which plays
a key role in Asia, is so famous for its treachery that it is said that they can get milk from a bull.
They have two tongues in one mouth and two faces on one head so they can speak everybody’s
language; they use everybody, deceive everybody.”

This loathing is partly because of the way in which it handed him to the Americans in 2002, but
also no doubt because he shares the bitter resentment that so many Afghans have expressed to me
over the years at Pakistan’s attempts to use and dominate them, as well as the humiliations visited
on Afghan refugees in Pakistan by Pakistani police and officials.

An interesting point is that in the 1980s, after 9/11 and – to judge by Zaeef’s account – during the
Taliban’s rise in the 1990s, this was true even of those Afghans who were gaining the most help
from Pakistan. Zaeef describes his own approach to dealing with Pakistani military intelligence,
while Taliban ambassador to Islamabad, with the words “I tried to be not so sweet that I would be
eaten whole, but not so bitter that I would be spat out.”

Zaeef’s nationalism tends to support the results of Graeme Smith’s survey, which suggest that
while the leadership obviously also have an agenda of seizing power in order to create an Islamist

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regime, by far the most important motivation for ordinary Taliban fighters is not Islamist ideology
but to get the US and Western forces out of the country – a desire obviously strengthened
enormously by the loss of relatives or neighbours killed by US bombardments.

In Giustozzi’s edited volume, Joanna Nathan writes of the Taliban putting out “an almost solely
nationalist message relentlessly spotlighting the poor state of local governance and questioning
the motives of foreign ‘invaders’ “.Or as an anti-Taliban Pashtun politician in Pakistan told me,
“Our problem is that every Pashtun has been brought up from the cradle to believe that to resist
foreign occupation is part of what it is to do Pashto” (i.e. follow the true Pashtun way).

And indeed, the Taliban leadership’s one non-negotiable demand is the complete withdrawal of
Western forces. They say that this must take place before they will negotiate any settlement with
the government in Kabul, but clearly there might be some room for compromise here on the basis
of a public US commitment to a swift and reasonably rapid timetable for withdrawal.

There are obvious obstacles to a negotiated settlement. A resolution seems quite impossible as
long as Karzai remains in power, since his removal would be an essential part of any settlement.
A minimum demand would be Taliban control of the south, which would also mean displacing
Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali, and other local bosses and warlords who have been backed by
both Karzai and the US. Given Afghan history, it is conceivable that a deal could be worked out
in which these parties share local power and profit with the Taliban, but this remains highly
unlikely.

Would the Taliban leadership and their followers settle for power only in the south, or perhaps in
the Pashtun areas as a whole? Unfortunately, it is in the nature of their Pashtun character that the
Taliban (including Zaeef) are at their most infuriatingly enigmatic. There are plenty of coded
appeals to Pashtun sentiment in their propaganda, but they have never presented themselves as a
Pashtun movement – both because they hope to rule all of Afghanistan and perhaps because, like
many Pashtun, they see Afghanistan as an essentially Pashtun country. Their support, however, is
certainly and overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) concentrated in the Pashtun areas.

Decoding the New Taliban provides a deeper understanding of such issues. Its essays, drawn
from field research conducted in several different provinces, bring out the varied levels of
organisation and command and control exercised by the Taliban high command in different parts
of the country. These divisions would seem in principle to give the US and the Karzai government
a good chance of splitting the Taliban and drawing away its local commanders in some areas.
Mullah Zaeef recalls a pattern during and after the Soviet withdrawal, one which which I heard
described repeatedly during my travels with the Mujahedin in Afghanistan:

Kandahar’s [Communist] governor at the time, Nur-ul-Haq Ulumi, was handing out truckloads of money to various
[Mujahedin] groups, in exchange for which they would conduct staged and pre-announced attacks in which there
would be no casualties…Even though the Russians were defeated, the Communists would remain in power by
buying off the Mujahedeen. This tactic was extensively funded by the Soviet Union…The fragile alliance between
the Taliban and other Kandhari mujahedeen groups began to crumble.

A Line in Blood

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Could the US and Karzai replicate this Soviet success in splitting the opposition on the ground?
The problem, as Giustozzi writes, is that while the Taliban are clearly poorly organised compared
to some old-style Communist and nationalist guerrilla movements, they are vastly more united
and disciplined than the Mujahedin of the 1980s – and, I would say, than many of the forces
supporting Karzai. Giustozzi's conclusions concerning the possibility of breaking off significant
parts of the Taliban are gloomy:

The role of the core activists is crucial: it is they who are able to inflict casualties, able to move around as required
by the leadership, disciplined enough to take orders and motivated enough to risk their lives…Although local
recruits, local commanders without an ideological profile, and mobilised communities make up the bulk of the
neo-Taliban insurgency, their strategic importance is very modest. They are “auxiliary insurgents” or even “decoy
insurgents” in some cases, and wars (or peaces) are not won by focusing on auxiliaries….Any major political or
economic effort targeted at luring away these “auxiliaries” and “decoys” could well end up resembling an attempt to
empty the sea with a bucket.

On the other hand, he is also pessimistic about the chances of negotiating successfully with the
top Taliban leadership, as long as it is convinced that it is winning and Western will to continue
the fight is crumbling. Another central part of US strategy to push back the Taliban and allow the
US to withdraw is to strengthen the Afghan National Army, but this risks making negotiations
with the Taliban leadership permanently impossible, since no strong army command would ever
agree to giving up control of much of the country to the Taliban. Mullah Zaeef describes
negotiations between the Taliban and the Ahmed Shah Masoud in 2000, which broke down over
Masoud’s inevitable insistence on retaining independent armed forces (albeit as part of an
ostensibly united Afghan army) and the Taliban’s refusal to agree to this. Moreover, negotiations
with Mullah Omar may well be politically impossible for the Obama administration (at least until
the 2012 elections, which it may not survive), given the political advantage the Republicans could
derive from this “surrender”.

My own view therefore is that the most likely future may well resemble the past Soviet
withdrawal. The US will build up the Afghan army to the point where they think it has a
reasonable chance of surviving on its own (albeit with continued and massive US support,
including both air power and money to buy off local Taliban commanders), and will then declare
victory and withdraw all or most US ground troops. The army will then either hold the Pashtun
cities against the Taliban in a series of bloody sieges like that of Jalalabad in 1989, or lose them
and retreat to Kabul and the non-Pashtun areas.

This would usher in a long-term civil war along broadly ethnic lines, in which different warlords
and militias would be helped by different international backers, including the US, India, Iran,
Russia and possibly China, and of course Pakistan for the Taliban. This would be a thoroughly
awful future for Afghans, and would draw a line in blood under all the megalomaniac Western
hopes of transforming Afghanistan. It has to be said that such an outcome would be largely in
tune both with much of America’s record elsewhere in the world, and with Afghanistan’s own
modern history.

--

Anatol Lieven is a professor in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London and a
senior fellow of the New America Foundation in Washington DC. He is author of several books,

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including America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism. His latest book,
Pakistan: A Hard Country, is to be published next year by Penguin.

Article originally appeared on Current Intelligence (http://www.currentintelligence.net/).

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