Nir Rosen - Aftermath

A senior UN official agreed. “The police are highly corrupt,” he said. “They are at the center of the collapse of the state and the Karzai government. They are involved in everything from corruption to harassment. Locals feel alienation from police, and they have been the best promoters of the Taliban. The police make them support the Taliban.”

“The Afghan National Police are corrupt and parasitic on the population partly because they are not well paid or trained,” according to Nathaniel Fick of the new Washington-based think tank the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). “It’s corruption from need, not from greed. At three hundred dollars a month, a family with a couple of kids can live in rural Afghanistan. The average minimum monthly salary is three hundred a month; we pay them one hundred and twenty a month.” Fick added that the salary was set to increase to a paltry two hundred a month, but one way or another, “the police always get paid.” Logistics were also a problem. “We need paved roads,” he said. “These guys get paid when the paymaster travels down a gravel road with an American escort with the money. So guys in rural outposts don’t get paid, so they become parasitic, and the circle goes around.”

Fick is a former Marine officer who served in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 and in Iraq in 2003. In 2007 he was an instructor at the counterinsurgency academy in Kabul. He was also portrayed in a positive light as the platoon leader in Generation Kill , a book based on a series in Rolling Stone that also became an HBO series. In August 2008 Fick returned from a visit to Afghanistan, where he and a colleague conducted research for CNAS’s impending strategic assessment of U.S. policy in that country. “We met with tribal elders in Ghazni, and they told us they were slapped on one cheek by the Taliban and on the other by government,” Fick told me. “There is bribery in every office, total lack of security, police corruption.” Afghans didn’t trust the coalition’s commitment, he said. “They think we’re going to leave, so they stay on the fence.”

The Americans and their allies arrogantly presumed they could create a state out of nothing in a fissiparous country with barely any roads linking different regions to one another, and then tried to make it a strong centralized state at that. In the beginning, overcome with a sense of victory, they ignored the Taliban and Pakistan. The Taliban were not part of the peace process in Bonn because the Americans didn’t want them there. Pakistan’s role was neglected at the beginning of the power-sharing arrangement. Most of the members in Karzai’s first cabinet had close to ties to India, archenemy of Pakistan, or to Iran, and there were too few Pashtuns. The Pakistanis felt alienated, and they invested in the Taliban to regain influence and power.

“The way people are treated in Afghanistan makes you feel disgusted about your own existence,” a senior UN humanitarian official told me. “For almost thirty years, Afghans lived in extreme flux. They are the most resilient and courageous population. They are skilled survivors. I can see the return of symptoms I saw before the fall of the Taliban: uncertainty, you are with several sides at once. This is everywhere—Kabul too.” A European ambassador added that even though Afghans don’t want the Taliban to rule, they will back a winner. “They don’t want to back the government, and in eighteen months’ time, the Taliban will ride back into the village and behead anybody who has made a deal with the coalition,” he said.

Living in a country with few resources and a legacy of thirty years of war has made Afghans the ultimate survivors. Pashtun elders have to negotiate competing claims and obligations as well as competition for resources and complex identities—their tribe, their region, the governor. (Is his tribe allied or at odds with ours? Was he with the Taliban before or opposed to them? Which party was he with in the ’80s?) The elders can get resources from the government, the Americans, the Taliban, drug lords, and neighboring countries. If an elder meets with the Americans, he will have to answer to the Taliban that night. If he refuses to meet with the Americans, the Americans will perceive his village as hostile and might bomb it. There could be a blood feud with a neighboring town or tribe because somebody was killed as a result of competition over land or water resources.

Even the reform of the Afghan army, of which the Americans were so proud, was fraught with problems. The army was still predominantly Tajik, so when it went to the south it was confronted with serious linguistic problems that may cause ethnic tensions in the future. The Afghan army relies on the support of U.S. forces and airpower; it will always require an American presence. It cannot function on its own. The Americans decided to expand the Afghan army from eighty thousand to one hundred twenty thousand, but this would take another five years (time they don’t have).

In August 2008 the American-led coalition, the UN, and the Karzai government were pinning their hopes on the 2009 presidential elections in Afghanistan. But a senior UN official told me, “You can’t fix the insurgency with an election. It’s a socio-economic phenomenon that goes well beyond the border of Afghanistan.” A British intelligence officer told me, “The Taliban are only too happy to keep Karzai in power. He’s impotent in every single way. He made a lot of deals to get in power and stay in power, he’s all about his own political survival, he’s a weak man who refused to stand up to the bullies. We need a clean individual who these other individuals can’t nipple-tweak. We need a guy who can say, ‘All the old deals are off.’”

Often very little distinguishes a tribe or village that decides to align itself with the government from one that decides to join the army or support the Taliban and send its sons to fight the Americans. It might be a contract, a personal dispute, a relative on one side or the other. “A lot of this is about power and local influence,” the intelligence officer said. “Parts of society will be poor and powerless if they accept Karzai’s order. They want to achieve status and influence. If they accept legitimate structures, they’re accepting their doom. A lot can be explained in Darwinian terms. Across nature you see alternative strategies. Fighting is an alternative strategy: you can be Mr. Big in your community.”

In 2006 the Taliban fought the Americans in conventional engagements. “The Taliban were being wiped out in huge numbers,” the intelligence officer said. “They were going at it jihad-style. So the Taliban went for asymmetry.” The Taliban were not experienced in insurgent warfare at the beginning of the occupation, but they showed themselves able to learn and adapt and even use technologies they had previously abhorred. They had a harder time accessing urban areas, so they made deals with criminal gangs. “The saving grace will be the winter,” said one senior NGO official. “They can’t move in the winter.” But in January 2008 the Taliban attacked the five-star Serena Hotel in Kabul using shooters and suicide bombers. The attack was important because it showed an intention to kill foreigners regardless of who they were.

The Taliban were successfully bypassing traditional tribal mechanisms. Young men came into villages and ordered people around. Many did not care about Pashtunwali, the traditional code Pashtuns follow. Instead they were part of a new globalized jihadist identity. They established a harsh law and order, and didn’t allow others to fight or carry weapons. They engaged in more car bombings and suicide attacks, using tactics imported from Iraq. These attacks persuaded people not to cooperate with the Americans and demonstrated that the Americans could not provide security. Local Taliban commanders could be pressured and influenced by the communities they came from, so the Taliban were replacing them with outsiders free from that pressure. The Taliban ran a very effective social terror campaign and could operate deep in civilian communities. “They’re killing more and more tribal elders,” the senior NGO official said. “We can’t expect communities to show solidarity with the government when we can’t provide for their security—it’s ridiculous.” The military was wrongly focused on what he called “symptomatic” factors, like how many bombs went off in an area. “The pulse of a community is what drives an insurgency, not symptomatic factors,” he said. “Talk to Afghans, look at school burnings and assassinations. It’s a qualitative assessment; you can’t crunch it in quantitative terms. But the military can’t do anything about it until it’s symptomatic. The conflict is taking place at a lower and lower level. There are not enough foreign troops or local troops. We’ve disarmed warlords and traditional power structures, and the Taliban are destroying traditional power structures, so it’s wiping out everything that stands in their way. Young Pashtuns are increasingly picking up arms against the government. We disarmed people and undermined traditional power structures, and we’re now wondering why the Taliban are running riot.”