Taliban, Where the “A” Stands for Apache, and the “N” Stands for Navajo

Someone should probably tell the Taliban that they are Ghilzai. It is obvious they’re not getting the memos, what with all this talk about tribal divisions driving the insurgency in Afghanistan. Take a wild guess who wrote this paragraph:

The importance of the Ghilzai to the Taliban and insurgency is illustrated by Figure 1. The shaded section of the map shows those areas where the insurgency is the strongest–primarily areas controlled by the Taliban. These areas include the northern districts of Kandahar Province, the northeastern districts of Helmand Province, the southern districts of Oruzgan Province, the western districts of Zabol Province, and districts in Paktika, Paktya, Gardez, Wardak, and Logar Provinces. The inset map is a rough sketch of the Pashtun tribal areas of the Durrani, Ghilzai, Ghurghusht, Karlanri, and Sarbani–the five large confederations of Pashtuns, each of which traces its roots to a single ancestor. (Each of these five confederations contains scores of major tribes, or Qawms, which are perhaps analogous to Native American tribes such as the Apache of the Navajo.) Comparing the two maps, it is evident that the most intense area of the insurgency is the area dominated by the various Ghilzai tribes.

Why that’s the inexplicably popular Thomas Johnson and M. Chris Mason, spewing gibberish in the Winter 2007 issue of ORBIS. Have any of you heard of a Gardez province? I certainly haven’t. They must have meant Ghazni when they wrote that (twice) and surely meant to distinguish that from the Gardez city and area in Paktika, which are quite different things.

Also, learning that I can compare the Ghilzai to the Navajo—I mean, they both live in the desert and helped the U.S. win wars, right?—is excellent. With this knowledge, surely the war can be brought to a swift close, yes?

Alas. Let us dig into this paper a bit deeper.

Johnson and Mason start out by conflating the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and Hizb-i Islami Gulbuddin, whose strategy leads them to advocate for a more aggressive Provincial Reconstruction Team presence. They’re also under the impression that “academia,” in addition to “policy circles,” believe the Taliban to be a) unitary; b) radical Islamists; and c) obtuse. I’m not sure how they’re defining any of those traits, since they don’t bother to, but that certainly isn’t the case, if “academia” and “policy circles” can include Barnett Rubin, Antonion Giustozzi, Amin Tarzai, Eric Schmidle, Robert Canfield, Ahmed Rashid, Seth Jones, or Ashley Tellis. They’ve all done solid research that digs into far greater depth than Johnson and Mason allow for here. Perhaps they only read Time?

They also suffer by focusing solely on the south of the country, as if that is the only area experiencing a resurgent Taliban presence. Given the unremitting cross-border militancy in Nuristan, Kunar, even Paktika and parts of Khost, this is an astounding claim to make, considering they are trying to make the case that they have unraveled the ultimate causes and intentions of the Taliban. They get parts of the south horribly wrong, however, but this can wait until later.

In attempting to contextualize the Taliban, Johnson and Mason explain at length how chaotic and anarchic Afghanistan was after the Soviet withdrawal, and how this created the environment in which they were welcomed in Kandahar because of the “fighting between Islamists and traditionalist mujahideen parties” that “resulted in the destruction of much of the traditional power structures.” That’s funny, because if they meant the Soviet War had destroyed much of the traditional power structures in Afghan society, then they’d be correctly summarizing the work of Roy, Rubin, and Edwards (though in this section they do not do us the courtesy of footnotes, a common problem in a Tom Johnson paper). The authors then argue that Pakistan’s ISI, supporting Hekmatyar, then also supported the Taliban in the NWFP who were recruiting from madrassas near Ghazni and Kandahar, and they then came out of nowhere to impose a traditional Islamic government.

This is the crayola version of the rise of the Taliban in Kandahar. For one, it rests on the myth of national anarchy, a myth handily discounted by Afghanistanica:

So where was there anarchy? Actually just in Kandahar city and the surrounding area. According the Anthony Davis this was the only part of the south where chaos and anrchy were endemic (Davis 1998: 46, 51-2). Davis notes “the later tendency to portray the religious students as having swept the south on a wave of popular adulation with scarcely a shot being fired has strayed from the factual record” (Davis 1998: 55). Davis goes on to analyze the areas outside of the Kandahar region: “in most other areas the Taliban laid down ultimata and fought their way into regions that were at peace, and in many instances – Qari Baba’s Ghazni and Ismail Khan’s Herat – recognized as being relatively well administered. Ironically, administration, services and schooling in these regions were far in advance of anything delivered by the Taliban. Their energies were focused exclusively on war” (Davis 1998: 55).

For another, they account for the rise of the Pashtuns against the Rabanni government because of its “discrimination against Pashtuns.” If by “Pashtuns” they mean “Hekmatyar” or “Hazara,” that is a true statement. Otherwise, it is an outright falsehood. By the time Johnson and Mason eventually get around to excerpting a many-ellipsis’d paragraph from Rashid’s Taliban, they have thus far horribly distorted Afghanistan’s 1990′s history with only a single footnote to show for it. I’d be curious to see what Abdulkader Sinno has to say about it?

Historically, only organizations that can successfully mobilize the Pushtun have been able to gain political dominance in Afghanistan in a sustained way. Today, the only organization with the potential to do so is the Taliban. President Hamid Karzai has negligible support among the Pushtun and current Afghan institutions will likely disintegrate absent the foreign military occupation. Gulbudin Hekmatyar’s Hizb cannot mobilize the Pushtun population beyond a few areas, particularly in the presence of a Taliban alternative, because it is perceived to be anti-tribal, too modernizing, anti-Durani, and too centralizing.

Woops, he disagrees. Hizb is unpopular because it is “anti-tribal?” So that means the Taliban is pro-tribal, that is, it uses tribal divisions to recruit? Antonion Giustozzi would disagree. His big argument is that the Taliban recruited through skillful opportunism, exploiting local grievances and offering support to disadvantaged parties. They did this without respect to tribe, and Giustozzi has a bountiful number of end notes to document how prevalent this was across the south and east. Of course, Johnson and Mason beg to differ:

The Taliban primarily consists of rural Pashtuns from the Ghilzai confederation with some support from the Kakar tribe of the Ghurghursht confederation.

I hope Johnson and Mason made sure to tell Mohammed Ghaus, Abdul Razaq, Khairula Khairkhwa, Ehsanullah Ehsan, Abdul Sattar Sanani, Mohammedullah Akhond, Amir Khan Mutaqqi, Hamidullah Nemani, Qari Din Mohammed, Maulvi Jalilullah Maulvizai, and Mohammed Hassan—all major figures in the Taliban, none of whom are Ghilzai (Qari Din is a Tajik). But that’s just the original Taliban, listed in the back of the Rashid book Johnson and Mason quote and cite liberally; while the initial leadership did have a slight Ghilzai bias, the leadership of the Neo-Taliban, Giustozzi demonstrates, is actually mostly Durrani.

In other words, Johnson and Mason have no idea what they’re talking about. It gets worse when they try to sell Mohammed Omar as the new Faqir of Ipi, because he’s totally like a Waziri tribesman from the hills above Bannu, or when they say he is as charismatic and inspiring a leader because he donned the cloak of Mohammed to self-declare as the Amir-ul Momoneen and thus fulfilled a Max Weber requirement for being called “charismatic.”

His surprising tactical skill, or what Sinno called the virture of “who they were not” (that is, urban, modern, anti-tribal, non-Pashtun, non-neutral), both of these are left by the wayside. Johnson and Mason try to explain that this cloak gave Omar magical charisma power because he turned into a petty tyrant and didn’t work through the shura system (never mind that most day-to-day decisions in the Taliban government actually were made through the shuras)… huh, kind of like Rabanni, Hekmatyar, Khalili, or any other mujahideen commander. Omar was not particularly charismatic, he was merely successful at seizing power—often incredibly violently. By trying to tie in Clauswitzian concepts like personality cults, Johnson and Mason speculate that killing Omar will make the Taliban “wither and die.”

Someone should probably tell the other 14 Taliban-esque groups fighting alongside Omar’s vastly reduced army, because they’d probably like to know that European warfare theorists hold the key to Omar’s defeat.

I shudder to dig into their section on the FATA and the peace agreements there, since I caught a glimpse earnestly describing them as “surrender” and not as the traditional first step in a very regular pattern of conflict resolution.

There is one section in the paper that is out of place: “Postconflict Reconstruction and the Rise of the Taliban Phoenix.” It is written in an entirely different tone, with a different pace, syntax, and reasoning. This is because it seems to be mostly based on Mason’s experiences in Afghanistan, including as a political officer for PRT Sharana in Paktika. It is also by far the strongest section of the paper—in fact, the only strong section of the paper. Indeed, that one section makes it worth the time to download.

Just skip the other 20 pages or so. They’re good tinder, but not much else.

Tagged as: Afghanistan

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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