Afghaniya village, as seen from FOB Morales-Frazier.
FOB MORALES-FRAZIER, AFGHANISTAN — In 2008, the National Directorate of Security, or NDS, conducted a series of daring raids into the Tagab Valley. At the time, the few outlets that wrote about it (mostly military, and difficult to find in freely available open sources, alas) described the area as a “HiG/Taliban stronghold.” HiG is shorthand for Hezb-i Islami Gulbuddin, the branch of Hezb-i Islami run by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and not the faction run by Malawi Khalis that split off in 1979 and spawned Jalaluddin Haqqani, or the modern Hezb-i Islami that is a semi-respectable political party within the Wolesi Jirga.
It might seem obvious to look at the presence of HiG, and their interactions with the Taliban in the area, and simply write off the association between the two as a natural consequence of both being run by Islamist zealots. While Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is certainly a violent extremist, his organization was not always reviled and feared, not even by the United States. Indeed, as it somewhat common knowledge, Hezb-i Islami received the lion’s share of American money during the jihad in the 1980s (if not, I highly suggest reading Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars).
One of the few reliable cultural currents in Afghanistan is that people remember fondly their work resisting the Soviet occupation. The heavy presence of Hezb-i Islami in the south, even if in the form of Gulbuddin’s rather loose alliance of militant franchises, isn’t surprising, nor is it surprising at how many people seem to use membership in either HiG or the Taliban as a cover for base criminality. What is pretty surprising, however, is how important political affiliations—in the sense of aligning oneself with the tanzim that operated out of Peshawar in the 80s and 90s—are in figuring out the power relationships in a given province.
In Kapisa province, you can define people in several ways: there are the hill people and the valley people. There are what I call the “three P’s of ethnicity”—the Parachi, Pashai, and the Pashtuns (along with many Tajiks in the north and west). There are the various subtribes of the Safi Pashtuns, the Tajik valleys, and competing groups of Pashai communities. But there are also people’s tanzim affiliation: during the 1980s, most of Kapisa was “owned” by either Jamiat-i Islami or Hezb-i Islami. Jamiat, as it is known, is the party of Berhannudin Rabbani and Ahmed Shah Massoud, and while Islamist is also generally considered progressive (for Afghanistan). While the U.S. mostly ignored Jamiat during the 1980s, it was one of the primary recipients of U.S. money and arms after September 11, 2001.
An oft-forgotten aspect of Jamiat is that it was surprisingly mutli-ethnic. In Kapisa, many members of Jamiat were, in fact, Pashtun. During much of the 1990s, Kapisa was fairly Taliban-free, and Pashtuns and Tajiks would band together to fight off the extremists trying to make their way up or along the Panjshir River. Details about this are sketchy, but from what I’ve been able to glean here, the Tajiks also loved attacking the Pashtun members of Jamiat, and not just the Pashtuns who were still part of HiG or who had joined the Taliban. The attacks, especially near the mouth of the Nijrab Valley, got so bad that by early 2001 the Pashtuns of Kapisa switched sides, and chose to join the Taliban to get some protection.
Then the towers fell, and months later Jamiat swept through the province. For the most part, it was settled fairly easily: for many years after the U.S. invasion, Kapisa was a beautiful backwater, and considered generally safe (at least one provincial official maintains the first suicide bomb didn’t explode there until 2006, though I am unable to confirm whether that it true or not). But as the years progressed, and political power and economic development was doled out to the well connected and denied to the poor, something strange happened. Almost all of the political positions in the province went to members of Jamiat. The prominent, even powerful members of Hizb-i Islami were mostly frozen out of provincial (and therefore national) politics. The contrast between members of Jamiat, who seem to “own” the provincial level politics, and members of HiG, who seem to “own” the insurgency within, is very stark: almost everyone who is aware of it discusses it.
The result is striking: a province that just three years ago was considered a safe multi-ethnic enclave is now wracked with violence driven by HiG and occasionally Taliban elements. Talking with some local elders here, the frustration in how things have progressed is evident. Even as they plea that, no, this valley is really okay, or no, those people are all Taliban, it is clear that many simply don’t know how to explain things to a group of people they know for a fact will leave the area in six months or so never to return. There are some further details to how the personalities in this province have shaped its eventual fate, and those matter, but I’m not yet comfortable revealing any of that on a public blog (it needs to be vetted by people who work above my pay grade). Suffice it to say, many remain proud of their association with HiG during the 1980s jihad, and see little reason to change alliances or stop being proud of that “because of a few hooligans.”
Hooligans, indeed. Things in Tagab are pretty bad. “Always, there is shooting,” one elder from further north told me, his voice almost cracking as he described how guns and violence have flooded his province. His companion, sitting next to him, wrote “DDR” in English next to a sea of Pashto; I wanted to ask him what he thought of the American idea to re-arm the militias but didn’t have the heart to.
Maybe there is an opportunity there. Maybe it’s not too naive and optimistic to think that a reconciliation between Jamiat and HiG in Kapisa is possible, and that it might help to reduce tensions between the north and south. It’s way too early to tell. There are other problems wracking this tiny province north of Kabul, from schools to hydrology to electricity to (of course) security. Reconciling two old frenemies of the Soviet jihad is surely at the bottom of everyone’s priority list. But maybe it shouldn’t be.
Maybe someday, the insurgency won’t seem such an impossible mystery. If we are very, very, very lucky.
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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{ 2 comments }
NB Hizb-i Islam Khalis isn’t run by Khalis anymore because he died a few years ago. Minor point.
But god what a good post. God what a good post.
The Pashtuns of Kapisa – joined the Taliban – as did all Pashtun in the north – in order to rape and loot…… It is the Tajiks whom would always accommodate the multi-ethnic fronts – and it has cost them dearly. Treacherous so called ‘allies’ backstabed them many a time.