Afghanistan's most peaceful province is now a test case for the security handoff

By NEIL SHEA
Stars and Stripes
Published: September 18, 201

An Afghan policeman inspects a car while New Zealand soldiers observe at a checkpoint high in Bamiyan's mountains. Kiwi soldiers were cautiously optimistic about police development, but concerned about what might happen when NATO forces leave the region. "Sometimes it seems like they only do this when we're around," a Kiwi soldier said. "And then the rest of the time they don't do anything."
NEIL SHEA/STARS AND STRIPES

KIWI BASE, Afghanistan — The soldiers stood on the old Russian gun platform high in the mountains and tried to imagine the other war. They were Americans and New Zealanders, all of them young, all of them dressed casually for soldiers. No body armor or helmets, no gloves, goggles or grenades. Their rifles slung easily across their backs. It was Bamiyan, after all, the most peaceful province in Afghanistan.

“How the hell did they get it up here?” an American soldier asked, spinning on the gun mount as though it were playground equipment. “You think they carried it up?”

“Helicopter, must have been,” said a New Zealander.

The men looked around, admiring the artifacts of the vanished Soviet army, the Cyrillic graffiti soldiers like them had carved decades before. They laughed, a little uneasily, at history. A few miles west and nearly eight centuries before, Genghis Khan’s army slaughtered thousands during a siege. A decade ago, near the same spot, the Taliban killed up to 500.

“Can you imagine sitting up here, shooting at stuff?” a soldier asked.

Another man picked up an empty, rusting shell casing that once held a round almost thick as a fist.

“Can you imagine getting shot with this?”

The soldiers quieted and looked down over the valley where the big rounds once fell. To the east lay Kabul, to the west, Iran. The Soviets built the outpost on a promontory atop the ruins of an ancient citadel called Shar-i-Zohak that had watched over paths linked to the Silk Road. Back then, Bamiyan was a crossroads, its fortunes rising and falling with the goods and religions, the armies and ideas moving through.

ADVERTISEMENT

In July, Bamiyan was officially set in the middle again, this time as a way point between the violent past and a hopeful future. In an unannounced, heavily guarded ceremony, the province became one of two to begin the so-called transition process, in which Afghan forces gradually assume security responsibilities from NATO troops.

For Bamiyan and Panjshir — the other province safe enough to begin it — the transition process will occur slowly, over more than two years. It will end in 2014 when most coalition forces depart the country. If the transfer can run smoothly anywhere, it is here. Bamiyan’s transition offers a test case and a view of one possible future. It also asks whether Afghan forces can do what has never been done here before — keep violence out.

Standing at the apex of several centuries of military ruins, the Americans and the New Zealanders didn’t plumb the big questions; they admired the view.

“Man, it’s so quiet up here,” a soldier said.

The men began taking photos. From their perch, somewhere near 10,000 feet, the war, and the future, seemed very far away.

Fragile Oasis

Since 2003, Bamiyan’s security and development have been led by the New Zealand Defense Force from Kiwi Base, a small outpost on the edge of the provincial capital that includes soldiers and civilians from Malaysia, the U.S. and the European Union. Together, they have presided over a period of stability unheard of in most other parts of Afghanistan.

Several elements have helped keep the province peaceful, including its remoteness and its lack of resources. But one of the most important details is Bamiyan’s ethnic mix, dominated by Shiite Hazaras and spread with Tajiks, Tatars and other groups that have generally never supported the Sunni Taliban or fought much with each other.

Richard Prendergast, civilian director of New Zealand’s Provincial Reconstruction Team, said Kiwi efforts were eased by the relative lack of deep ethnic and tribal tensions.

“I don’t want to oversell it,” he said. “The security is pretty good here, so we can move on to other things, like development.”

This means Bamiyan is, in some ways, ahead of the curve.

Its governor, Habibi Sarabi, is the only female governor in Afghanistan. The central bazaar in the capital town, also called Bamiyan, is considered so safe that NATO soldiers can travel there in teams of two, without body armor. Shopkeepers on the busy main street eagerly tell visitors that business is good.

Foreign tourists are also occasionally spotted here, lured by an oversized share of Afghanistan’s cultural and natural riches — ancient Buddhist sites, crumbling fortresses like Shahr-e-Zohak and rugged landscapes of the Hindu Kush — and the provincial government hopes to make them a mainstay of its economy, with outsized plans for a commercial airport and a burgeoning annual festival celebrating the legacy of the Silk Road.

And to the east and west of the capital, road crews appear constantly at work, slowly stretching ribbons of pavement into areas where, only a few years ago, there was none.

“It’s like an island here, and oasis, compared to the rest of the country,” said Major Richard Ojeda, an American stationed alongside the Kiwis who has also deployed to other parts of Afghanistan. “In the year we’ve been here, the changes have been amazing.”

By other measures, Bamiyan’s problems still glare through the thin skin of progress.

Ten years after the war began, it remains one of the nation’s poorest regions. The capital is without electricity, and few households in the province have access to clean drinking water. Literacy rates hover around 29 percent, near the national average; harsh winters and summer droughts threaten the agricultural economy.

And, while anti-coalition attacks remain extremely infrequent (two Kiwi soldiers have died here since 2003, one in an IED attack, another in a vehicle rollover), violence looms in neighboring provinces, where NATO commanders say Taliban influence is growing.

A month before the transition ceremony, in Parwan province, the much-loved leader of the Bamiyan provincial council, Jawad Zuuhak, was dragged from his car by the Taliban as he drove home from Kabul. His body was found by the roadside; he had apparently been tortured.

Province officials took the murder as an omen, the whisper of another possible future, one resembling the period after the Taliban took power years ago, when they massacred up to 4,000 people, most of them Hazara, in Mazar-i-Sharif.

“They have photographs of us,” said Muhammad Rezaei, a judge in central Bamiyan, who explained he would not travel roads out of the province. “They know who we are. They are waiting.”

A tipping point

Kiwi and American officials say all of this illustrates Bamiyan’s vulnerability. Increased aid and sustained peace could push the province toward a solid footing by 2014. Maintaining the status quo, however, would more likely knock it in the opposite direction, they said.

Afghan and coalition officials said that in a war of counterinsurgency, the tide doesn’t flow in their favor. More violent regions attract more attention and resources, and in Afghanistan that means aid and troops are pressed like bandages into the bloody south and east. Bamiyan, with its quiet reputation, isn’t seen as a priority, officials said.

In a 2009 visit to Bamiyan, Kai Eide, Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary-General for Afghanistan, became one of the most high-profile officials to discuss the problem.

“We focus too much on conflict provinces and we spend enormous amounts of money there and it does not have much impact because of the conflict,” he told IRIN, a UN news agency.

“It should be a warning signal to us all [and] teach us a lesson [to] direct money to the stable provinces.”

Eide was essentially condemning coalition strategy. Instead of the classic “inkblot” approach favored by NATO commanders, where troops clear a troubled region of insurgents then rebuild it with the hope that stability will seep into surrounding areas, Eide was proposing the opposite: build first in peaceful provinces, like Bamiyan, and let stability spread from them.

Privately, Kiwi officials agreed the province needed more attention from NATO and Kabul in order to sustain peace and progress. They were less willing to criticize the coalition habit of sending resources to hotter spots.

Afghan officials were more forthright.

“We need more help from Kabul,” said Col. Hafizallah Payman, director of the Afghan National Police Recruit Training Center next door to Kiwi Base. “They must not ignore us.”

In his small, damply air-conditioned office Payman sat back and enumerated the challenges like a man reading a script. His facility is responsible for basic training for recruits from Bamiyan and four other provinces. It offered more advanced classes, too — for detectives and crime scene investigators, the men and women who, according to NATO plans, will plant law and order in Afghanistan.

Despite Western emphasis on police, Payman said his facility couldn’t fulfill the need. There wasn’t enough room or equipment to train more recruits, he said, though demand for them is high. Students were sleeping on floors, instructors sometimes had to live off-base.

“There are about 30 female candidates waiting to start training, too, but we can’t accommodate them now,” Payman said. “I keep mentioning these things to Kabul, but nobody is listening. They think, ‘The transition has begun, Bamiyan doesn’t need any of this.’ ”

Yet Bamiyan might need it most of all.

New face of security

Walk through the capital’s bazaar, and something quickly becomes apparent to any visitor who has traveled elsewhere in Afghanistan. There are no Afghan National Army soldiers, no beige pickups jolting past packed with armed and mostly uniformed men.

Only a handful of ANA soldiers work in Bamiyan. Kiwi officials explained this is partly because old ethnic tensions had surfaced between the Pashtun-dominated military and local Hazara police. But another reason is that soldiers, like development money, don’t pool here.

“There has never been an ANA presence here because the Province has always been relatively secure by Afghan standards,” Lt. Col. Hugh McAslan, commander of the New Zealand Defense forces in Bamiyan wrote in an email. “And a greater need for ANA forces exists in the more kinetic Provinces in the South and East of the country.”

The result, McAslan said, is that the ANP is the main security force. And, when the Kiwis leave in 2014, Bamiyan’s stability will become their responsibility.

The role will not come easily. Almost nowhere in Afghanistan do police forces — plagued with problems from illiteracy and drug use to corruption and high casualty rates — inspire great confidence, at least from Western observers. While pockets of competence exist, and some specific units and commanders perform well, many experts agree the national police program is nascent.

In April, a Pentagon report underscored the point, concluding that no ANP units could yet operate independently. The Pentagon also warned that sustaining the country’s army and police forces would be a major burden in years ahead because the cost of training and equipping them was more than twice Afghanistan’s gross domestic product. In other words, Afghanistan’s first lines of defense will require deep, regular injections of foreign cash.

In Bamiyan, where the police will play an especially prominent role and resources already feel spare, these challenges intensify.

Kiwi forces have been working hard against these trends to ensure the police are ready by 2014. Kiwi infantry units regularly partner with the ANP, standing with them at wind-blown checkpoints, mentoring their commanders, helping them acquire necessary equipment.

A small detachment of European Union police trainers also works in Bamiyan, led by Kiwi police officers. The Europeans advise police leaders and work with judges, prosecutors and detectives, attempting to strengthen basic law and order. Step by step, European and Kiwi trainers said, they see progress, especially among a key group of police commanders.

Fortunately, insurgent groups never had much interest in the mountain-bounded province or its Hazara population. The Taliban came in the past to kill, and they also arrived a decade ago to destroy two of Bamiyan’s most famous treasures — ancient, enormous statues of Buddha, which they considered affronts to Islam. Then — like Genghis Khan, like the Soviets — they left.

But ethnicity and remoteness also create pitfalls. Hazaras have long been trapped in an Afghan underclass, routinely relegated to menial jobs, suffering discrimination at the hands of politically powerful groups, such as the Pashtuns. Many NATO officials described the Pashtun-dominated government as, at best, indifferent to Bamiyan. Local officials said they worried about the future, when coalition forces no longer buffer against old prejudices.

McAslan said the Kiwi’s next large project would boost Bamiyan’s ability to defend itself. Over the next 18 months, he said, his forces would help create a Provincial Quick Reaction Force composed of police who would act like a large SWAT team, capable of answering threats acrossthe province — specifically those spilling in from neighboring regions.

“The PQRF will have a paramilitary skill set and address the types of threats that might normally be dealt with by the ANA,” McAslan said.

In a recent meeting McAslan discussed details of the PQRF with Provincial Police Chief Jumagildi, who, like many Afghans, goes by one name. The chief seemed wary, almost reluctant. He was concerned about committing the number of officers — about 40 — McAslan wanted. The men fell into the kind of negotiations common between Afghan and NATO officers, a rhythmic back-and-forth that often sounds like market bartering. They reached a deal when McAslan agreed to provide lunch for the police during their training.

“Yeah, sometimes it comes down to that,” McAslan said later, grinning tightly. “But it’s a step in the right direction.”

Model for the future

With transition begun, that direction is set. McAslan and Prendergast said coalition forces would increasingly ask Afghan police and the local government to take charge. They would slowly remove themselves from the works, they said, emphasizing the word “slowly.”

The Kiwis have needed to clarify the speed of transition many times. Prendergast and others described how, as the official start of the process neared in July, many Bamiyan residents believed it meant coalition forces would immediately withdraw — allowing the Taliban to sweep back in.

Kiwi soldiers and civilians were forced to do emergency PR, explaining they would not abandon Bamiyan. In August, they were still repeating it to visitors.

“Transition is a process,” Prendergast said. “I think the challenge [and the fear] is more around lack of confidence, lack of experience. It’s about reassuring them and making sure they will stand up.”

Prendergast said New Zealand forces were firmly committed to their mission. But he was also firm about limits, echoing the sentiment of nearly every other coalition nation.

“New Zealand is not looking to be here for generations,” he said. “We’re looking to improve Afghan lives in the time we have.”

Asked if the province, with its peace, its police and its place at the heart of nation, could be a model for the rest of Afghanistan, Prendergast was cautiously optimistic. First, remember this isn’t like most other provinces, he said, pointing up its Hazara ethnic fabric.

“Bamiyan is a model for transition,” he said. “Not for state-building. If it was state-building, we would be here till 2030, not 2014.”

Facing the same question, Provincial Police Chief Jumagildi glanced out his office window toward the mountains, as though scanning for bad weather.

“Bamiyan is in the center of the country, and we’re surrounded by eight other provinces,” he said. “The problems are in those provinces.”

He was describing the limits of any oasis, the danger at any crossroads. Places the future blows through from somewhere else.

“Bamiyan will be a model,” Jumagildi said. “If we are not forgotten.”

shean@estripes.osd.mil

Source,

Stars and Stripes

ہزارہ کمیونٹی نشانے پر

Odds of dying 'worth the risk' for a new life

NICK BUTTERLY, AFGHANISTAN, The West Australian
September 13, 2011, 2:45 am

Aziz Mohammadi has done the calculations on the risks he faces in making the journey to Australia to claim asylum.

The 25-year-old sociology student has watched others from his town embark on the challenge and reckons he has a 2 per cent chance of dying while attempting the trip to Australia, either by drowning at sea on a boat from Indonesia or in some mishap in Pakistan.

"But driving from here to Kabul, I face a 50 per cent chance of being killed by the Taliban on the road," he says.

"The risk for me is to live in Afghanistan."

Mr Mohammadi lives in the central Afghan province of Bamiyan and is a member of the ethnic Hazara minority.

Hazaras are among the biggest ethnic group taking to boats to make their way to Australia.

Almost all people in Bamiyan are Hazaras, so for most Afghans thinking of trying their luck to get to Australia, their journey begins here.

Mr Mohammadi has researched how he will get to Australia and thinks he will make his attempt in three months.

Seven out of his group of 10 friends from Bamiyan are now living in Australia after being granted refugee visas.

Although he lives in one of the most impoverished parts of the world where phone and internet access is unreliable, he follows Australian politics closely and is even aware of the High Court ruling that struck down the Government's plan to send asylum seekers to Malaysia.

He knows about Australia's strict detention policies and has heard stories of riots between Sri Lankan and Iranian asylum seekers in the Australian camps.

However, none of these stories has discouraged him. He has spoken by phone to friends on Christmas Island and is happy to be detained for a time if it means a new life.

"Maybe I would have to wait in the camp (on Christmas Island) for one year if that's the only option to go to Australia," he says.

Mr Mohammadi says he will go to Pakistan where he will get a fake ID card. A people smuggler will get him to Malaysia, then Indonesia.

Once there, he will call an agent in Pakistan who will give the people smuggler about $US5000 ($4800). He will then hand another $US5000 to a smuggler in Indonesia to put him on a boat to Christmas Island.

He will get the money by selling a small plot of land he owns and by borrowing from his brother.

"Australia is a country built by refugees," he says. "If I get citizenship in Australia I can say proudly it is my country."

Source,

The West Australian

Editorial: Seeing Afghanistan through naive prism

OPINION: It is hard to ascertain whether author Nicky Hager is being astonishingly artless or wilfully mischievous in his claims about an American presence at New Zealand's main military camp in Afghanistan.

In his latest book, Other People's Wars, he writes: "Somehow, in spite of media visits and hundreds of soldiers passing through the base, the ... military managed to keep secret the fact that they shared the Bamiyan camp with a US intelligence base". All the evidence, he says, points to the United States' personnel being CIA officers.

Had Hager been claiming that New Zealand helped the CIA and Britain's MI6 in rendition flights of terrorism suspects to Libya, he might have truly been on to something.

But over Bamiyan, it does not seem to have occurred to him – or those, such as Green list MP Keith Locke, who were so quick to demand an inquiry into his "shock, horror" expose of goings-on at the main camp – that visitors failed to show surprise because an American presence is to be expected. It is naive in the extreme to have thought otherwise.

No successful military operation is undertaken without good intelligence. Common sense says that, given the Kiwis' limited military capability in the Afghan war – they have, for example, no Royal New Zealand Air Force assets to ferry them hither and yon, or to give them air cover – they must trade information with their US counterparts in order to keep themselves as safe as possible.

Hager sees himself as an author and a journalist. In the common definition of the journalistic craft, he is not. He is a meticulous compiler and ferreter out of information that some people would wish to keep secret, and he is very good at it.

Take his earlier book, The Hollow Men, for example, which – though not news to political junkies – made uncomfortable reading for some associated with the Don Brash-led National Party.

But the flaw in Hager's modus operandi is that he amasses what he has learned and then presents it to the public through the prism that best suits his world view, without allowing for the possibility that there might be a plausible explanation for what he has "uncovered".

The case he builds is thus rarely troubled by opposing opinions and inconvenient facts, realities that journalists in the mainstream media are morally obliged to take into account, and present.

In his comments on Bamiyan, Hager – and those who were so vocal in the days after this latest tome's release – seems to ignore the unpleasant fact that Afghanistan is a dangerous environment.
If New Zealand is to put its troops in harm's way – and there are reasonable arguments both for and against that political decision – the Kiwis on whose behalf they are there want them to work alongside military personnel from like-minded nations.

It should have been news to no-one that the army contingent in Bamiyan, trying, with some success, to restore peace to that community, shares the main camp with a group of Americans, some in civvies. If the Yanks didn't have our backs, we would be worried.

Source,

The Dominion Post

Pressure mounts over ghost boats

Natalie O'Brien September 11, 2011

A DISTRESS call giving out the co-ordinates of a stricken boat carrying 105 Hazaras seeking asylum, who are now presumed to have drowned, was received by Australian Customs and Border Protection officials but the agency has never publicly revealed the details.

Advice that the vessel was in distress and its position in seas between Indonesia and Australia on October 3, 2009, was passed by the agency to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which called in the Indonesian search and rescue agency to take over the search.

But the boat has never been found and those on board have not been heard from since, despite the Home Affairs Minister, Brendan O'Connor, having later said that ''subsequent credible information'' showed the boat's difficulties had been resolved.

Customs has never revealed whether the distress call came from the stricken vessel or from another source. Shortly after the boat disappeared, frantic Afghan community members in Australia made inquiries with the Department of Immigration and Customs and Border Protection, but were told nothing about the fate of the boat.

Questions in Parliament in May, which have only just been answered, reveal it was not until a story about the missing boat was published three months later, on January 18, 2010, that Customs and Border Protection ''reviewed its information holdings'' and found the data.

Within two days of the story appearing, Mr O'Connor had been briefed. But still, the families were told nothing. The opposition spokesman for justice, customs and border protection, Michael Keenan, said ''these are grave allegations about a minister misleading about what the government knew and when they knew it. A possible tragedy of this magnitude demands the fullest possible account of events.


''I urge Minister O'Connor to use the Parliament this week to provide that account and to clarify the discrepancies in the comments the government have already made on this matter. If he doesn't take up that opportunity then we will look at ways that the Parliament can make the government account for everything it knows."

The boat is one of eight believed to have sunk between Indonesia, Malaysia and Australia in the past 2½ years. The most recent vanished on November 14 last year with 97 on board after leaving a port near Jakarta. It is believed many more have gone missing and one may have disappeared just before the SIEV 221 smashed into rocks on Christmas Island last December, killing 50.

An Iranian woman who lost five relatives in the tragedy will tell the West Australian Coroner's Court next week that when she inquired about the approaching boat Christmas Island detention centre staff asked which boat she was talking about - the one the Navy had detected or another that had gone missing.

Information about the 105 missing Afghan Hazaras, a Persian-speaking ethnic group who live mainly in the central region of Afghanistan, only came to light after the opposition asked in Parliament what the government knew about each of the missing eight boats.

The families of the missing Hazaras have long questioned how the boat could have vanished without trace, with two governments aware of its existence. They had no idea the government had such specific information about its distress.

Afghan community spokesman Hassan Ghulam, has called on the government to release details of the distress call, who made it and any other information available.


Mr Ghulam said relatives last received calls from those aboard the boat saying that they were in international waters between Java and Australia.

''The last call we know about was one of the passengers saying we can see the Australian forces coming towards us. We are going to throw our mobiles overboard,'' he said.

Mr Ghulam said the government needed to answer many questions, including whether it had any satellite or radar images of the boat.

He also wanted to know whether the navy saw them, and if so, why did they not rescue them. The families of the missing deserved to know what happened, he said.

''We are not blaming the authorities. People know they are risking their lives when they get on these boats,'' he said. ''If they have drowned, then we can have a funeral and get on with things.''

Do you know more? n.obrien@fairfaxmedia.com.au

Source,

Sydney Morning Herald

Afghanistan’s Ethnic Puzzle

AUG 31 2011 ,Foreign Affairs

BY Thomas Barfield

In 2001, fearing ethnic strife, the international community pushed for a strong central government in Kabul. But such fears fostered a system of regional and ethnic patronage. To correct matters, the U.S. should de-emphasize Afghanistan’s ethnic fault lines and push for more devolved and inclusive governance.

In late 2001, when U.S. forces expelled the Taliban from Afghanistan, the country appeared headed for a breakup. The United States and the rest of the international community feared that Afghanistan’s rival ethnic groups would use their regional power bases to pull apart any unitary state, forming in its place independent ministates or aligning with their ethnic brethren across Afghanistan’s borders. At the time, such fears seemed credible: NATO troops were still dealing with the fallout from the violent disintegration of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

The Afghans themselves, however, were less concerned about their country dividing. After all, Afghanistan has been a single state for more than 250 years. If the country were going to split, it would have done so in the 1990s, during its protracted civil war. Yet it did not. No Afghan leader of any political stripe or ethnicity endorsed secession at any time during the last century. Nor did ny at the start of this one. Although Afghanistan’s various ethnic factions disagreed about how the country’s new government should be organized and who would wield power within it, they all proclaimed their support for a unitary state.

A decade later, the anxiety of Washington and its allies has reversed itself. If in 2001 the West was afraid that the absence of a strong centralized government in Kabul would prompt Afghanistan’s dissolution, by 2011 the West has come to fear that a dysfunctional centralized government could cause this same outcome. Such a turn of events was caused by several factors, perhaps most of all by many Afghans’ dissatisfaction with a centralized national administrative structure that cannot cope with the country’s regional diversity or with expectations for local self-rule. The government in Kabul has been further undermined by the country’s fraudulent 2009 presidential election, the absence of political parties, poor security, and general corruption.

As a result, the fears of 2001 have come to life, as regional and ethnicities have taken on an ever-larger role in Afghan politics and society. Networks based on ethnicity have become stronger conduits for patronage and protection and have often merged with criminal syndicates that exploit similar ties. After 2005, when the Taliban insurgency began to reenergize in Afghanistan’s largely Pashtun southern and eastern regions, part of its appeal was rooted in this local opposition to the dysfunctional government led by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Yet despite this reality, the United States and its allies seem not to have considered whether a different configuration of the Afghan state and its leadership—one created by the Afghans themselves—might prove more stable and inclusive than the present one. Devolving the political authority to redress the current imbalance between national and local governance is not the first step toward Afghanistan’s disintegration but a way to avoid it. Such reforms would solve a dilemma currently standing in the way of peace in Afghanistan: how to create space for dealing with insurgents whose concerns are local rather than national or international. In 2001, Afghans from every region and ethnic group were so eager for peace that they accepted the restoration of a flawed central government. Today, the mood is quite different. Unless the United States and its allies confront—and resolve—the problem of political legitimacy before foreign forces leave the country, the West’s efforts to create a stable Afghanistan will fail.

Location, location, location

Afghanistan’s population of 30 million people is divided into seven major ethnic groups—the Pashtuns, the Tajiks, the Hazaras, the Uzbeks, the Aimaqs, the Turkmens, and the Baluchis—and many smaller ones. Although the Pashtuns claim to be the national majority, most analysts believe they constitute only a plurality of between 40 and 45 percent. However, each ethnic group does constitute the majority in one or more of Afghanistan’s regions: Pashtuns in the south and east, Tajiks in the northeast and west, Hazaras in the center, and Uzbeks in the northwest. On the political level, ethnicity in Afghanistan is more descriptive than operational, as most individuals’ primary loyalty is local—to kin, village, valley, or region. There is little political cohesiveness within large ethnic groups, except when faced with an enemy ethnic group. Meanwhile, crosscutting ties of intermarriage, bilingualism, and political alliance regularly transcend ethnicity. Among non-Pashtuns, shared location is even more important: different ethnic communities in the same towns and villages often display more solidarity with one another than they do with their ethnic compatriots from other parts of the country. As a result, Afghan ethnic groups have never viewed themselves as fixed nationalities with an overriding commonality and history that would require political unity or a nation-state. Instead, ethnicity in Afghanistan is essentially pre-nationalist, with ethnic groups holding similar economic and political interests but no common ideology or separatist aspirations. Moreover, the multiethnic state had long been the accepted norm in Afghanistan; it was not some anomaly that needed rectification. Ethnic conflicts in Afghanistan historically centered on which group would dominate the state and subordinate others, not over which group would have exclusive control of a territory.

For most of the time between the sixth century BC, when the Persian Empire was founded, and the mid-eighteenth century, Afghanistan was divided among empires based in Central Asia, India, and Iran. These Turkish and Persian ruling dynasties taxed and administered each region’s cities, trade routes, and most productive agricultural areas. They won political support by tying themselves to local elites who became junior partners in government. These regimes ignored the poor mountainous and desert regions, since they would not repay the cost of administration, until they caused trouble. (The proud boast that Afghanistan has never been conquered is true only for these remote regions, not its cities and productive lands.) In 1747, a Pashtun dynasty founded by Ahmad Shah Durrani took control of Afghanistan for the first time, but Durrani followed the same pattern as his Turkish and Persian predecessors. Rulers in Kabul appointed governors (often their relatives) to regional cities but let these governors remain largely autonomous.

This pattern changed when Abdur Rahman Khan came to the throne in 1880. Later known as the Iron Amir, Rahman aimed to rule Afghanistan directly, without relying on intermediaries. Before finally subduing the country in 1895, his regime put down more than 40 uprisings and killed more than 100,000 people. He ended the regional political autonomy that had formerly characterized Afghanistan and concentrated all political power in Kabul. The Pashtuns became Afghanistan’s politically privileged group, although the Tajiks ran the government’s administration. Uzbek, Aimaq, and Turkmen leaders disappeared from public life, even in their home regions; the Hazaras, meanwhile, faced active discrimination. Although all succeeding Afghan regimes emulated Rahman’s centralized state, it proved hard to maintain. In the century following Rahman’s death in 1901, every one of Afghanistan’s rulers either died violently or was driven into exile.

Culture wars

Although ethnic conflict played a role in Afghan politics in the twentieth century, it was never the reason for state collapse. Instead, it was ideology that brought down most regimes. The country was cleaved by an unresolved conflict between the modernizing elites in Kabul and the country’s more conservative rural inhabitants. The modernizers assumed that they could change Afghanistan by decree, but they underestimated the military strength and administrative capacity required to accomplish such a task. This conflict first proved fatal in 1929, when the reform-minded Amanullah Khan was overthrown by rural revolts only months after demanding weeping social and legal changes. Two generations later, in 1978, the same conflict arose when the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan promulgated radical new social and economic policies that alienated rural Afghans. Only a Soviet invasion the next year and a protracted occupation would keep the PDPA in power.

These conflicts did not pit different ethnic groups against one another: Pashtun kings and Communists opposed rural Pashtun mullahs and tribal khans; a progressive Persian-speaking intelligentsia in Kabul opposed conservative Persian-speaking villagers. In both 1929 and 1978, insurgents allied across ethnic and regional lines, citing the common threat to their traditional ways of life and interpretations of Islam. (Although the current insurgency in Afghanistan reflects similar ideological and cultural fault lines, the Taliban have found it more difficult to transcend their rural Pashtun ethnic base.) In Afghanistan, such ideological conflicts are associated with opposition to established regimes, whereas ethnic and regional conflicts emerge in the vacuum after a state collapse. Despite the decade that has passed since the Taliban were driven from power, Afghanistan, at least politically, still remains in this post-collapse era of uncertainty. Therefore, frustrating the Taliban insurgency is less about confronting the Taliban’s ideology, which was never very popular in Afghanistan, than it is about creating a more stable and legitimate Afghan state.

If insurgencies topple established Afghan governments, their stable replacements emerge from the crucible of civil war. Rural rebels may stay united long enough to bring down governments in Kabul but lack enough internal cohesion to create stable regimes of their own. When faced with a common threat or united in a common goal, such groups readily set aside the disputes that ordinarily divide them, only to rediscover them once the goal has been achieved. This dynamic played out most clearly in the 1929 alliance of conservative Tajiks (from north of Kabul) and Pashtun tribes (from eastern Afghanistan) that overthrew Amanullah. These former allies became enemies when Habibullah Kalakani, the leader of the Tajik faction, unilaterally named himself emir of Afghanistan. For the cause of Pashtun solidarity, the very tribes that had just forced Amanullah from the throne now rallied behind him. After nine months, the Pashtun force defeated Habibullah and installed its own commander, Muhammad Nadir Shah, as ruler of Afghanistan. Restoring the old ethnic hierarchy and jettisoning Amanullah’s reforms, Nadir and his heirs governed a peaceful Afghanistan for the next 50 years.

On a much longer and larger scale, the mujahideen insurgency against the PDPA that began in 1979 and the civil war that followed that regime’s collapse in 1992 matched this pattern. The mujahideen rallied nation-wide opposition to the decade-long Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. When the Soviets withdrew in 1989, however, unity among the mujahideen began to fray. Those factions that had aimed to expel the Soviets saw little point in continuing the fight against Najibullah, then the leader of the PDPA. He had already jettisoned the regime’s radical communist ideology and now offered arms, money, and local autonomy to those factions willing to leave the resistance. This tactic succeeded well enough until the Soviet Union disintegrated in late 1991, taking with it the outside military and financial support for the PDPA regime. The government collapsed in April 1992. Most former members of the PDPA then joined mujahideen parties based on shared ethnic ties.

The Afghan civil war of the 1990s had no ideological foundation and pitted ethnic- and regionally based factions against one another. With the exception of Abdul Rashid Dostum, the secular Uzbek militia leader, all the major factional leaders (Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara) were Islamists of one variety or another. Although militia leaders mobilized members of their own ethnic groups to fight, they fought not for the cause of an ethnic group but out of self-interest. Conflicts that appeared ethnic on the surface were, in reality, fights over control of political, economic, and military resources. This fact explains the often bewildering shifts in alliances among different militia groups during the civil war and the striking lack of unity within any single ethnic group.

If there was any overarching ethnic theme in the civil war in the 1990s, it was the attempt by non-Pashtuns to break the century-old ethnic hierarchy that had discriminated against them. They demanded a return to an older pattern of regional autonomy, in which local elites played a significant role in governing their own people and had a say in politics at the national level. The Pashtuns bridled at this assertion of power but could do little to stop it. They were too divided and unable to unite behind a single Pashtun leader. In the past, they had always rallied around scions of the royal Durrani house, a good strategic ploy because both rural Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns accepted the legitimacy of such rulers. But in the 1990s, competing Pashtun mujahideen leaders, such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, vetoed this option, since each man wanted supreme power for himself. By 1994, in the absence of Pashtun unity, the civil war reached a stalemate: each faction could hold its own territory but was unable to move beyond it.

The Taliban, a movement led by Mullah Omar and other low-level Pashtun clerics from Kandahar, broke this standoff. As Ibn Khaldun, the Arab social historian, first noted seven centuries ago, religious leaders often prove more successful than tribal ones in uniting large groups in Islamic societies. Calling on God’s authority, the Taliban circumvented clan rivalries and united people in the name of religion. In theory, this dynamic should have given the Taliban nationwide appeal, but their leadership and membership remained too overwhelmingly Pashtun for that to happen. Although Taliban victories between 1995 and 1998 gave them control over most of Afghanistan’s territory, non-Pashtuns resented the regime’s heavy-handed tactics and narrow ethnic chauvinism. They waited for an opportunity to turn against the regime. This moment, of course, would arrive in 2001, when the United States went to war against the Taliban in response to the 9/11 attacks. Within ten weeks of the beginning of U.S. military operations, the Taliban were expelled from Afghanistan. In the end, not even the Pashtuns in the Taliban’s home base of Kandahar proved willing to fight on their behalf.

Kabul’s arranged marriage

The fall of the Taliban left a power vacuum at the national level and restored clout to regional leaders. But none of them opposed the establishment of a new unitary government or sought to break away from it once it had been created. In the months and years that followed the U.S. invasion, the discussions about Afghanistan’s future and the architecture of its political system—the 2001 Bonn meetings, the 2002 national loya jirga (council of elders), and the 2003 constitutional convention—were marked more by cooperation than by conflict. Equally significant was what did not happen: the non-Pashtun Northern Alliance leaders, who had defeated the Taliban, did not form a government unilaterally; except for some local score settling, the Pashtuns were not penalized for their earlier pro-Taliban sympathies; and no faction took on the role of a spoiler. The agreement to make Karzai the head of state recognized the traditional Pashtun claim to executive power, but the ministries were divided among the different ethnic factions. Although many non-Pashtuns initially opposed Afghanistan’s draft constitution because they wanted a less centralized government, the representatives ratified it unanimously because no faction wished to pick a fight. Afghanistan’s long tradition of practical politics made these agreements possible; the new government was an arranged marriage, not a love match. Its legitimacy would be judged by its effectiveness. Ironically, the major expected benefit of making Karzai, a Pashtun from Kandahar, president—winning the support of the southern Pashtuns—never materialized, because politics among rival clans in the south divided the community between pro- and anti-Karzai factions to the benefit of the Taliban.

The new government had an exceptionally strong executive, modeled on the constitution that Muhammad Zahir Shah’s regime had written in 1964. Afghans in Kabul (many of whom had recently returned from abroad) argued that this was necessary to prevent ethnic and regional division. They rejected alternative plans, labeling those who favored more regional autonomy and less presidential power as tools of the “warlords” or of ethnic blocs. The international community supported those Afghans in favor of centralization— although the West’s fears about ethnic destabilization reflected recent experiences in the Balkans more than Afghan reality. (Moreover, international advisers preferred dealing with a single central government rather than a series of local decision-makers, thus creating even more support for a strong executive power base.)

Like the U.S. constitution, Afghanistan’s new constitution made no mention of formal political parties, and Karzai refused to allow candidates to run with any party affiliation or to let parliament organize itself by party. Karzai couched his opposition to political parties in the same rhetoric Zahir Shah had used in the 1960s: parties lead to national discord. But his decision only reinforced nonpolitical ties based on family, region, or ethnic affiliation. For lack of other alternatives, the Afghan parliament soon split into Pashtun and non-Pashtun blocs. Government ministries became ethnic enclaves, spoils that Karzai offered to ethnic leaders in exchange for their political support. At the same time, because Karzai unilaterally made all appointments, even down to the sub-provincial level, palace patronage played a larger role than democratic politics in determining who governed at the local level. For regions that had grown accustomed to autonomy over the years, the arrival of Karzai’s appointees, who abused their positions or favored one faction over another, created hostility to the central government. When they reemerged in southern Afghanistan in 2005, the Taliban drew on this resentment and on the belief that Karzai did not represent a national government so as much as a family network keen to reward political enemies and punish rivals.

Breaking Afghanistan’s taboos

Afghanistan’s various domestic problems have now become especially relevant for the United States and its allies as they look to withdraw their forces over the next few years, with the goal of transferring security responsibility to the Afghan government in 2014. A politically stable Afghanistan could accommodate a Taliban faction in government, whereas a politically unstable Afghanistan could not. Ethnic perceptions will play a role in determining what sort of country will emerge as U.S. and NATO forces begin to pull out. At the moment, non-Pashtun Afghans fear that Karzai will strike a deal with the Pashtun Taliban at their expense. They also believe that such a deal would not represent true power sharing but rather be a harbinger of the Taliban’s return. Instead of fighting another bloody civil war, as Afghanistan’s non-Pashtuns did in the 1990s, they might instead abandon the unitary state and secede, leaving the Taliban to struggle for power with other Pashtun factions in the south and east. Such a scenario would inevitably destabilize Pakistan’s Pashtun-majority regions, making the vast, ungoverned territories that border Afghanistan even more anarchic and therefore fertile ground for various terrorist groups.

But it is not too late for Washington to avoid this scenario. First, the United States should make a greater effort to persuade Karzai to give legal recognition to political parties. At the moment, ethnic and regional networks owe their strength not to popular enthusiasm but to a simple lack of alternatives. Afghanistan’s parliament would be far more effective and relevant if its members represented political platforms and agendas instead of geographically or ethnically defined constituencies. Such a reform would also reduce the defects in the existing winner-take-all balloting process, in which candidates run as individuals and the majority of parliamentarians receive less than 20 percent of the vote in their districts. The absence of political parties makes governance in Afghanistan more difficult and less legitimate while providing no offsetting benefit. Allowing any ideological group, including the Taliban, to legitimately and peacefully compete for a place at the national level would do more to ensure the stability of the Afghan government than any backroom deal that Karzai might make with the Taliban on his own.

Second, the United States should encourage the Afghan government to devolve power to provinces and districts so that citizens there can elect their own governors. Karzai currently makes all such appointments, but such authority is not mentioned in the 2004 constitution and could thus be changed through legislation. Once elected, governors should have the authority to raise local taxes to fund local services, a privilege that also now resides only with Karzai’s administration in Kabul. Although it is true that Afghan governments since the late nineteenth century have resisted any devolution of governmental authority as too dangerous, these regimes were all run by kings and dictators. Afghanistan today is a nominal democracy, meaning that people in the provinces are less concerned that Kabul will make decisions they oppose. As one of the oldest democratic federal states in the world, the United States is in a unique position to make the case that in a diverse country such as Afghanistan, such a structure provides for more stability, not less.

Opening up provincial and district governorships to competition would provide the safest form of power sharing with the Taliban. Whereas non-Pashtun Afghans oppose granting the Taliban a role in the national government, they have few objections to former (or even current) Taliban members serving in districts or provinces where they have local support. Allowing the Taliban to serve in a democratic government would likely lead to beneficial fissures within the Taliban, since those who come to hold positions in local government would have less reason to remain loyal to the Taliban leadership based in Pakistan. Participating in a coalition government would put much different pressures on Taliban members from those they faced when they essentially ruled as dictators in the 1990s. The stated goal of the Taliban’s central command—seizing power nationwide—would immediately clash with the interests of these local commanders turned politicians. Similarly, the need for these governors to deliver services and patronage to their own districts would increase their incentives to cooperate with those who could provide such aid: namely, the government in Kabul and its international allies. (An example of such a process already exists: some officials in the Karzai government are members of the Hezb-i-Islami, or Islamic Party, even though its leader, Hekmatyar, openly fights against Afghan and Western forces.)

To achieve even these modest goals, the United States and its allies must address a question that is still dangerously taboo: the status of 2014 as a transition date in Afghan politics. According to the Afghan constitution, a president can serve only two consecutive terms, meaning that Karzai must relinquish his office when his second term ends in 2014. No Afghan ruler has ever stepped down voluntarily, however, and Afghanistan is rife with speculation that Karzai intends to stay on regardless of the constitution. The United States and the rest of the international community should publicly announce their opposition to any extraconstitutional extension of the current presidency, if only to force Kabul’s political class to begin considering the consequences of a future without Karzai—and to convince Karzai himself that there is indeed such a future. Here, outside influence is especially important: most Afghans believe that without pressure from his patrons in the West, Karzai will not step down. Such moves from Washington and elsewhere need not be viewed as an attack on Karzai himself; after all, this is a constitutional issue and not a personal one, and Karzai has often argued that the Afghan constitution needs to be respected. Even the inkling that Kabul may have new leadership in 2014 would immediately open up Afghan politics to new ideas and personalities, particularly to the younger generation of Afghans who have so far been excluded from the political process. But the country would not have to wait until 2014 to begin to benefit from this change: after all, Karzai’s current objections to political devolution and political parties might soften if he were to realize that someone else would soon wield the strong executive power that is currently his alone.

Along with structural changes such as political devolution and the allowance of political parties, the opening up of the political field in advance of 2014 offers the best possibility of creating a more stable and legitimate Afghan government. If Washington leaves the question of executive power unaddressed until 2014, however, then the much-heralded transition of responsibility to the Afghan government may founder over disputes about the government’s legitimacy. Although ethnic and regional groups in Afghanistan have historically mobilized to fight when their interests were threatened, such reactions have been the product of pragmatism rather than any primordial hatred or nationalist ideology. The best way to avoid such conflict— and, thus, to create a more stable Afghanistan—is to address these interests before conflict arises, not after it starts.

Thomas Barfield is Professor of Anthropology at Boston University and the author of Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History.

(Republished with permission from Foreign Affairs)

Source,

Gateway House

Opening of the exhibition Fragments of Tradition, Beauty and Hope, Photographs by 13 young men and women from Bamiyan (Video)

Opening of the exhibition Fragments of Tradition, Beauty and Hope, Photographs by 13 young men and women from Bamiyan from Prince Claus Fund on Vimeo.