Leave the Mountain People Alone

The following is copied from an email discussion with friends:

Part 1 - How the U.S. Gave Birth to the Taliban

Dear Friends and Strangers,

Cultures are complex and I think that's part of where we went wrong in Afghanistan.  We focused on certain aspects of Afghan culture, but haven't had a good understanding of why their culture is the way it is.  

We are looking at Afghanistan from the perspective of a globe spanning empire.  The Afghan people are on the margins of that empire with a dramatically different perspective.

I don't think that empires are either good or bad in and of themselves.  But the fact that the United States is at the center of a global empire does affect much of our domestic politics as well as our international interventions.  We are blessed and cursed within being the locus of power which is manifest around the world.  How many Americans are aware of the extent to which Afghanistan was changed by U.S. military aid to the mujahedin rebels based in Pakistan during the 1980s: 

In the summer of 1979, over six months before the Soviets moved in, the US State Department produced a memorandum making clear how it saw the stakes, no matter how modern-minded Taraki might be, or how feudal the mujahedin: “The United States’ larger interest … would be served by the demise of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.” The report continued, “The overthrow of the DRA [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan] would show the rest of the world, particularly the Third World, that the Soviets’ view of the socialist course of history as being inevitable is not accurate.” ...

In September 1979 Taraki was killed in a coup organized by Afghan military officers. Hafizullah Amin was installed as president. He had impeccable western credentials, having been to Columbia University in New York and the University of Wisconsin. Amin had served as the president of the Afghan Students Association, which had been funded by the Asia Foundation, a CIA pass-through group, or front. After the coup Amin began meeting regularly with US Embassy officials at a time when the US was arming Islamic rebels in Pakistan. Fearing a fundamentalist, US-backed regime pressing against its own border, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in force on December 27, 1979. ...

American DEA agents were fully apprised of the drug running of the mujahedin in concert with Pakistani intelligence and military leaders. In 1983 the DEA’s congressional liaison, David Melocik, told a congressional committee, “You can say the rebels make their money off the sale of opium. There’s no doubt about it. These rebels keep their cause going through the sale of opium.” But talk about “the cause” depending on drug sales was nonsense at that particular moment. The CIA was paying for everything regardless. The opium revenues were ending up in offshore accounts in the Habib Bank, one of Pakistan’s largest, and in the accounts of BCCI, founded by Agha Hasan Abedi, who began his banking career at Habib. The CIA was simultaneously using BCCI for its own secret transactions. 

 

The DEA had evidence of over forty heroin syndicates operating in Pakistan in the mid-1980s during the Afghan war, and there was evidence of more than 200 heroin labs operating in northwest Pakistan...  Such were the men to whom the CIA was paying $3.2 billion a year to run the Afghan war, and no person better epitomizes this relationship than Lieutenant General Fazle Huq, who oversaw military operations in northwest Pakistan for General Zia, including the arming of the mujahedin who were using the region as a staging area for their raids. ...

The impact of the Afghan war on Pakistan’s addiction rates was even more drastic than the surge in heroin addiction in the US and Europe. Before the CIA program began, there were fewer than 5,000 heroin addicts in Pakistan. By 1996, according to the United Nations, there were more than 1.6 million. The Pakistani representative to the UN Commission on Narcotics, Raoolf Ali Khan, said in 1993 that “there is no branch of government where drug corruption doesn’t pervade.”  ...  By 1994 the value of the heroin trade in Pakistan was twice the amount of the government’s budget. A Western diplomat told the Washington Post in that year that “when you get to the stage where narco-traffickers have more money than the government it’s going to take remarkable efforts and remarkable people to turn it around.”

In February 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev pulled the Soviet troops out of Afghanistan, and asked the US to agree to an embargo on the provision of weapons to any of the Afghan mujahedin factions, who were preparing for another phase of internecine war for control of the country. President Bush refused, thus ensuring a period of continued misery and horror for most Afghans. The war had already turned half the population into refugees, and seen 3 million wounded and more than a million killed. The proclivities of the mujahedin at this point are illustrated by a couple of anecdotes. ...

In September 1996 the Taliban, fundamentalists nurtured originally in Pakistan as creatures of both the ISI and the CIA, seized power in Kabul, whereupon Mullah Omar, their leader, announced that all laws inconsistent with the Muslim Sharia would be changed. Women would be forced to assume the chador and remain at home, with total segregation of the sexes and women kept out of hospitals, schools and public bathrooms. The CIA continued to support these medieval fanatics who, according to Emma Bonino, the European Union’s commissioner for humanitarian affairs, were committing “gender genocide.”

So there's a lot of history that we don't know about. President Biden said:

American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves...  We gave them every tool they could need... We gave them every chance to determine their own future.  What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.   

But I think the Afghans were right not to oppose the Taliban when it became clear that they would win.  More war was averted, and Afghanistan has suffered too much as a pawn on the front lines of a war between opposing empires.  This context can help us to digest the podcast interview with Brig. Gen. Khoshal Sadat, a former Afghan deputy minister for security. 

Hugs,

Dan

Part 2 - Leave Mountain People Alone

Here's a relatively short and readable history of the Pashtun and Afghanistan as a whole: The Pashtun Will Outlast All Empires, but Can They Hold Afghanistan’s Center?  

In the Pashtun world, everything must be decided by a jirga (assembly). They happen at every level – home, village, clan, tribe, whenever necessary. The number of participants varies from a dozen to thousands. I’ve been to a few. It’s a fascinating exercise in direct democracy.

I wish the Afghan people success.  It won't be easy.

In Afghanistan, prior to the latest horrendous four decades of war, the center of the rural political order revolved around landowning khans. As a rule, they were allies of the state. But then, starting with the 1980s jihad, this old elite was smashed by young, self-made military commanders who rapidly built their own political bases. The new generation, who fought NATO on the ground, now also expects to have a future in the new Kabul arrangement. As far as state building goes, this will be extremely tricky to negotiate.

So the big question now is how the old Pashtun breed, having learned the lessons of their dismal governing experience in 1996-2001, will be able to circumvent the inherent weakness of every Afghan central government. The periphery tribal system is bound to remain very strong, with nearly autonomous territories controlled by warlords that are not tribal chiefs, but in fact competitors for regional power and sources of income that should be feeding the state coffers.

Mountainous regions generally resist centralized control as we see around the world in places like the Appalachians (hillbillies), Peru (Andes), Chechnya (Caucasus), the Balkans, the Scottish Highlands, and Afghanistan.  Mountainous regions have low population density and are costly to occupy and rule.  I lived in the Philippines for a couple of years and learned that rebels there hide out in the mountains.  It's a fact of life that geography shapes cultures as much or more so than religion.  In Why Are People Who Live in Mountainous Regions Almost Impossible to Conquer?, T. X. Hammes makes this point:

The English first began serious efforts to subdue Scotland in the twelfth century, but it took centuries of fighting before the Act of Union joined the two countries in 1707. Even this did not end Scottish resistance as the Scots rebelled in 1715 and 1745—and argue about independence to this day. The Russians have been fighting on and off in the Caucasus since the early 1700s, and still struggle to suppress terrorist groups in the region. The Maronite Christians of Lebanon have held their mountains against Muslims for over a thousand years. 

Outside powers can win against mountain people but it takes decades to centuries. Afghans, Chechens, Kurds, Montagnards (which literally means “mountain people” in French), Scots, Welsh, Swiss, Druze and Maronite Christians have all repeatedly seen off outsiders. Although the Scots and Welsh were finally integrated into the United Kingdom, it took centuries to conquer each nation...

Virtually every mountain society has stories of outside invaders turned away. These stories form a central element in the people’s identities. Also central to mountain identities are the long-running internal feuds. Families and clans have engaged in disputes that have lasted for centuries. Inevitably outsiders who enter the mountains get drawn into these feuds although they rarely understand them. In her book No Friends but the Mountains, Judith Matloff takes the reader on an intimate tour of mountain societies from the Sierra Madre to the Caucasus to the Himalayas and Andes. She notes that while mountains contain only 10 percent of the world’s population, they were home to twenty-three of the twenty-seven wars at the time of her writing. She also highlights the blood feuds that complicate governance in the mountains. 

 Switzerland, now seen as one of the most stable, democratic and prosperous nations in the world, took centuries to work out its internal government issues. First formed in 1291 by an alliance of three cantons, it was not until 1848 the Swiss agreed to unify under a single government. Prior to that, there was a great deal of internal conflict. Even today, the twenty-six cantons and three thousand communes (municipalities) retain a great deal of independence in deciding local issues...

Clearly, “Leave mountain people alone” should be a rule of thumb at least as prominent as “Never fight a land war in Asia.”  ...

Even if an outside force does take control of a mountainous region, it will find it very difficult to maintain control. Unlike most lowland societies, mountain societies are physically fragmented, which leads to social fragmentation. While river valleys and plains provide natural lines of communication, which tend to unify a society, often by conquest, mountain ridges separate communities. In particularly rugged terrain, villages as little as ten miles apart by direct line can take a day or more to reach on foot. And during winter, they may not be able to visit each other at all. Just as important, mountain societies do not consistently produce the large surpluses necessary to support a bureaucratic government and thus have only infrequently been able to afford or need a central government to protect that surplus. In contrast, lowland societies have historically produced surpluses, have needed a government to protect those surpluses and developed the stratified social structures to do so. The presence of surpluses and lack of defensible terrain provided the incentive and the resources for strong men to unify these lowland regions. While most lowland societies become unified political entities, mountain societies usually remain fragmented. An invader must deal with each small political entity (family, clan, tribe, etc.) and with the long-term conflicts between them if the outsider hopes to control the mountain populations...

Yet terrain only explains part of the difficulty of “pacifying” mountain people—and the least significant part. Culture is a much greater problem. Mountain people tend to be clannish, inwardly focused, belligerent toward outsiders and tough. Constant infighting among clans and families insures their fighting skills and toughness are continually honed. Between 1991 and 2012, over ten thousand Albanians died in feuding—up to 20 percent of all males in Albania’s mountain communities. David B. Edward’s Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier highlights the role conflict between cousins plays in Afghan society. Edward describes how cousins compete to lead their generation of the family. These competitions are often violent. “The word in Pashto for ‘male father’s-side first cousin’ is tarbur, which is, at the same time, also one way of saying ‘enemy’ in Pashto.” 

Yours in geography and wishing the best for people of whatever ethnicity around the world,

Dan