Christian Parenti on the return of the Taliban
The Nation - October 30, 2006 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061030/parenti
Taliban Rising by CHRISTIAN PARENTI
Afghanistan
Twenty minutes south of Kabul, along one of Afghanistan’s few newly
paved roads, lies Logar Province. In another country Logar’s desert
villages and accessible mountains might be a place city dwellers
would use for quick rustication. But in Logar the Taliban are back,
coming out at night to burn schools, assassinate liberal imams,
launch rocket attacks on government buildings and plant mines to kill
NATO soldiers.
The drive from Kabul to Logar is a mind-bending lesson in political
geography, showing how badly deteriorated the occupation of
Afghanistan has become. It seems the infamously insurgency-torn
“south” of this country now extends very far north.
“The Italians call that the Valley of Death,” says my local guide
matter-of-factly as we pass a lush little cluster of villages wedged
between two desiccated slopes. We are still in Kabul Province, the
Musayi district: “Six of them were killed there a few months ago, and
they never went back in.” Then, after a pause: “The green is all
pistachio trees.”
According to NATO only two Italians were killed, with four wounded.
Nor does NATO admit that any area of Afghanistan has been ceded to
the insurgents–let alone a valley right outside the capital.
Whatever the case, most Afghans are beginning to think that the
Taliban are winning. This raises several questions: Who are these
insurgents? Why are they fighting? What dynamics fuel their growth?
And ultimately, how, when and to whom will the United States and its
allies finally leave Afghanistan?
When we arrive at Shaffad Sang, a cluster of villages just off the
main road, the tension grows palpably thicker. Our contact, a man
named Zibullah Pimon, who works for a foreign construction company,
is visibly nervous. Because of the Taliban activity here, Pimon
spends all his time in Kabul, returning to his village only once a
week to visit his family for a few hours before racing back. We slip
into the privacy of his qala, or mud-walled compound, and then into
his neatly whitewashed and carpeted guest room, away from the women
in the family quarters.
“There were no police here and no Afghan army,” explains Pimon. “So
the Taliban saw their chance and came in.” He says Taliban actions in
Logar started about a year ago, when organizers infiltrated from
Pakistan, using money and arguments to reactivate networks of former
fighters and win over local imams. Opponents were killed or run off
with warnings.
Though “Taliban” or “AGEs”–antigovernment elements–are the catchall
phrases used to describe Afghan insurgents, in provinces near Kabul
like Logar, Wardak and Nangarhar, most of the guerrillas are actually
members of Hezb-e-Islami, an old mujahedeen party led by Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar. A pathologically ruthless commander, Hekmatyar got his
start throwing acid at unveiled women when he was an engineering
student in Kabul. In 1975 he formed Hezb-e-Islami with Pakistani
support. First he fought the nationalist President Daoud Khan; then,
after the Communist coup in 1978, he received more than $600 million
in American military aid to fight the Russians.
Now his forces have reorganized, pledged support to Al Qaeda, made
peace with their old foes, the Taliban, and are “blowing back” upon
their former patrons, the Americans. Like the Taliban, Hezb-e-Islami
is made up primarily of Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s dominant ethnic group
at more than 45 percent of the population.
“They say this is not a national government, that its positions are
controlled by only a few,” says Pimon, explaining why some of his
neighbors support the insurgents. “And there are no jobs, no
development.
“The Taliban have told every family to provide one man, and they say
they will pay these fighters,” explains Pimon, adding that corruption
and opium eradication are also angering people.
In recent months insurgent violence has even started in Kabul. Over
five weeks this fall the city suffered four suicide bombings, three
of which killed or wounded international troops. One attack hit just
outside the American Embassy: Three US Humvees were bombed, killing
two GIs and sixteen others; twenty-nine people were wounded. The US
military now says there are Kabul-based suicide cells.
September saw numerous IEDs uncovered in the capital and some rocket
attacks–including one against the airport an hour after I arrived–
while security forces arrested several urban-based Taliban, including
a group of university students who were storing rocket-propelled
grenades (RPGs) and propaganda.
In the south, kidnapping has begun: One German and three Macedonian
NGO workers were abducted and murdered in Helmand Province this past
spring. Their corpses were booby-trapped, and nine Afghan National
Police officers died in the recovery effort. In September a Colombian
aid worker and two Afghan nationals were kidnapped in Wardak, west of
Kabul, then released three weeks later.
This new pattern of political violence is seen as the “Iraqization”
of the Afghan insurgency, which some fear could also lead to an Iraq-
style meltdown or ethnically based fragmentation. Even the top NATO
general here recently warned that most Afghans will soon support the
Taliban if development and security do not significantly improve over
the next six months.
So far most Kabulis continue about their business, assured that their
chances of being killed in this war are still low. On a day-to-day
basis, their worries are more about poverty and the predation of
public officials.
The government of Afghanistan under President Hamid Karzai has become
a classic rentier state: an institution designed to capture revenue
rather than deliver services and facilitate economic growth. Instead
of oil, it feeds on the free flow of international aid, which
accounts for 92 percent of the nation’s income. The government’s
thirty-two ministries are massively overstaffed, with employees
usually earning a mere $30-$100 a month. They sit in squalid offices
drinking tea, reading newspapers and watching Bollywood films on TV.
Not surprisingly, they use their positions to demand bribes and
peculate public funds. The modus operandi of the ministries is to
deny access, deny permission, deny responsibility and sabotage those
who might be effective at their job–in case they start capturing
more of the aid flow.
This mess is largely the result of a US-led process that–in the lead-
up to the Iraq War–sloppily fast-tracked Afghanistan’s
reconstruction. Warlords were allowed to control the government and
the United States signed off on ridiculous shakedown schemes like
paying wages to militia commanders who wildly exaggerated their troop
numbers. The result is a nonfunctional state that will probably never
be able to “stand up” and allow the international community to
successfully “stand down.”
Five years after the overthrow of the Taliban, Kabul has only three
hours of electricity per day and unsanitary and inadequate drinking
water. The healthcare system is nonexistent or run by foreign NGOs,
and primary schools lack teachers. The government undertakes almost
no public works; there is no food-safety system or program of
agricultural extensions; state-owned industries–such as coal mines,
gas works, cement factories, the national airline with its half-dozen
planes, a chain of old hotels and several massive granaries–receive
little or no investment.
To pay taxes in Kabul one must first bribe the tax collector! No
bribe and your taxes (which will be stolen) won’t be registered as
paid. Without proof of payment a homeowner or shopkeeper could be
reported to the police, arrested and repeatedly extorted at every
step of the legal process.
Even government offices bribe one another. “To get license plates for
our cars we had to bribe the Transportation Ministry,” says Naqib,
who runs nebulously defined “capacity-building workshops” at the
Ministry of Women’s Affairs. “We had to pay about $2,000.”
Women working in government offices–beyond the control of their
husbands but still crushed by poverty–often double and triple their
paltry $30 a month salaries through casual prostitution. “Cellphones
make it very easy,” says an Afghan driver. “The woman I am seeing has
just two or three friends. I pay her a month’s salary for an hour in
the back room of my friend’s store.”
“Closing the Chinese brothels was a joke,” says a friend of mine who
contracts for a major Western intelligence service and has access to
the highest levels of government in Kabul. “The palace is the biggest
brothel of all–half the female screeners in the presidential guard
engage in prostitution.”
The corrosive impact of life under a kleptocracy became all too clear
when a close friend was extorted by three judges. Ajmal, a successful
journalist and well-connected fixer, was ordered to pay the judges
$4,000 or go to jail. The issue was an alleged theft at a guesthouse
that his brother had managed a year earlier, before moving to Europe.
To top it off, one of the judges involved–a languid man with a
poorly dyed beard and penchant for flashy suits–was toying with
Ajmal under the guise of negotiating the bribe. The judge would
insist that Ajmal come have tea at the office or join the judge’s
entourage to attend a wedding. Money wasn’t enough–Ajmal had to
grovel; he had to put on obsequious public displays of appreciation
for the judge and his power.
I went along on one trip. The judge’s office was devoid of books,
files, papers, a computer or anything else that hinted of work.
Instead it was lined with chairs in which sat a rotating series of
social visitors. “My family is very well known. We are related to
King Zahir Shah,” says the judge with a leering smirk and a pause.
Ajmal chimes in with praise for the elaborate lineage charts on
display at the judge’s home. “You will have to come visit. You will
be my guests,” says the judge.
The next time I see Ajmal he explodes into a pro-Taliban diatribe.
“Fucking judges! Having long beards, big turbans, acting always very
religious.” His voice shakes with rage. “They are not even this much
Muslim!” Ajmal grabs the tip of his little finger. “If the Taliban
come back, I will pray for them! I don’t care if I have to grow a
beard, go to mosque all the time. I don’t care. At least they are not
thieves!”
This from a man who has made lots of money in the new Afghanistan,
enjoys the occasional drink, rarely prays and was even jailed under
the Taliban because he had a Leonardo DiCaprio-style haircut. The
club-wielding Talib called it “Titanic hair” and shaved it all off.
In the countryside the Taliban capitalize on the resentments and
humiliations of life under kleptocracy and occupation by not being
corrupt and by simply killing officials who are. According to most
credible reports–including one from a Western intelligence source–
the Taliban are known to “always pay for food and gasoline–always.”
Government forces are more likely not to pay, in part because their
troops and front-line officers are broke. If the corruption of
Karzai’s government is Afghanistan’s new cancer, then the Taliban are
increasingly seen as chemotherapy: a very unpleasant but perhaps
necessary remedy.
Western officials assert that the Taliban fund themselves by taxing
the drug trade. But with opium production accounting for at least
half of Afghanistan’s GDP, it could be said that even merchants
selling plastic buckets to farmers at the local bazaar are “funded by
the drug trade.”
According to the United Nations, Afghanistan now supplies 92 percent
of the world’s heroin. Production dipped last year by 21 percent but
has now bounced back, to an all-time high. Poppy cultivation directly
employs an estimated 2.9 million Afghans, and the country earns about
$3 billion annually from it–most of which is parked in foreign bank
accounts and laundered through regional real estate schemes.
Karzai has said, “Either Afghanistan destroys opium or opium will
destroy Afghanistan.” And the UN has described poppy as creating “a
state of emergency.” But a visit to drug-growing regions indicates
that the exact opposite is just as possible: Opium revenue acts as a
stabilizing force by keeping poor farmers alive. Eradicate all poppy,
and Afghanistan’s 30 million people could plunge back into all-out
civil war, with the country disintegrating into two or three parts:
the Pashtun south becoming a de facto extension of heavily Pashtun
northern Pakistan, and the more ethnically diverse north, around
Mazar-e-Sharif, and west, around Herat, being pulled into the orbits
of the more developed economies of Central Asia and Iran.
One region where poppy eradication has reportedly been effective is
in Nangarhar. Lying east of Kabul, Nangarhar is a long, mountainous
province that juts out into the tribal belt of Pakistan; its
population is heavily Pashtun. “We are facing a lot of problems,”
says Ghulam Hazrat, a teacher and farmer in the Derazi village of the
Kama district, north of the provincial capital of Jalalabad.
Last year the government promised each farmer here $350 for every
half-acre not planted with poppy. But the people in Kama say the
money was stolen. “Only some farmers got $150,” says Hazrat. “We have
no paper or books in the school. The road is bad and there is no
clinic. The teachers have not been paid in three months. Maybe we
will plant this year. If we don’t plant we will suffer, and when
people suffer, people fight.”
In more remote parts of Nangarhar, eradication is even less
effective. The Sherzad district lies several hours southwest of
Jalalabad, at the end of a rutted dirt track. The landscape is desert
canyons and barren hills punctuated by villages clustered along
beleaguered little rivers flowing down from the mountains on the
Pakistani border.
In the village of Toto, not far from the border, I meet Wazir, an old-
school poppy farmer, who lives in a qala with his two wives. In a
manner typical of rural Afghanistan, the neighboring families in this
district engage in constant blood feuding, and according to Wazir
crime is common throughout south Nangarhar.
Nangarhar’s security reports revealed that crime was not the only
issue: Twenty-three mostly war-related incidents were listed during
the week I made my visit. According to the Afghanistan NGO Safety
Office, there was a kidnapping threat, ongoing counterinsurgency
operations and “reported infiltration of a new group of AGE/
Insurgents” made up of “Arabs, Chechens and Pakistanis.” Two vehicles
used by “armed Taliban” were spotted in Sherzad, and there were some
rocket attacks. The reports paint a picture of a region beyond
government control.
“The eradication campaign came, but they just took bribes,” says
Wazir as we sit in his dera, a shaded outside visiting area, on rope
and wooden cots called charpayi. “When we heard that they were coming
we went to the district governor and negotiated a price.” Wazir says
that the local “commander,” named Hasil, was chosen as the farmers’
envoy.
“If the governor had not accepted the bribe, we were ready to fight.
If a farmer loses his poppy he can’t even have tea and sugar. He will
borrow money from a rich person and lose his land.” Wazir says
emergency loans carry 100 percent interest rates.
The official rhetoric of poppy eradication is ridiculously ambitious
when compared with facts on the ground. Among the “five pillars” of
the strategy are “judicial reform” and “alternative livelihoods.”
None of that exists here. The only NGO in this district digs wells,
but Wazir says that the corrupt drilling team charges a fee for what
should be aid.
As the sun starts to slide down in the sky, we head back out. Halfway
to Jalalabad, five armed men emerge from behind rocks. One aims an
RPG at our truck while another steps into the road and levels his
AK-47 at the windshield. It’s an ambush. The lead gunman approaches
and asks, “Is that police truck still down in the village?”
By freak luck we had noticed a Frontier Police pickup truck getting
gas in the village just behind us. Thinking fast, one of my Afghan
colleagues answers: “Yes. And they will be following us in a few
minutes.” The gunman pauses, for one very long second, and then
allows us to pass. We assume these men were local thieves, or
possibly Taliban, who lay in wait for us or the cops but choked at
the last minute.
Northern Afghanistan has been relatively peaceful, but there are
increasing signs of trouble–clashes between rival militias,
occasional attacks on troops of the International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF, the UN-sanctioned peacekeeping force), rising banditry.
If the war in the south pits messianic guerrillas against what they
see as a sinful puppet government run by foreign infidels, then
violence in the north takes on a distinctly ethnic quality, with
Uzbeks, Tajiks and others squaring off against the Pashtuns, who once
supported the Taliban and oppressed non-Pashtuns. What happens next
in the north is a crucial piece of the Afghan puzzle.
We drive to Balkh Province; NATO has recently reported an ambush and
firefight in a Pashtun village here. To get safe passage into Pashtun
villages, we must find the local Pashtun commander, a former Taliban
and mujahedeen landlord named Haji Aktar. Our local Tajik contact is
terrified by the idea of approaching Aktar. “The people around here
are lawless and wild,” he says from the passenger seat. We have
traveled a mere five or ten miles from his home, Balkh town, but the
man acts like we’re in another country.
Eventually we make contact with Haji Aktar and his broodingly
handsome son, who is now taking over the family business of,
essentially, being the man in charge of the local poppy-farming
Pashtuns. We sit on the carpeted veranda of Haji Aktar’s adobe qala
and look out over the pot fields on the plain that stretches south
out of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to the base of the blue-gray Hindu
Kush mountains. After a lunch of stewed sheep kidneys, okra and
greasy rice, Haji Aktar explains why the Pashtun of the north are
growing angry. “The government of the north excluded Pashtuns,” he
says. He is talking about his rival, the Tajik governor, Atta
Mohammed. “Every day or two they are searching and raiding the three
Pashtun districts. They even arrested me. They came with forty
vehicles and three helicopters and took me to [the prison at] Bagram.”
Haji Aktar explains how he was handcuffed and blindfolded, while
American troops searched his private quarters–”with women and
children inside.” Being a gracious host, Haji Aktar does not blame
the foreigners–my people. Instead he blames Atta Mohammed for
setting him up. Haji Aktar claims he is at peace with the government.
But one wonders at what point this honor-obsessed feudal landlord
will feel compelled to avenge his humiliation.
“I can’t think of a bigger insult for a guy like that,” booms G.
Whitney Azoy, a former US diplomat turned scholar-adventurer, who
knows Haji Aktar. In the 1980s Azoy was involved with support for the
mujahedeen’s US-backed campaign against the Soviets; more recently he
worked as a consultant for the military contractor DynCorp and now
runs a State Department-funded research center. He is one of the
leading authorities on northern Afghanistan. “Nothing–I mean
nothing–could be worse for a Pashtun landlord like that. But a guy
like Aktar is also very shrewd and patient. He’ll wait and watch. But
that sort of thing won’t be forgotten.”
On one of my last nights in Kabul I retire to the spacious home of my
acquaintance the intelligence contractor. Particularly fascinating is
his insight into the mindset of Western diplomats and military officers.
“Mention defeat and they say, ‘It is unthinkable!’ Well, it is
coming, so you better well start thinking about it,” says the
contractor. He guesses the West’s project in Afghanistan has between
three and five years, and he thinks negotiation with the Taliban is
its “only hope” for a graceful exit.
Surprisingly, that view has gained traction in several countries with
ISAF troops. British Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Howells suggested
that talks might be useful, and some in the Canadian New Democratic
Party have agreed. Then, in early October, US Senate majority leader
Bill Frist said the war in Afghanistan could “never” be won
militarily and suggested that some Taliban be allowed into the
government. One rumor in Kabul was that the Taliban’s military
commander, Mullah Dadullah, might be offered the Defense Ministry.
But a few posts for some top leaders won’t end the war. There are
already many ex-Talib in the Parliament and ministries, and they push
the Afghan government in fundamentalist directions. As for Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, few believe he would settle for anything less than ruling
Afghanistan himself. And what about the Al Qaeda network operating on
the border northeast of Kabul, in Nuristan and Kunar? It’s hard to
imagine the Bush Administration placating these champions of
international jihad with the offer of an Afghan ministry.
Negotiations may help the West save face as it disengages, but it is
unlikely they will do more than that. Ultimately, the US-built state
in Afghanistan seems unreformable, and its future looks calamitous.
Yet the nation builders in Kabul remain in denial, each concerned
with immediate performance and the next promotion rather than the big
picture. My host the contractor illustrates this mentality with a
historical anecdote.
“Did you know, the US government continued family postings to Vietnam
as late as four months before it fell?” he asks. “You might have
thought that someone would have smelled the rot earlier and asked,
‘Do we really need to bring the 2-year-old to Saigon?’ But no–that
would have been pessimistic, bad for the career.”