Pashtunwali

The Taliban RevivalBy Hassan AbbasYale University Press, 2014We’ve been hearing a lot about the Sykes-Picot Agreement recently. In early June, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (most commonly known as ISIS) overran the fleeing Iraqi army, seizing the city of Mosul and most of the key strategic points in northwestern Iraq on their way to the capital. They were halted at the doorstep of Kurdistan by the Peshmerga, and have so far been unable to reach Baghdad, as Shiite militias form in the south to meet their advance. Right now the map appears to show three fairly distinct entities: a Kurdish northeast, a Shiite south, and an area of Sunni control stretching from Anbar province into Syria. Maybe the borders will reflect that someday.The reality on the ground is complicated, but in the meantime, Western commentators (at least, those uneager to reprise the Iraq War) opine about the ‘artificiality’ of Iraq, a country whose borders, they claim, are a European invention not even a hundred years old. American meddling may be foolish but so is this tidy little theory. The division of the Ottoman land between France and Britain was a typical example of European rapacity, yet the borders delineated by Sykes-Picot were largely a reflection of the Ottoman Empire’s administrative system (and were not followed to the letter anyway). Sykes-Picot grafted the certitude of the nation-state system onto this relatively loose arrangement, and that is what did the damage: Mesopotamia has changed in the last hundred years, but its borders have not.If you’d like a clearer example of fateful imperial map-making, I would nominate the Durand Line, a 1,600-mile international boundary rising from the shores of the Arabian Sea into the remote towers of the Hindu Kush. It was established in 1893 by Abdur Rahman Khan, the Afghan Emir, and by England, which aimed to check Russian influence in Afghanistan and formalize its inroads into present-day Pakistan. The “Great Game” between the British and Russian empires for control of Central Asia had seen the Czar’s influence extend to what is now Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. A worried England negotiated Afghanistan’s northern border with Russia in the 1880s. Afghanistan itself was to be a buffer state; the tribal belt between it and British India, which was and is populated mainly by ethnic Balochs and Pashtuns, would be a buffer zone intended to separate India from the Afghans, whose recalcitrance frustrated the British. The Durand Line ran right through the middle of the belt and the people living in it. Khan was anxious to modernize his country, so he accepted the deal (which included a subsidy) even though he may have considered the border provisional. “Afghans,” Hassan Abbas writes in The Taliban Revival, his useful new book, “never forgave him for accepting the Durand Line,” which divides Pakistan and Afghanistan to this day and bedevils everyone affected by it, save the Taliban.No group has suffered more from this imaginary line than the Pashtuns. They number about 45 million, about a third of whom live in Afghanistan, where they make up a plurality. Their lineage is obscure, but they are perhaps descended from the Pactyans mentioned by Herodotus, who said they “wore cloaks of skin, and carried the bow of their country and the dagger.” Following the Muslim conquests after the 7th century the Pashtuns adopted Islam, melding it liberally with tribal customs. From the 16th to the 18th century they deftly managed the shifting borders of the Mughal and Safavid Empires, “exploit[ing] the situation to extract concessions from both sides,” Abbas writes, until waning imperial fortunes allowed a Pashtun to establish an empire of his own. The Durrani Empire survived for a century, until 1842, but “the Durrani Pashtun family survived in power (in one form or another) until 1973, which explains the Pashtun claim to leadership in Afghanistan.”

The Pashtuns, Abbas explains, are “the largest tribally organized group in the world today” (there are “60 major tribes and over 400 sub-tribes”), and the Durranis are only one confederacy. Their chief rivals are the poorer Ghilzais, from which Mullah Mohammad Omar and much of the Taliban leadership hail. Abdur Rahman Khan was a Durrani, and so is Hamid Karzai, which may help to explain why so many Taliban leaders are Ghilzai, but then again so were many Communists during the 1970s and 80s. (Afghanistan seems to confound everyone, even Marxist scholars.) There are rivalries between the confederacies, within the confederacies between tribes, and within tribes between clans and families. There are divisions between urban and rural Pashtuns, and even between militant groups.It is all so very complicated, and invaders rarely have a mind for the necessary details. The Pashtuns may be fragmented, but they are generally united by the Pashto language (“Taliban” means “students” in Pashto), by religion, and by a tribal code, the Pashtunwali. It commands, among other things, melmastia (hospitality for guests), nanawatay (protection for those who request it), jirga (adjudication by a group of elders), ghairat (pride), badal (revenge), and zemaka (collective defense against invasion). Anyone who has followed the Afghan war over the last 13 years will notice something familiar in these concepts; outsiders usually discover after the fact that Pashtuns can be united by one other thing: encroachment.“Pashtuns,” Abbas explains,

are often depicted as belonging to a warrior tradition – hence the saying that ‘Pashtuns are never at peace unless they are at war.’ This perception is an outcome of the dozens of major battles in which Pashtuns have participated actively over the past couple of centuries. It is forgotten, though, that both regional and global politics played a critical role in these wars.

When they fail, invaders often attribute their loss to a stubborn backwardness, gesturing vaguely at the most revolting aspects of local culture, like the oppression of women or the illegal but often accepted practice of pederasty (bacha bazi). As Abbas puts it,

All those who failed to govern and micromanage the Pashtuns would like the world to believe that the Pashtuns are indeed devoid of any sense of proportion, and that their tribal baggage and misdirected religiosity make their worldview incompatible with the modern world.

This is a very fluid and succinct summation of a blinkered view. Hassan Abbas was born in Pakistan and spent time as a police officer in Pakistan’s tribal areas before he left for the United States and a career in academia. He is familiar with the local culture and the perceptions of it held by those in Washington, where he teaches, all of which makes him unique among commentators on the area. Abbas’ tone is genial (he uses exclamation points when he notes an irony) and even-handed, and although he occasionally resorts to deterministic language (such as resistance being “in [the Pashtun’s] blood,” which I take to be a careless metaphor for common behavior), his best writing, like the passage quoted above, harnesses his natural sympathy for the benefit of his readers.“Even if (for the sake of argument),” Abbas continues,

the Taliban worldview represented a significant section of Pashtuns today, this is a recent phenomenon and it needs to be seen in the context of geopolitical and security developments in the late twentieth century.

The question, one to which Abbas does not have a satisfying answer, is whether it is too late to halt the cycle of radicalization and bloodshed.Part of the problem is that intervening powers great and small tend to think selfishly and in strictly martial terms, to the exclusion of everything else. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up its puppet government, the United States provided weapons and training to the mujahedeen resistance, men and material they encountered on the battlefield decades later. It is a popular misconception that the CIA funded an embryonic al Qaeda, but Osama bin Laden and the Arab jihadists who fought the Soviets wanted nothing to do with America, had plenty of their own money, and got whatever else they needed from the Saudis, who supported the most radical fighters for religious reasons.

The American mistake was in failing to think beyond the Cold War paradigm, which as usual had devastating results for the local population, and in ignoring the designs of their Saudi allies, who set up schools (madrassas) among the millions of Afghan refugees in Pakistan to teach Wahhabism, an oppressive variant of Islam and the official religion of the Saudi kingdom. This confluence of local mujahedeen, Arab jihadists, displaced refugees, radical Islam, and Western military hardware nourished both al-Qaeda, with its global vision, and the Taliban, whose goals were more parochial.It is doubtful the United States, given the limits of its worldview, could have made a positive contribution to Afghanistan after the Soviets left, but in any case it did not try, leaving Afghans between the hammer and anvil of the Indian-Pakistani rivalry. Pakistan, through its Inter-Services Intelligence (the infamous ISI), supported the Taliban’s bid to control Afghanistan as a check on Indian power. Iran and India supported the motley Northern Alliance, who later partnered with American Special Forces to overrun the Taliban when the United States invaded in 2001. After the Taliban fled Afghanistan in 2002, they made camp in Pakistan’s tribal areas, which were already suffering under decades of indirect but corrupt rule from Islamabad and the radicalizing effects of violence, deprivation, and extremism. There they formed a loose association with a new constellation of militant groups, the TTP, or Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.If, as Abbas says, British and Russian competition during the 19th century “increased the complexity of the internal political environment” in the region, the interventions of the 21st century have in some ways done the opposite. Iraq plays a larger part in this than it might seem at a glance. It is common wisdom by now that the second Iraq War was a massive distraction from Afghanistan, but what is less commonly understood is that both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban have learned, sometimes directly, from the insurgency in Iraq:

A group of Iraqi insurgent leaders even met the Afghan Taliban in FATA in late 2005 and taught them lessons from the Iraq theatre. The flow of ideas and information from Iraq about the use of improvised explosive device (IED) technology and suicide bombing was also gaining momentum, leading to a significant rise in suicide bombings – a particularly disturbing sign.

Even more important is the unifying presence of American troops and the Pakistani decision, however tenuous, to side with the United States. Take one example from Pakistan: “Mehsuds and Wazirs,” Abbas explains,

both residing in the Waziristan area of Pakistan’s FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas], are very proud of their formidable reputation as warriors and are known for their frequent blood feuds. In the past, when one tribe decided to support the Pakistani Taliban, the other opted to cut a deal with Pakistani security forces to support their military campaigns. It was less an ideological preference and more a continuation of an old tribal rivalry.

But continued US occupation of Afghanistan, along with Pakistan’s fitful military campaigns in the FATA, has smoothed over many local disputes. Today the militant Mehsuds and Wazirs are in accord, fighting their common enemies.Lost in all of this was a chance – perhaps faint, but real nonetheless – to change the facts on the ground, to make those baleful international lines less important to the people they divided. A century of intervention abroad hasn’t taught the United States that it is difficult to find principled allies: in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is not ‘tribal baggage’ that is most salient, but the baggage of the militaristic government in Islamabad and the nepotistic clique that claims sovereignty over Afghanistan from its redoubt in Kabul. Allies so concerned with maintaining their own power rarely work to the benefit of their citizens, and that, paradoxically, is the best way to defeat an insurgency: to give it little reason to exist in the first place.Afghanistan and FATA needed a massive infusion of civilian aid to deny the Taliban a constituency. The relevant figures are depressing. “In real per capita terms,” Abbas recounts, “the aid in the initial two years (2002-2003) hovered around $50 per capita. This falls far short of other comparable post-conflict situations: in Kosovo the figure was $814 in 2000-2001; in Haiti, $152 in 1995-96; and in Bosnia, $1,390 in 1996-97.“ Education, areas of economic promise, and the institutions of the rule of law were all underfunded, and usually poorly supported when they received any money at all. There has been something of an about-face in priorities in recent years, but it may have come too late.Hassan Abbas doesn’t claim to have a definitive solution, but this is where he shelters his hope: in justice, education, and economic development. What the region needs, he says, is “a law enforcement model that focuses on enhancing the capabilities of the criminal justice system,” “an independent revenue-generating capacity” for Afghanistan (whose government receives 90 percent of its operating budget from foreign aid), and a “well-designed and well-resourced de-radicalization strategy involving religious centres of learning.” But for any of these programs to work the Afghan and Pakistani governments will need to radically overhaul their priorities – indeed, their governments – to succeed, and that change does not seem forthcoming.Among Abbas’ more realistic proposals are a policy of decentralization in Afghanistan and a willingness to negotiate with the Taliban. Tragically, the new Afghan government missed a chance to peel off important Taliban commanders early in the war, when several offered to retire in exchange for immunity from prosecution. They were rebuffed and went on to play an important role in reviving the insurgency.America and Pakistan are now open to bargaining, but as Abbas points out, it is axiomatic that negotiations are best entered into from a position of military strength. Today both Talibans believe that prudence lies with waiting: the United States is drawing down its forces in Afghanistan and its drone campaign is spurring recruitment (the most hard-hit tribe, the Mehsud, supplies about 80 percent of Pakistan’s suicide bombers), while Pakistan’s forays into the tribal areas are clumsy, brutal, and ephemeral.The Taliban recently launched a strong offensive in northern Helmand province, and Pakistan is currently trying its hand at another military operation in Waziristan. Iraq proves that it is foolish to make predictions in the confusion of the present, but it is hard not to see in recent events the emergence of a new reality, one that will confound the mapmakers for a long time to come.____Greg Waldmann is the Editor-in-Chief of Open Letters Monthly, and a native New Yorker living in Boston with a degree in International Affairs.