Fundamentals: Don’t Forget Traditional Structures

In all of the hemming and hawing over the Pakistani government’s negotiations with the tribal areas—which have been appropriate, in that it is not by any stretch capitulation, but rather a normal process of accommodation and bluster on both sides—very little attention has been paid to the traditional ways of getting things done: bribes.

KHYBER AGENCY: Thieves, feuding tribesmen and Taliban militants are creating instability along the main Pakistan-Afghanistan highway, threatening a vital supply line for United States and NATO forces based in Afghanistan.

Abductions and arson attacks on hundreds of cargo trucks plying the switchback road through the Khyber Pass have become commonplace this year. Many trucks carry fuel and other material for foreign troops based in Afghanistan.

US and NATO officials play down their losses in these arid mountains – even though the local arms bazaar offers US-made assault rifles and Beretta pistols, and the US-led alliance is negotiating to open routes through other countries…

In Khyber, US weapons and other supplies – boots, camouflage uniforms and rucksacks – are openly for sale. Saifur Rahman Zalmay hawks US-made assault rifles and pistols.

For a new Beretta, he demands $ 10,000. New and used M-16s rifles cost a few thousand dollars less – far more than Western armies pay.

Zalmay claimed some of the second-hand rifles were sold to arms dealers by Mullah Ismail, a Taliban commander killed in April in Pakistan. Shah, the former regional security chief, said the government paid a stipend to secure the route for regular trade and military supplies.

From this, we can glean several things:

• Pretending the only security risk in the tribal areas is “the Taliban” is vastly oversimplifying the problem.
• Abductions have once again become a popular sport.
• Thieves are an under-reported scourge of the Khyber Pass, to the point where locals have turned to “the Taliban” for protection.
• Despite all of the hype about how impossibly dangerous the area is, both the U.S. and NATO seem to have been content to rely on it for the transit of their weapons and supplies for the past seven years or so.
• No one knows how much of that supply has been pilfered and sold or given to the local militants we now want to fight.
• The Khyber arms market is ludicrously overpriced compared to the nearby Afridi arms market at Darra Adam Khel.
• Bribes—a traditional structure in the relationship of the FATA with the government—are so effective they allow the government to move the weapons it uses to fight the ones it bribes.
• The U.S.’s involvement in all of the above is unclear—to what extent it pays its own bribes for supply transit, to what degree the influx of pilfered guns and ammunition have impacted cross-border militancy, and whether a dramatic rearrangement of this situation will have positive or negative spillover effects.

To repeat a claim that is now a refrain: we alter the internal dynamics of this area only at tremendous risk. And I do not trust those in charge to make reasoned, informed, considered decisions.

(Link via Péter Marton, who has some entirely different, but nevertheless important, thoughts on the matter.)

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust

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