Afghanistan (35 page)

Political Leadership

Afghans still believe in Afghanistan. 72 percent of Afghans told pollsters in 2009 that they saw themselves primarily as Afghans as opposed to only 26 percent that put an ethnic identify first. This suggests that the national vision remains strong at the grassroots level; there is a reason no one is talking about dividing up Afghanistan.
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What is missing has been the inability of Afghan political elites or their foreign supporters to unite such diverse identities. The post-2001 Kabul government and its supporters have proven ineffective in exerting governance on much of rural Afghanistan. Because there are few Afghans willing and competent to backfill behind US or coalition forces when they are able to push insurgents out of an area, governance has been denied in much of Pushtun rural Afghanistan even by what remains an unpopular insurgency.

Because Afghan institutions are weak, personal leadership in Afghanistan is critical to any hope of success. While the failure of leadership has contributed to this crisis inside Afghanistan, there are, in actuality,
too many leaders and too little authority available to create effective governance. Competition for power, legitimacy, and access to patrons and foreign supporters and donors has increased and has created a more divided and factionalized Afghan political system than even during the two-party Communism under the Soviets in Kabul or the seven parties in Peshawar in the 1980s. In 2008–09, different ministries in the Kabul government and different aid programs each had “their” particular foreign sponsors. Because most of the foreign money was given directly to the recipients rather than through the Kabul government, what little impetus there was to cooperate with other Afghans evaporated, encouraging them to build relations with foreign patrons.

For most outsiders, dealing with Afghans has only resulted in extreme frustration. Even the mighty and ruthless Soviets, who had power of life and death over their clients in Kabul for a decade, found themselves repeatedly defied and thwarted in the most frustrating ways. Part of this inherent resistance to outside direction stems from traditional Afghan independence of thinking and general bloody-mindedness. Rather than thinking of a bottom line or effective or enabling decisive decision-making, Afghans consider all their actions in terms of kinship, patronage networks, and the complex society of which they are a part, which includes their relationship with Islam. However, in today’s Afghanistan, few decisions are purely in Afghan hands. Foreign interests—patrons, investors, donors, or soldiers—are currently an inextricable part of the equation.

Educated Afghanistan is a small place. Everyone thinks they know every other educated Afghan or at least someone else who knows them. In the Golden Age, this led to a low level of corruption; people had to maintain their reputations (and those of their kinship groups). Besides indicating how few educated Afghans there were and currently are, it poses another problem because there is a great deal of personal “who’s-who” knowledge about other Afghans within this limited group, there is also a great deal of personal distrust and unwillingness to work toward a shared common good. In Afghanistan, the near-total brain drain that took place before 2001 has only been reversed to a limited extent. A sizable number of educated Afghans have proved willing to come back to Kabul, but finding educated Afghans that are willing to do difficult jobs
out in rural Afghan, whether as government administrators or teachers or doing development, is limited. “The scarcity of educated Afghans is the key limit in all fields,” said Eshan Zia, Minister of Rural Rehabilitation and Development.
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This makes short-term solutions to many problems elusive. The same Afghan political conflicts can be seen in microcosm at the local level.

Warlords and Power Brokers

Combining access to governance and to non-state sanctioned armed forces, many Afghan warlords were originally local commanders whose leadership originated from resistance against the Afghan Communists and the Soviets. When a leader has been killed or becomes too old, his son, brother, or nephew usually succeeds him, in line with the Afghan reliance on kinship ties.

Afghan attitudes toward warlords are often ambivalent. When asked what was the biggest danger to Afghanistan, only 7 percent of Afghans in 2009 polling said local commanders (compared to 58 percent saying the Taliban, 13 percent drug traffickers, and 8 percent the US).
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In 2009 polling, only 37 percent of Afghans said they had confidence in local militias—often associated with warlords—and 54 percent said they had no confidence.
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The term “warlord” itself—
jang salaran
in Dari—is pejorative. Yet many Afghans see value in their own particular warlords, local leaders, and power brokers. Some warlords may be unpopular, but tend to deliver for their clients without imposing harsh extraction in return (but are still willing to use violence or repression to turn back challenges to their authority).
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To many Afghans, the anti-Soviet war of 1978–92 was the greatest event of their lives and the leadership figures that had their roots in that conflict have a strength and presumption of legitimacy that the returning exiles, technocrats, and former Communists that many in the international community find more acceptable cannot match. Many warlords had experience in putting together coalitions or using patronage that other Afghans lack. With this wartime experience, many warlords have a degree of legitimacy independent of any positions they may hold under color of the Kabul government’s authority. There is no tradition of warlords in Afghanistan. They resulted from the conflicts of 1978–2001.

For example, Pushtun warlords, in order to survive post-2001, had to show Kabul and the US forces that sufficient differences existed between themselves and the Taliban. It was individuals from this group that held power under Kabul’s authority after 2001. Many were repressive and provided no economic development. The tribal dimension—favoring their own group to the exclusion of others—and issues of cross-border influence from Pakistan have made Pushtun warlords generally more divisive than their non-Pushtun counterparts. When, at the insistence of the US and the international community, these warlords were transferred to other positions or marginalized and removed from power, along with the militias and the patronage networks they controlled, it actually contributed to the rise of the insurgency, rather than subverting it by removing the source of local grievances as the US thought it would. They might have removed warlords contributing to the problems of Pushtun-speaking Afghanistan. With nothing to replace them with, removal actually made the situation worse. Replacing and bypassing warlords removed a layer of leadership that could have acted to mediate the demands of the population toward Kabul.
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Other warlords were part of the Northern Alliance that with coalition help defeated the Taliban in 2001. In the Hazara Jat, warlords and party organizations have been part of the local governance that has led to that area being the most peaceful in Afghanistan despite the devastation caused by the Taliban.

Among Afghanistan’s Uzbeks, the figure of former Communist militia leader Abdul Rashid Dostum, who brought down the pro-Soviet Najibullah regime in 1992, continued to have a strong impact on politics in 2008–10, despite a year in exile in Turkey following accusations of extensive criminal activity. He is hated by many Pushtuns, especially in the south where he fought on behalf of the Soviets and is often accused of personal aggrandizement and violence toward rivals.
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He has been accused of causing the deaths of large numbers of Taliban prisoners, mainly Pushtuns and Pakistanis, in 2001, by keeping them confined in airless shipping containers, revenge for their massacres in Mazar-e-Sharif years earlier. He returned to Afghanistan as a pro-Karzai figure during the 2009 election campaign and has continued to work with the
government, much as this has enraged foreigners, most notably US Vice President Joseph Biden and special representative Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, immune to the charisma that has served Dostum among his Uzbek supporters.
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The welcome given Dostum in 2009 and Karzai’s looking to him, rather than more traditional Uzbek leaders, to deliver the vote in the 2009 election showed his importance both to the national leadership and the grassroots.
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Another Northern Alliance figure was Ismail Khan, a Dari-speaking former army officer who was the leading resistance commander in his native Herat province in the anti-Soviet conflict. Captured by the Taliban in 1996, his Iranian allies bought him out of prison and enabled him to play a major role in driving the Taliban from Herat in 2001. Restored to the governorship of Herat in 2001–04, he had strong relations with Iran. He was removed from this position at US urging in 2004 and made minister of energy in Kabul. He retains considerable support in his home area of Herat, especially among Dari-speakers, and his governorship is often looked back on with nostalgia.
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In many ways, security has been perceived as having deteriorated in Herat since his replacement. Some 98 percent of Afghans polled in Herat in 2009 identified corruption as a problem, the highest percentage in the entire country.
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“Disbanding illegal armed groups” has been the focus of international accords, including the 2005 Afghanistan Compact. To many non-Pushtuns, especially leadership figures (warlords and more benign figures alike) in the Northern Alliance, it appeared that programs to disarm the militia forces associated with warlords such as the UN-supported Disarmament Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) were aimed directly at them. To Tajiks (especially Panjsheris), Hazaras, and Uzbeks, the strong emphasis on marginalizing warlords by the US and its allies, along with the creation of a centralized Afghan state, seemed intent on curtailing the power of the warlords. In the Hazara Jat, disarmament of Shia militias was met with increased distrust of Sunni authority in general. To all these peoples, the perception was that disarmament was not indeed to remove non-government armed organizations as much as it was rather to preclude future armed resistance in case a future Pakistan-backed Pushtun force should again try to control Afghanistan.
Conversely, to Pushtuns it seemed that the DDR process ensured that the Panjsheris that provided much of the leadership of the Northern Alliances’ forces reserved the best jobs (and, increasingly, opportunities for corruption) for themselves.
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The US and the coalition are frequently criticized for “not doing enough to get rid of the warlords”; yet in many areas, there was no alternative authority. Local notables or tribal leaders were dead or stripped of legitimate clout. The warlords provided the only functional patronage networks. There was no capability to provide an alterative to them that ensured acceptable governance.

The amount of power held by these warlords became an issue after the fall of the Taliban because they were receiving governmental positions and material and financial support from Kabul or directly from the US and did not have to secure their positions by keeping their patron-client relations among the local people intact. Post-2001, many warlords—especially Pushtuns—became increasingly extractive to the local Afghans, through forced land acquisitions, bribes, toll collections, forced marriages to secure relationships, and violence toward potential rivals. Kabul support negated their need to receive consent from the local population or even specific groups of people within their “constituency.” Consent, usually as part of a patron-client relationship, had continued to play an important part in Afghan internal politics in most of the country even in the dark years of the 1980s and 1990s, and now it was rapidly deteriorating. Competition between regional leaders for the support of local qawm leadership figures had then often limited crime or harsh extractive policies by warlords or would-be warlords. In most cases, if such leaders proved too extractive or unable to provide benefits for clients, their clients and the local inhabitants would find someone else who could meet their needs, either from one of the other Peshawar parties as in 1978–92 or from the other side in the civil conflicts. Now there was no check or balance like this on warlord power, yet there are few viable replacements for them either, as there had been in the past. The ability for a qawm, village, or other group to switch allegiance from an oppressive leader became much more limited if not impossible, allowing such warlords to “rule” with impunity.

Kabul has aimed to reduce warlord power by limiting their support. By 2002–04, few warlords were getting direct money from Kabul or foreign supporters. Ashraf Ghani, as finance minister, had taken a strong stand against such payments as undercutting Afghan government capability or even sovereignty, although his opponents saw him as acting to reduce competition to centralized Pushtun-dominated power in Kabul. In some areas, warlords or their supporters engaged in opium cultivation or trafficking. Others used their fighting men to secure what remained of their status, especially in key areas that cannot be ignored such as a local bazaar, a district, or a valley, or other such strategic position, like a mountain pass. By 2008–10, with their income limited and lacking outside patrons, warlords had either transitioned to being allies of the Karzai government or were increasingly absent from national-level politics.

The return of the Northern Alliance’s former military leader Marshal Mohammed Qassam Fahim—who, as defense minister in 2002–04, promoted himself to field marshal to command over 2,500 generals, aiming to secure his position with what seemed the largest and most costly patronage network in Afghanistan’s history—as one of Karzai’s vice-presidential candidates in the 2009 election was greeted with dismay by many foreigners. But the fact that he is not seen as overpowering other Afghan leaders by his access to his old patronage-based organization shows how much these have declined since the 2003–04 period, when Fahim was highly influential in Kabul.