The Insurgency Research Group points to a thesis by Raja Hussain from the Naval Post Graduate School addressing the role of collateral damage in Afghanistan:
As a consequence of the ongoing insurgency and terrorist activities, American and NATO forces are struggling to win the hearts and minds campaign, an element which has been compromised by collateral damage. Loss of civilian lives associated with military strikes has played into the hands of the Taliban, in turn boosting their legitimacy and image while lowering U.S. credibility. The unconventional methods of the Taliban have proven valuable in hindering with the stabilization of Afghanistan. With regards to implementing an effective strategy towards Afghanistan, this thesis will outline the implications of the current strategy as it pertains to information warfare, culture, and people as the center-of-gravity in reducing the level of insurgents.3 Additionally, it will highlight the neglected social factors which have contributed to the success and recruitment of the insurgents.
This sounds promising—after all, one way the Taliban have reduced their negative perception is, for example, by warning the civilians near the prison in Kandahar that they were going to attack it, and choosing to do so after the nearby shops had been vacated for the night. It is rare U.S. or NATO troops give civilians the same courtesy. I really hope this doesn’t turn into a big, misguided attempt to blame the complexity of collateral damage on Pashtunwali, however.
* How has Pashtunwali culture and tribal customs affected the insurgency?
* How has collateral damage contributed to the Taliban propaganda campaign?
* Where and how can the U.S. utilize non-kinetic approaches to address the underlying issues related to insurgency?
Oh Lordy. This is not difficult to understand: if you kill someone’s family members and destroy their livelihood, they will be angry and want to get back at you. There is nothing unique to Pashtunwali in this regard, save the non-violent means it provides alongside bloody veneance for conflict resolution (Afghanistanica’s brilliant post on the nature of Pashtun revenge culture, which is neither absolute nor mechanical, is a must-read on this topic). Filtering everything through Pashtunwali is dangerous, as it leads to assigning Pashtuns a certain exoticism and tends to imply the need for a unique set of tactics and strategy. This paper has a lot of potential, so lets dig into it further, after the jump.
The dissertation is onto a really good idea—collateral damage is a critical problem, and is probably the biggest challenge facing the coalition at the moment. The most recent horrifying news of another wedding party bombing, with 42 innocent people killed, is exactly what needs to not happen. This is, as this blog has argued for several years, intimately tied to the “economy of force” doctrine and its over-reliance on air power. Indeed, the great danger of these kinds of events is that they actively turn otherwise supportive people against the coalition, whether into the arms of the Taliban in the case of some locals or into wishing both sides would leave and supporting neither in the case of others (and many outsiders), it doesn’t matter.
Most worrying on that front is the recent news that the Navy is moving yet another carrier battle group into the area for additional sorties. No matter how precise air-launched weapons are, and to Hussain’s tremendous credit this point is emphasized repeatedly in the paper, they are only as good as the intelligence behind them, and never as accurate as a soldier on the ground.
So in a macro sense, the general point Hussain argues is an absolutely necessary and long overdue one. Perhaps in this context it can do some good, since those of us on the outside of traditional military discourse have had very little luck in pushing a reevaluation of the air power structure. There has been some movement, but not nearly enough to seriously effect policy.
This thesis, however, is far from perfect. In fact, there are some serious conceptual problems underlying its argumentation that could tempt those who read it without a sufficient understanding of the situation to come to the wrong conclusions.
First and most importantly, the attempt to filter everything in Afghanistan, the Taliban groups, the various militant groups, and the FATA, through the Pashtunwali concept of badal is deeply mistaken. Not only is badal neither absolute (it can be tempered or redirected or channeled into non-violent resolutions), it is quite obviously not a primary driver of either Taliban propaganda (as Hussain argues), nor of regular people joining the insurgency (though collateral damage might play a role).
A list of essential scholars in understanding Pashtunwali and how it is applied variably across Pashtun society must include Thomas Barfield, Bernt Glatzer, Jose Oberson, and Antonio Giustozzi… none of whom appear in Hussain’s bibliography. The only scholar who has discussed Pashtunwali in any academic publications (though none are cited in Hussain’s section on explaining the concepts of Pashtunwali, which is done incompletely and, considering its supposed centrality to the primary thesis, haphazardly) is Thomas Johnson—which makes sense considering he was the thesis advisor, but also lends a highly distorted picture of what Pashtunwali is and is not. In a recent paper Johnson wrote, “On the Edge of the Big Muddy” (China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2007) p. 93-129), which has a curiously parallel thesis to Hussain’s, Johnson argues in part that honor, justice, and revenge drive Pashtun society in complex ways. While this isn’t necessarily wrong, it is woefully incomplete—depending on the scholar, the importance concepts of Pashtunwali can number anywhere from three to ten, and these vary by region and sometimes by village or valley. Similarly, while collateral damage is a major problem, Pashtunwali actually provides a means for non-violent means of reconciling the victims—whether by blood payments or other forms of restitution.
This incomplete scholarship of the body of work on Pashtunwali—and I by no means provided anything even remotely approaching a comprehensive list—is a critical weakness in Hussain’s paper. By grossly simplifying the role of Pashtunwali in Afghan and Pakistani Pashtun societies, Hussain arrives at a grossly simplified, and thus incomplete, understanding of how Pashtun society operates. Just a simple comparison of Hussain’s “model” of revenge cycles (using STELLA, which was designed to model ecosystems, not people) and Barth’s model of Pashtun conflict cycles (kin relationships influence an endemic structure of conflict, resulting in a high frequency of conflict between close family members and comparatively little external conflict) highlights this defficiency. Given the great importance Hussain gave badal in the proto-typical Pashtun’s decision-making process, this idea really needed to be fleshed out much more fully.
Similarly, while Hussain asserts that badal is at the heart of Pashtun xenophobia (British, Soviet, and now American), I couldn’t find where an actual connection gets drawn. For example, after describing the British vengeance on Kabul, in which they razed the Great Bazaar and murdered hundreds following the massacre at Gandamak in 1842, Hussain notes:
Such mass punishment not only enraged the Afghans but it violated many deeply-held customs like nang (honor) and invoked badal (revenge or vendetta). This incident was hailed as a heroic effort on part of the British troops who, in one British Army officer’s words, carried out these courageous actions and formed “one of the most glorious pages in English history;” in the same 1879 article, this officer described revenge as a “virtue” for the Afghans.
The only response is, “yes, and?” This is not an argument, it is a baseless assertion. How did the British inflame badal? How was this rage expressed later? How did it influence Afghan decision-making? These issues are never directly addressed, merely asserted or implied. Similarly noting that the Afghans killed the British during their retreat from Kandahar in 1879 doesn’t really say anything—yes, they were on a jihad, but they were when they were invading India two centuries before. There is no evidence in Hussain’s paper that badal is the primary motivating factor… and not traditional resistance dynamics. It could easily be revenge, but how is this a unique organizing factor? In World War II, the most common refrain among Navy pilots in the Pacific was “Remember Pearl Harbor!” All countries wish to avenge wrongs. But there is no evidence to support such an argument in Hussain’s entire history, including even in the Soviet War—the mujahideen resented occupation, absolutely, but did not seem primarily driven by the uniquely Pashtun concept of badal.
It is difficult to over-emphasize how much of a critical weakness this is. Apart from not even mentioning badal in the history section on the 1980s (and curiously not even mentioning the primary seminal works on the period, by Roy, Rubin, Klass, and others like Coll), badal is invoked in Hussain’s analysis of the so-called Night Letters, which are written threats posted in public places. In this, Hussain unfortunately relies on Johnson’s analysis of the Night Letters (pdf), which is a classic example of over-analyzing a concept and relentlessly committing the narrative fallacy. Reading the translated text both provide, the letters are clearly meant to be intimidation and threats toward collaborators with NATO and the U.S., and not nuanced treatises on Pashtun history and culture based on Pashtunwali. It is ridiculously overblown. Hussain cannot point to concrete effects from the Night Letters, nor the ways they are in any way uniquely Pashtun.
Critically undermining the support of Hussain’s thesis, too, is how collateral damage in the current campaign has driven badal sentiment. Not only are local sources and local views missing from Hussain’s news sources (though reliable reports such as Carlotta Gall make an occasional appearance), there is no connection between actual collateral damage incidents and the incitement of a holy war. It is doubtless some are driven to support the insurgents by the murder of their family and/or the destruction of their home. But this is more of a pushing dynamic than a pulling one—it isn’t Pashtunwali pulling them away from supporting the Coalition, but rather the Coalition removing the incentives they have for cooperation. Even so, no one has been able to point to the precise ways in which collateral damage incidents have directly driven people into the hands of the Taliban (Hussain does not either). The best we can do is point to how collateral damage has massively undermined support for the Coalition… which is not the same thing.
The section on the FATA was simplistic and wrong, drawing the wrong conclusions from the wrong evidence for the wrong reasons. But this is overly tedious to delve into—the argumentation above gives a fair indication of the sorts of conceptual problems that plague Hussain’s account.
HOWEVER, and this must be emphasized repeatedly, while Hussain has what can only be called sloppy argumentation, the primary argument—that civilian casualties fatally undermine the mission in Afghanistan—is absolutely right. If this is the primary point people can take away from this paper (which has begun receiving attention from some important places)., then that is a wonderful thing. But moving beyond the superficial, the many conceptual and evidenciary weaknesses of Hussain’s thesis make it a poor choice for informing policy decisions. I hope that isn’t what it gets turned into.
Rather, I hope Hussain can expand on and develop this idea into something more complete. There is a lot here worth pursuing further.
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
For information on reproducing this article, see our Terms of Use
{ 3 comments }
You’re asking to disregard Pashtunwali as such an important factor in the insurgency, particularly the concept of badal, claiming “there is nothing unique to Pashtunwali in this regard,” and then referencing a somewhat incomplete blog entry as an authoritative background of badal. How about the numerous anthropological studies on Pashtunwali such as David Edwards, Hereos of the Age or Louis Dupree’s Afghanistan. But if it is conciseness you are aiming for, then very well, I won’t hold it against you.
While I agree, Pashtunwali is not a primary motive for Taliban information operations or revenge violence when misplaced bombs destroy families; it is a significant aspect that deserves our attention. Part of our problems in the past has been woeful ignorance of the cultures we operate in. While some people appear to over emphasis cultural factors in analyzing conflicts, this may be a temporary swing in the pendulum until analysts find the correct balance of individual, organizational, and cultural elements affecting the nature of insurgency.
While badal is not necessarily a unique trait of Pashtuns, as you attempt to flesh out in tearing apart Hussain’s thesis, it appears to be a significant organizing factor that has influenced jihad against perceived occupation in the past just as it is today. No it’s not the only factor, and I’m not sure if Hussain claims it as the primary role in his argument, but it is a significant enough cultural factor worth Hussain’s consideration and all of ours. While you allude to the utility of Hussain’s primary argument in the end, it seems you fail to accept badal as a legitimate factor worthy of consideration. I think you should.
Unfortunately, you refer to your typical attack mode on Johnson’s publications without providing any substantive justification. It’s understandable you don’t have the time nor inclination to seriously dissect his Night Letters piece, but I think you fundamentally misunderstand and under appreciate Taliban information operations. Simply put, they are “intimidation and threats” aimed at the local population, and done in a manner reflective of Pashtun history, culture, and narratives. Equally laced with religious diatribe, night letters are much more clever and potent then any message the Afghan government is sending. To our dismay, Taliban understand the rural culture much better than Kabul elites ever will.
-John
John,
Perhaps I misstated myself: I don’t discount the role of Pashtunwali in the insurgency, but merely its elevation as a primary motivation for the insurgency, and for converts to the insurgency. Despite the laborious argumentation laid out here and in Johnson’s piece (“typical attack mode?” He is still pushing the ludicrous and unsupportable “ghilzai-durrani rivalry drives the taliban” line), they can’t actually point to how those night letters, or how collateral damage-inspired badal, have fueled the insurgency.
I’m not ignorant of Edwards or Dupree — I’ve referenced both before on this blog, many times (I even reviewed Dupree’s book for crying out loud). Notice how I said in the post I wasn’t even trying to construct a comprehensive list of scholars who have studied Pashtunwali, merely that there is an enormous body of work Hussain was neglecting in a surprisingly proscribed exploration of it as a concept (considering badal is repeated again and again as the heart of the thesis).
Frankly, I would consider Dupree’s concept of the “mud curtain” that reinforces village-level xenophobia to be a far more credible driver of hositlity toward the coalition than Holy Revenge of Holy War.
As for how the insurgency is fueling itself, despite the NPS crowd being very proud of getting their hands on some Night Letters, none have been able to explain how, exactly, they impact rural Afghans’ decision-making on anything other than a theoretical level. Indeed, even if we were to ignore coalition reporting that Night Letters more often result in a plea to send more troops into an area to provide security (which is hardly the same as a nuanced appeal to Pashtun identity), Giustozzi did some sophisticated analysis of how what he calls the Neo-Taliban recruits today, in which he notes that well over half the Taliban were recruited directly from the FATA, where NATO collateral damage is not a significant recruitment factor, but that within the south-east region recruitment was only effective in areas where the tribal leadership was weakest and religious leaders strongest — implying a strong basis in salafism or wahabism, and not Pashtunwali and badal.
To get back to my original critique of Hussain’s work, this sort of nuance, and the research that went into it, is absent from the thesis. And it is deeply at odds with the argument that badal is driving recruitment.
John,
Note that Edward’s presented the elements of Pashtunwali as one of several moral authorities that Afghans draw from and are conflicted by.