Authors: David Isby
Opium is grown, refined, and transported through the Vortex. Illicit opium is a crop that cannot be grown without insecurity; it needs conflict more than it needs rainfall. Narcotics cultivation and traffic has its roots in the pre-2001 failure of the Afghan state. Successive pre-2001 governments were unwilling or unable to suppress it. The collapse of the economy of rural Afghanistan pre-2001 and limited post-2001 agricultural sector aid provided farmers with few alternatives. Afghanistan has ended up supplying the vast majority of the world’s illicit opium.
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The southern provinces of Afghanistan that are most affected by the insurgency grow the bulk of the opium, but the traffic has an impact even in areas where no poppies grow.
In the Vortex, according to former Afghan finance minister Ashraf
Ghani, “the stakeholders in instability are better organized than stakeholders in stability.”
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Each threat is waging a different but overlapping conflict, and a different set of strategies and tactics is required to defeat them. There are many important discontinuities between effective counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency to make it important to distinguish these two conflicts in Afghanistan. The insurgency is both integral to the terrorist threat to Afghanistan and distinct from it. The defeat of one will not remove the threat from the other. There are significant divergences between the two threats and the conflicts they are waging as well as in the Western response to each threat (for example, ISAF’s mandate includes counter-insurgency but not counter-terrorist operations).
Al Qaeda and its allies from their sanctuary in the Vortex aim to overturn a world order that they see as inherently oppressing all Muslims. Insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Afghan and Pakistani Taliban and their allies) are fighting against governments in Kabul or Islamabad they see as foreign tools and not representing their interests (defined in ethnolinguistic, political, or religious terms). Narcotics growers and traffickers (who need to make money) grow most of their crop in Afghanistan, but much of the refining and value-added is in Pakistan. That they are able to work together despite their differences is a sign of the effectiveness of the networks, originating with Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and other agencies that bind them, the Al Qaeda-generated offensive in the war of ideas that has allowed them to claim many “hearts and minds,” and the failure of their opponents—US, Kabul and Pakistan—to effectively exploit the divisions between them.
Both Afghanistan and Pakistan face internal conflicts. Threats beyond those of terrorism, insurgency, and narcotics have the potential to overturn both states in their current forms. Afghanistan today, in many ways, is a country defined by its conflicts, which are far more extensive than those being waged with weapons. In Pakistan, larger problems have been left unsolved by civilian and military governments alike.
The bearded men with the Kalashnikovs and the laptops in caves are not the only adversaries. Many of the most important adversaries sit in office chairs and wear Western-style business suits or the uniforms of friendly military forces. What makes the threats particularly difficult
for the US and the coalition is that not all are from enemies. The US’s friends, whether Afghan politicians in Kabul or Pakistani generals in Rawalpindi, are very much part of the reason for the policy failures that made the region a top security concern by 2008–10.
The Pakistani military—an allied force that has been receiving US aid—created the Vortex’s infrastructure and support networks to serve Pakistan’s strategy starting in the 1970s. The insurgents were supported as part of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Kashmir. The networks originally supporting Afghan resistance groups were expanded to include Punjabi insurgents, and Pakistan’s own domestic Islamic radical parties were brought in to the networks to enable these insurgencies and to serve as an internal political balance in favor of the military’s role in Pakistan’s politics. Other friends that are enabling enemies include the countries in the Middle East where much of the funding for terrorism and insurgency originates, a process much larger than just the network of unofficial moneychanger hawala/hundi transfers that moved the funding for the 9/11 attacks.
What all these diverse conflicts have in common is that they are wars against hope. Before 2001, there was precious little hope in Afghanistan, only civil war, hardship, and repressive Taliban rule. Then, after 9/11, when the US-led coalition intervention enabled Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance to defeat the Taliban and their Al Qaeda allies, Afghanistan had hope. It was flooded with hope, had an exportable surplus of hope, hope for peace, for stability, for a better life. The US-led intervention in Afghanistan was identified as bringing this hope and was welcomed by Afghans of all ethnolinguistic groups. By 2008–10, much of this hope had dried up and been turned to dust by Afghanistan’s external and internal conflicts, but enough remained to preserve what has changed since 2001. While the foreign military presence had suffered from years of collateral damage and the perception of being part of an international war on Islam that includes the Iraq and Arab-Israeli conflicts, there remains hope that it will at least prevent a return to civil war. Even in Pakistan, there has been hope, especially when the 2008 elections brought an end to military rule, but that hope too has been drying up faced with dysfunctional governance, economic hardship, and insurgency. But, as in Afghanistan, hope remains.
In the US, the UK, and other members of the international coalition, no one wants to see hope fail. But few want to give orders, and fewer still are able to originate and implement effective policies that will prevent a crisis in the near term, because this will mean more casualties, more expense, and more political cost. The hard men know, in their hearts, that in the end the coalition will disengage, that the Afghans trying to rebuild their country will go into exile, and, with the help of their friends in the business suits and the generals’ uniforms, they can then go back to their hard business of fighting a civil war in Afghanistan and transforming the country to meet their worldview.
Frontiers and Conflicts
The North West Frontier, where the British Empire came up against Afghanistan until 1947, has become the Vortex, something different, unique, and dangerous. The conflicts emanating from the Vortex include the world’s most destructive terrorist leadership, two democratically elected national governments (Afghanistan and Pakistan), power sources ranging from elected legislatures to well-armed warlords, almost all of the world’s opium production, and a major commitment by the US and its allies.
Geographically, culturally, and politically, these are the Borderlands. The borders of Afghanistan are more than lines on a map. They are one of the major fault lines between civilizations; a site for both division and interaction. Warrior and trader Pushtun tribes and clans straddle the Afghanistan-Pakistan border: Wazir, Mahsud, Afridi, Shinwari, and Mohmand amongst them.
Frontiers are important for the nation-state. The frontiers of Afghanistan were drawn to make it a buffer state in the competition between the British and Russian empires. Afghanistan was never intended to be cohesive or self-supporting. Frontiers divide, but are also sites of interaction. The Frontier was a geographical and cultural division and, to those that lived there, a political and religious one as well. Afghanistan was outside the ordered world of the imperial inheritance. The inheritance from this past made it possible for Afghanistan’s neighbors (and others with strategic interests in the region) to fight out their conflicts with their own money and Afghan lives.
All successful empires know where to draw the line and create a frontier, but frontiers remain zones of interaction as well as exclusion. No one can keep out what happens in the land beyond the frontier. Afghanistan’s role as a graveyard of empires is not the result of a particular Afghan pathology or xenophobia, but of the failures of those empires they fought there. The failed empires found themselves unable or unwilling to evolve to meet Afghanistan’s fast-emerging and always-mutating challenges. In the end, they took their failure and brought it home.
Force and legitimacy—the tools of the British Empire in 1893—drew the Durand Line that created the Frontier. But the linking factors of Pushtun ethnicity and Islam were never extinguished by the geographic divisions the Frontier represented on the map. Indeed, these divisions were seen at the time, and continue to be seen, largely as illegitimate, in large part because they were not enforceable. Throughout Afghanistan and the Pushtun borderlands of what was to become Pakistan, national power received limited, sometimes nominal, allegiance by secular and religious elites and did not concern the trader or farmer, whose livelihood required travel or trade with neighbors. The Frontier—not limited to what has since become the FATA—began where the British ability to compel compliance ended.
The Frontier demonstrated the inadequacy of the Western reliance on borders and sovereign states to define a world that instead looks to subnational (tribal, ethnolinguistic, or political groups) and supranational (Islam) identification and definitions. The model of the nation-state, which only came to Afghanistan under duress in the late nineteenth century, often fits it poorly despite all the Afghans’ pride in it and all they have paid in blood and treasure to own it. The existence of multiple and flexible self-definitions by Afghans and equally diverse sources of authority within Afghanistan are reasons why it is often wrongly alleged that Afghanistan has never been a “proper” nation; for generations before 1978 it had been able to maintain Max Weber’s “monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Order, security, services (to the population, although prior to 2001 this was concerned primarily with elites), and legitimacy (though this was expressed more in support for social and cultural arrangement than the national government) were always part of traditional Afghanistan.
Historically, the Afghan state has appeared to be weak, especially when compared to the centralized systems, intended to maintain state control and with the military as their highest priority, of its neighbors in Pakistan and Iran. But Afghan nationalism is not a weak force. Every political group seeks to define itself in Afghan rather than subnational or ethnic-specific terms. The average Afghan, however illiterate and limited in personal horizons, tends to have a sense of an Afghan nationality and aims to live consistent with the tenets of “Afghaniyat,” doing things properly the Afghan way.
The Afghan’s 1978–1992 struggle against the Soviets and their Afghan supporters and 1992–2001 civil war made the Afghan state fail. Afghanistan has been a battleground for proxy wars and outside military intervention since the 1970s. This, more than any other factor, has led to the continued conflict in Afghanistan since 2001. On the Pakistani side, the insurgency emerging from the Vortex has combined with their pre-existing crisis of governance to threaten the future existence of Pakistan. The crisis of governance in Pakistan—a country where the military controls Afghanistan policy, state school and taxation systems do not function, and ties of blood and family still trump just about everything else in democratic politics—was there before the US intervened in Afghanistan in 2001. Following the 2007 fighting at the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad and the 2009 insurgent seizure of Swat, even the Pakistani military had to recognize that their internal insurgents were not a force that could be easily controlled.
The Vortex brings together both the potential for a clash of civilizations and conflict within Islam about its future and how it will interact with the rest of the world. Afghanistan is geographically, culturally, and politically outside the Islamic mainstreams of either the Arab world or the subcontinent. Yet it has always had an impact beyond its borders. In the 1920s, Muslim leaders and scholars from the subcontinent advocated that the king of Afghanistan succeed to the Khalifait after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The traditional role of the Frontier is the seam between civilizations. It is also the source of chastisement to those who do not live by the laws of the Pushtuns that inhabit it, whether they are practicing Muslims, Sikh, British, or others. Add this to the widespread
Afghan belief, especially among Pushtuns, that their faith is both exemplary and unique, providing a light and direction for the rest of Islam. Al Qaeda and a host of Islamic radicals have told them this since 2001, and many believe that this quality makes them a target for evil infidels and their Muslim allies that together are waging a global war on Islam. The Urdu poet Iqbal Lahori saw Afghanistan as the “heart of Asia” and said the entire continent will suffer when the heart is in pain.
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The Afghan Taliban had, and apparently retains, ambitions that extend beyond the borders of Afghanistan. This became readily apparent in 1994 (two years before bin Laden returned to Afghanistan from Sudan) when Mullah Omar put on the cloak of the Prophet himself that was revered in a shrine in Kandahar and had himself proclaimed (by fatwa)
Amir-al-Muamin
—commander of the faithful—a title that embodied a claim for support from devout Muslims everywhere. This meshed well with Al Qaeda’s goal of shaping the future of Islam and worldwide networks.
Now that the Frontier has become the Vortex, what may emerge from it has the potential to shape the larger world. The 11 September 2001 attacks on the US were planned and organized in Afghanistan. The global aspirations of the threat, the future of a nuclear-armed Pakistan, and the international effort to support Afghanistan have already made the Vortex of global concern.
Losing the Vortex
The story of the Vortex that I want to tell is primarily about the countries and people that are part of it. Outsiders, especially the US and UK, see the conflict as being about themselves, but it takes nothing away from the bravery of their troops or the devotion of their development workers to remember that the story is about the people of Afghanistan and those parts of Pakistan threatened by insurgencies.