The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan

by Graeme Smith

  It was an interesting chunk of data, but in some ways it did not prove much; short statements by masked men do not lend themselves to firm conclusions. The Taliban cheated a little as we asked them questions, too, because they eavesdropped on each other’s answers. This made the exercise more like a series of focus groups and not a scientific survey. By the time we published the results in March 2008, I worried that the few strong points to emerge from the project would seem too obvious. Some of my colleagues said the same thing; a leading expert on the Taliban listened to the interviews in their original Pashto and told me that it gave him nothing but a headache and a reminder that the insurgents are, in his words, “village idiots.” What still surprises me, however, is how many of these basic truths about the Taliban are not widely understood. Things that seemed obvious to my friends and acquaintances in Kandahar took years to reach the desks of generals and politicians, and some never did at all. Even now, years later, these four lessons remain important.

  1. THE WAR IS A FAMILY FEUD.

  Intelligence analysts spend years learning the Pashtun tribal structures, and locals will tell you a whole lifetime isn’t enough to master all the branches and sub-branches, the family trees whose fingers reach into every corner of local politics. But anybody can watch our Taliban videos and notice a pattern in the way the fighters introduce themselves. After the customary throat-clearing (“In the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate …”) they identify their tribal affiliation. Most of the tribes’ names end with the suffix “-zai,” meaning “son,” tracing bloodlines that go back centuries. Walking the streets of Kandahar city, you would bump into a lot of people who identified with the big tribes that hold power in the government: Popalzai, Alokozai and Barakzai. Out in the villages, however, our researcher found very few of those tribesmen in the insurgent ranks. Only five of forty-two named themselves as members of those three tribes. (Among those, the two who belonged to the president’s tribe, Popalzai, appeared to have bitter personal reasons for joining the armed opposition: one said his family was bombed by foreign aircraft, and the other said the government repeatedly eradicated his opium fields.) The rest of the Taliban in our survey belonged to tribes that weren’t handsomely profiting from the foreign presence, and felt a sense of victimhood. Those connected to the rich foreigners showered patronage on their own clans, while the excluded groups jealously fought for their share. It wasn’t so different from The Sopranos, or any other stories of a family squabble that turns violent.

  Shortly after we published our survey, a secret US intelligence report on tribes reached a similar conclusion. Taliban are not primarily driven by external forces, the report said; outside help from Pakistani territory is important, but not so important as local rivalries. The report described the Karzai government using instruments of official power to support his own Popalzai tribe and selected allies within his tribal confederacy. Taliban exploit the resulting anger among the other tribes, many of whom find themselves on the losing side of arguments over money, opium, land or water. The US assessment concluded that the Taliban do not support any particular tribes wholeheartedly, but the conflict is increasingly coloured by those ancient rivalries.

  Nobody wanted to talk about this. Foreign governments needed to rally their electorates by labelling their enemies in Afghanistan as global terrorists, and their Kabul proxies as the founders of a new democracy—not tribal factions, grabbing wealth and punishing their enemies. Nor did the Taliban themselves want to talk about the tribal aspect of the war. On a trip to Quetta to visit his family, our researcher had a frightening encounter with politically sophisticated Taliban who criticized him for collecting data on the insurgency’s tribal makeup. The insurgency’s leaders wanted to emphasize religion, not tribe or ethnicity, as the binding thread of their movement. It sounded much better, declaring war in defence of Islam rather than making self-serving appeals to enrich your own tribe. War in the name of all Muslims was also a more inclusive slogan than invoking tribal politics, which are mostly confined to the Pashtun south and east. I also wondered if even the most bloodthirsty Taliban understood the terrible dangers of tribal war: one of my Afghan acquaintances looked at the results of our survey and concluded that the conflict isn’t yet a genuine tribal conflict. In such cases, he said, neighbours kill neighbours on a much greater scale than the current war.

  This remains one of the most frightening risks for Afghanistan in the years after most foreign troops pull out: the nightmare of anarchy. If clear battle lines do not emerge between government forces in the north and Taliban-allied groups in the south, a power vacuum may grow in places where neither Karzai nor his opponents have enough armed men to assert themselves. Afghans may turn to their own tribes for security, reducing the country to scattered fiefdoms. Fatalists will be tempted to see this kind of warfare as a natural state among the tribes, but Afghans say this is a misreading of history. The tribes lived at peace with each other for centuries and could do it again. The Afghans are not savages who fight endlessly. Tribalism remains a dangerous fault line that runs though the conflict, however, threatening to make a bad situation much worse.

  2. AIR STRIKES PUSHED PEOPLE TO JOIN THE INSURGENCY.

  It seems obvious that dropping bombs on people will make them fight back, but this is especially true of people who live according to traditions of honour and revenge. Foreigners often have a hard time deciphering how the ancient rules of Pashtunwali, a code much older than Islam, apply to modern Afghanistan. Centuries have worn down the traditions, blurring away sharp definitions, but the old rules thrust themselves into everyday life. One day, on a highway near Kandahar city, my driver lost his usual game of chicken with oncoming traffic. Our car screeched and swerved, clipping the front bumper of an oncoming taxi. Both vehicles spun to a stop on the paved road. Traffic diverted into the flat desert around us, engulfing the scene in dust. My driver jumped out and rushed toward the taxi driver, waving his arms and berating the guy for a crash that was likely his own fault. Men gathered, and I slouched low in my seat, pulling up my Afghan scarf to hide my face. My driver eventually realized it was risky to leave a foreigner sitting in an unfriendly crowd—but instead of giving up, he rushed over to the taxi and snatched the keys from the ignition. Then he sprinted back to our car, drove away, and left the taxi driver stranded and screaming in the middle of the highway. My driver wasn’t angry, just impelled to settle the score. Our vehicle limped back to the office of the contractor who owned the car. The driver’s boss seemed dismayed when he saw the crumpled grille, but listened to the story and smiled when the driver reached into his pocket and slammed the taxi keys on his boss’s desk. He got revenge; everything was okay.

  The same logic applied to air strikes. Afghans saw the international forces as cowardly when they called firepower from the sky. When a civilian died, whole families felt a need for revenge. Even well-aimed bombs, killing only armed insurgents, triggered a social system of call-ups, pushing the younger brothers or cousins of men slain in battle to replace them. Blood repaid blood. This stood out in our survey: even before we asked questions about bombings or civilian deaths, some Taliban raised the issue as a reason for war. Asked specifically about the air strikes, almost a third of them claimed their family members died in such incidents during the current war. That’s a lot of carnage: if true, it suggests that insurgents either joined the Taliban because their families were bombed, or the most rebellious villages suffered heavy losses in air strikes. Either way, insurgents used the bombings as a rallying cry, a reason for hitting back at the foreigners. In the same breath, some Taliban fighters complained about Russian air strikes in the 1980s, suggesting that memories of the Soviet invasion still fuelled the current insurgency. Horror stories of the Russian occupation must have sprung to life every time young Afghans heard the roar of jets. In other responses, however, it was clear that their anger stemmed from more recent events. A twenty-five-year-old man said he joined the Taliban after two of his uncles di
ed under air strikes in Pashmul, a village about fifteen kilometres west of Kandahar city that saw heavy combat, especially during Operation Medusa in 2006. He used civilian deaths as a justification for war: “The foreign troops came to Afghanistan, killed many innocent people and elders and bombed them, so I started jihad,” he said. In interview after interview, the armed fighters set out the logic of the war in the same way my driver talked about his car crash: they were wronged, and were fighting to make it right.

  It’s worth remembering that we did those interviews in 2007. Hundreds of civilians died that year as the war escalated and the tonnage of air strikes doubled. Afghanistan got bombed far more than Iraq, partly because its open terrain made for easier targeting. But the tonnages stopped rising in the following years, even as the conflict intensified, because military leaders realized they couldn’t make friends—couldn’t win the war, in other words—if they blasted villages flat. General Stanley McChrystal became especially strict about reducing air strikes during his year in command of the international forces. After General David Petraeus replaced him in the summer of 2010, however, the bombings intensified again. As troops withdraw in 2014, they will find themselves tempted to rely on air strikes to make up for their reduced numbers. A smaller contingent of US forces may stay behind in the years after the main withdrawal, and they will almost certainly need to call for air support to keep themselves safe. The risk will be that increased bombings could, in fact, undermine the overall security of the stay-behind forces as air strikes inspire more hatred.

  3. DESTROYING POPPY FIELDS MAKES THINGS WORSE.

  The Taliban not only summoned young men to fight for the sake of defending lives, but also livelihoods. Illegal opium stood far above any other source of cash flowing into the south, and millions of people depended on the industry to feed their families. Poppy fields stretched to the horizon, bursting with colour every spring: satellites spotted those fields easily, so the United Nations could accurately read the landscape and predict which provinces would yield the biggest crop. Across the south, in general, the places that blossomed with the most poppies also broke into the greatest violence. Our survey found the same overlap on the ground, too: a majority of the Taliban admitted a personal role in the drug industry, with more than 80 per cent of respondents saying they farmed opium themselves, and a similar percentage saying their family or friends make their living the same way.

  Those numbers supported the idea that opium and the insurgency grew in tandem, in the same places. Illegal activity flourished in lawless territory, not surprisingly. For several years, the international community applied a blunt logic to this problem: If the Taliban thrive amid the poppy fields, then why not burn the fields? This idea became popular as a way of both cutting a supply of ill-gotten cash to the insurgency and stemming the flow of drugs reaching world markets. The theory sounded appealing, but it proved to be horribly flawed. The foreigners paid for eradication teams to drive out into the countryside, hacking and burning the farmers’ only means of survival. Losing fields often meant crippling debts. Dealers killed men who couldn’t pay, or took their daughters as so-called “opium brides,” sometimes toddlers barely old enough to talk. This escalated as the foreign donors pushed for bigger eradication campaigns in 2005, 2006 and 2007. At its peak, the teams destroyed almost twenty thousand hectares in a single year, or roughly a tenth of the country’s crop. The United States wanted more, offering aircraft to spray the fields with herbicide, but other countries argued against it. They worried that eradicators were stirring up too much violence.

  Our survey supported the idea that destroying fields inspired people to fight: half of the Taliban respondents said they had been targeted by government eradication efforts, sometimes more than once. The Taliban could have been exaggerating the reach of the eradication, but their detailed accounts of the corrupt officials who ran these programs suggested they were speaking from bitter personal experience. Fighters also praised their Taliban comrades for success in driving away counter-narcotics programs, proudly describing how the eradicators could not touch insurgent strongholds. A twenty-five-year-old former driver, wearing dark sunglasses and a white turban, admitted he farmed poppy and claimed that the government destroyed his field.

  “So what was your reaction to the government then?” our researcher asked.

  “We are fighting against them,” he replied.

  “Okay, so you mean to say that you are fighting for poppies?”

  “No, no. We are only fighting for the approval of God. But as I said, they attacked us and it is our responsibility to fight against them.”

  It took years of bloody uprisings in the south before the international community started to understand that their war on drugs worsened the conflict. Eradication fell to a quarter its previous levels in 2008 and 2009, and dropped again in 2010 as counter-narcotics officials shifted their focus away from poppy growers. All sides of the war seemed to understand that the country would someday need a legal economy—that Afghanistan could not sustain itself forever as the world’s biggest opium supplier—but that impoverishing farmers wasn’t going to work. Interestingly, even the insurgent fighters viewed opium as a short-term solution. “We are forced to grow it. We don’t have a car or a road or anything, so what should we eat if we don’t grow it? Tell me. If we had factories, we would not grow the poppies,” said a twenty-eight-year-old tribesman. He cradled an assault rifle, with a bigger machine gun propped against the wall behind him, chatting knowledgeably about the cost of fuel for the water pumps that nourish his fields. Poppy remains the only profitable crop, he said, even though it’s morally distasteful. “Everyone knows that it is not good,” he said.

  Poppy eradication continues in Afghanistan. Countries that suffer the worst effects of cheap Afghan drugs, especially Russia, continue to push for stronger action against opium growers in the south, and some counter-narcotics officials still dream of razing the fields. That solution has not entirely lost its allure, and remains a potential disaster for the south.

  4. TALIBAN NATIONALISM LEAVES ROOM TO NEGOTIATE.

  Here is the most important thing I learned from surveying the Taliban: no matter how stupid, or stubborn, or ignorant, or xenophobic, or religiously misguided these men are—they are nonetheless nationalists. You could even call them patriots, in the ugliest sense of the word. During the interviews they didn’t seem to know much about the outside world, except that they wanted to keep many aspects of modernity out of their beloved Afghanistan. They showed no fondness for Pakistan, despite the support from that country for the insurgency, and every fighter in our survey rejected the legitimacy of the border, saying that the Pakistani cities of Quetta and Peshawar belong inside Afghanistan. If the conversation moved beyond the troubled relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan, however, their grasp of international affairs became hazy. They did not know how many countries joined the NATO alliance against them, knew nothing about those distant lands, and expressed disdain for such useless information. Faced with a multiple-choice question about Canada’s location, only one of forty-two fighters correctly guessed the country’s location north of the United States. Some of them did not even realize that the word Canada signifies a country: “It might be an old and destroyed city,” one of them said. They fared better with questions about the United States, but appeared to understand the Americans as mainly a direct equivalent of past empires that sent crusaders to the Middle East.

  The fighters’ political views seemed like a relic of bygone centuries, and the same applied to their social attitudes. Some of the most revealing moments in our interviews happened in the quiet interludes between questions, when the insurgents volunteered their own unprompted thoughts. Spontaneously, two of them started complaining about modern life in Kabul. They probably had never seen the capital, but the villagers loved trading stories about the sins and excesses of the city. “There are some things forbidden by Islam and the Koran, like alcohol, adultery and cinemas,” said a twenty
-seven-year-old farmer, with a belt of machine-gun bullets draped around his neck. Another insurgent talked about the corrupting power of foreign movies, possibly referring to the brisk trade in illegal pornography that flourished under the new regime. “They are enthusiastic about the dollar and cinemas,” the gunman said. “That’s why we are fighting them.”

  I had noticed the same kind of deep suspicion about Western social codes during my face-to-face conversations with insurgents. At the end of a meeting with a Taliban organizer at a guesthouse in Kabul, the insurgent patted my pillow and gave me a knowing look: “You have girls in your guesthouses, yes?” he said. The Taliban were convinced that foreigners spread moral rot.

  Still, the insurgents seemed willing to back any leader who would cleanse the capital of corrupting influences—whether that purification happened under Mullah Omar or some other figure. Their lack of personal loyalty became one of the biggest headlines of our project. It seemed amazing that twenty-four insurgents, more than half those surveyed, would be willing to look into a video recorder and declare their so-called “Commander of the Faithful” not essential to their war, and not necessarily the best leader for Afghanistan. Those responses were especially surprising from fighters whose other answers suggested total commitment to the cause. Some even suggested it needn’t be a Taliban government in Kabul at all, only that they wanted to influence the selection of a new leader. “We are not saying that it should be our government,” a fighter said. “But we want only a Muslim king.” They kept circling back to this idea, that the leadership of Afghanistan should depend only on a man’s willingness to implement their version of Islamic rules. They did not express any plans for influencing the world beyond the rugged lands of their ancestors. They had only the foggiest notion of the West, and primarily wanted to escape its reach. These did not seem like men who necessarily wanted to crash planes into distant cities, and most of them would never see a skyscraper in their lives.