Afghanistan (22 page)

In 2001, the Taliban had found few willing to fight to the death for them except some foreigners. By 2008–10, there was no shortage of insurgent fighters: Afghans, Pakistanis, and a new generation of foreigners. Those Afghans fighting in the insurgency were, in 2008–10, almost exclusively Pushtuns. The current Afghan insurgents have, like the 1994–96 Afghan Taliban, been able to present themselves internally as the banner carriers of Pushtun nationalism and the restorers of Pushtun power in Kabul while holding fast to a transnational ideology of Sunni Islamic radicalism. Post-2001, the Afghan Taliban and other insurgent groups have managed to come out from under Osama bin Laden’s effective control. The post-2001 Taliban has become the leading Afghan
insurgent group, dominating but not controlling a diverse insurgent coalition, but has retained its links with Al Qaeda. But while Al Qaeda focuses on its global mission, the post-2001 Afghan Taliban instead aims at seizing state power in Afghanistan as part of an insurgent coalition that includes, among other groups, its pre-2001 rival HiH.
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Before 2001, many of the cultural restrictions that made the Taliban a brutal occupying force in Kabul or the Hazara Jat were applied more leniently—or at least more haphazardly—in the Taliban heartland of southern Afghanistan. The current Afghan insurgency combines some of this approach. In many predominantly Pushtun areas, the insurgents make use of outreach to local inhabitants. But more brutal and direct methods are also widespread. The Afghan insurgency is a mix of Afghan Taliban Pushtun origins and a potential Islamic Khmer Rouge. Xenophobia has been exalted, reflecting the need to de-legitimate the foreign presence that supports Kabul and reflecting the Al Qaeda-provided narrative that Afghanistan is one front in a global struggle against Crusaders and Zionists. It builds on a shared sense of deep humiliations to Muslims worldwide.

The worst crimes of the pre-2001 Afghan Taliban and their allies—the massacres in the Hazara Jat and Mazar-e-Sharif, the despoliation of the Shomali Plain, the repressive rule in Kabul and other cities—are likely to be the standing operating procedures of their successors. In south Afghanistan by 2008–10, the murder of pro-government religious figures and aid workers and the massacre of civilian Afghans have been widespread. Perhaps most telling, the intimidation of rural Afghan Pushtun leadership figures has forced many to flee to Kandahar, Kabul, or Dubai. Many of these were the bedrock of local support for the pre-2001 Afghan Taliban. The Afghan insurgent coalition is a different type of force.

Despite, and in some ways because of, the unprecedented coalition military effort in Afghanistan post-2001 (with 43 countries contributing troops at its height) and a number of major battlefield successes, the Afghan insurgency has continued to gather strength. Insurgent and terrorist attacks rose from a maximum of 400 per month in 2005 to 1,000 per month in 2007. By 2008, attacks in the provinces around Kabul, increased crime, and attacks inside the city led to the US decision to
commit an additional 17,000 personnel in early 2009. Following a strategic review by the incoming Obama administration in Washington, the senior US and NATO leadership in Afghanistan completed their own reassessment that showed a need for further coalition assets and an expansion of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) to eventually take over the burden of the conflict. It was widely believed that things will get worse in Afghanistan before they can get better.

Insurgents in Afghanistan

“The insurgents share the same short term goals, to get rid of the foreigners and get rid of the governors. They have no common vision of the future but work together well and their differences have not been sufficient to drive a wedge between them,” in the words of COL Patrick McNiece, USA, ISAF deputy director of intelligence in 2008.
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The Afghan Taliban is the largest single member of a diverse coalition fighting inside Afghanistan. The Afghan Taliban continues to demonstrate an ability to unite Pushtuns in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, cutting across tribal and local loyalty, a reason why the Pakistani security services have used them as a tool of national strategy in Afghanistan in the past. The Afghan Taliban may have had had their origins in Pakistan’s goal, dating back to the 1970s, to use Afghanistan for “strategic depth”; post-2001 it turned out that it was Pakistan that was providing the Taliban and their allies with their own “strategic depth.”

Part of what GEN David Petraeus called the “syndicate of extremists that are the problem in Regional Command—East”
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, other insurgent groups include the Hezb-e-Islami (HiH) of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was no longer involved in the day-to-day command of operations by 2009. Another affiliated insurgent group is led by Jaluladin Haqqani, a 1978–92 field commander with strong “Afghan Arab” ties, in who was in failing health or possibly deceased by 2009 and his son Sirajjuddin Haqqani. There are also Wahabi groups including Arabs, Pakistanis, and Afghans operating mainly in Kunar and Nuristan. A large number of basically criminal groups and narcotics traffickers claim nominal allegiance to the insurgency.

Except for some of these latter—crime knows no ethnicity—the
members of insurgent groups appear to primarily consist of Afghan Pushtuns and Pakistani Pushtuns fighting together, reflecting the insurgents’ ideology that the border dividing them is illegitimate. All these groups also have substantial numbers of foreigners, mainly non-Pushtuns from Pakistan but also Arabs and even Muslim volunteers from the UK and Europe. Pakistani insurgent groups fighting in Afghanistan such as the Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM, Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law), Jaish-e-Mohammed (Arm of Mohammed), and the Pakistani Taliban umbrella group, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, Students’ Movement of Pakistan), are also fighting in Afghanistan.

Afghan and Pakistani insurgents fighting in Afghan, as well as those fighting in Pakistan, have been able to draw personnel, funding and support from Deobandi-influenced Islamic radical groups in Pakistan which have overlapping memberships, such as Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI, Union of the Clergy of Islam), Jaish-e-Mohammed, and Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Righteous). These groups have shown an ability to change identity and focus, able to adopt new names or present themselves in Pakistan as a charitable group. The Pakistani Jamiat-e-Islami (JI, Union of Islam), which has exclusive membership, has been an exception; it has long-standing links with the Afghan HiH and its members have tended to support that group. The large numbers of non-Pushtun Pakistanis that have fought in Afghanistan since the 1990s were in large part recruited through these Pakistani Islamic radical groups.

These Pakistani groups and individuals have been important for the insurgency in Afghanistan as well as that in Pakistan. Even after Pakistan ended its support for cross-border insurgency in Kashmir, links with exiled Kashmiri militants in the FATA and Baluchistan continued to be fostered by Afghan insurgents. Such Pakistani groups and their members were already mobilized and radicalized, in many cases, and easily transitioned to other Afghan and Pakistani insurgent organizations. Even the Pushtun nationalist Afghan insurgents, bitterly fighting their own non-Pushtun countrymen, welcomed non-Pushtun Pakistani volunteers as honored guests. For example, many of the original Pakistani Taliban in the FATA’s Bajaur agency were JUI members from areas outside the
FATA, who only took up the Taliban name to gain Pushtun recruits after the initial insurgent successes in South Waziristan. JI members played a major role as auxiliaries to the ISI in Pakistan’s brutal counter-insurgency campaign in what was East Pakistan in 1971.

In practice, all these Afghan and Pakistani insurgent groups have some links, ranging from close integration to limited cooperation, with Al Qaeda and other transnational terrorist groups. This has included sharing technology and tactics, even among groups where there is not an ideological link, and has allowed blowback from Iraq and lessons from other insurgencies to affect Afghanistan and Pakistan. This has ranged from more lethal improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and roadside bombs to adapting effective political and propaganda themes.
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Afghanistan and Pakistani insurgent groups have been widely reported to share access to logistics, infrastructures, and networks running throughout Pakistan and to the sources of support outside the country. They included the networks between Al Qaeda and other transnational terrorist organizations; what remains of the support networks created by the Pakistani security services to support guerrillas in Afghanistan and Kashmir and sympathetic movements and political parties at home; networks of patrons and clients enabled by resources provided from outsider supporters; and networks of religious leaders, linked by roots in the same madrassas. ADM Eric Olson, combatant commander of US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), has said the Afghan insurgency is “about genealogy and theology more than ideology.”
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Yet, despite shared access to these networks, it appears that what coordination exists between the different coalition members, much as in the 1978–92 war, is through local coordination between field commanders backed up by a top-down resource allocation process imposed by outside aid donors. Yet at the operational level, the different insurgent groups have demonstrated an ability to pull together coalitions for major operations. For example, the force that attacked and defeated a US-ANA outpost in the Pech valley of Kunar province in July 2008 was estimated to be over 200 strong and included large numbers of Pakistani insurgents as well as Afghan Taliban. An even larger force overran a US—ANA outpost outside Komdesh in Nuristan in October 2009.

This does not all work smoothly; Mullah Omar has supposedly been in conflict with Behtullah Mehsud, head of TTP until his death in an UAV attack in August 2009, over the latter’s strong links to Al Qaeda. Another source of the conflict was that Behtullah Mehsud was threatening the same Pakistani military that was providing Mullah Omar and the Quetta shura effective sanctuary in Baluchistan.

The insurgency in Afghanistan brings together groups that would often just as readily fight each other, even to a greater extent than the fractious Afghan resistance of 1978–92. Some of these conflicts have been long-running and violent. In Kunar and Nuristan, HiH and Wahabi-funded groups have been rivals since the 1980s. Many of the foreign insurgent fighters in Afghanistan, Pakistani well as Arab, are ignorant of local ways and often disdainful of the Afghans. This often leads to resentment and violence. Indeed, in much of Pushtun Afghanistan, the mosaic of tribal and sub-tribal divisions means that Pushtuns from another (or rival) tribe can encounter as much xenophobia as the Punjabis or Arabs that often make themselves hated by the local inhabitants. They can be considered foreigners as much as Europeans, despite the ties of shared Islam. Often, tensions over religious practice lead to divisions or violence.

The Afghan Taliban

There is no central Afghan insurgent command nor a central source of money or logistics, although the different groups may share and overlap. Mullah Omar remains the titular head of the Afghan Taliban, as he has been since at least 1994, but his power and authority have changed. He no longer provides the direct charismatic leadership and dispute resolution that he did during the Taliban’s rise to power in the 1990s.

By 2008–10, the Quetta shura was reportedly able to make strategic decisions and allocate resources to implement them; the spread of the Afghan insurgency among Pushtuns in northern Afghanistan and to target troops from Germany, Italy, and Spain to encourage their withdrawal was reported to have been the results of such high-level action by the Quetta shura.
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The Quetta shura have also, when practical, issued precise operations orders and conducted structured “lessons learned” processes, including a formal campaign review at
the end of each year, at the end of which Mullah Omar announces guidance and intent for the coming year.
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The involvement of the Quetta shura in decision-making increased in 2008–10, apparently reflecting the heavy losses of mid-level commanders, especially in southern Afghanistan, in 2005–07, especially when the Taliban tried to hold their ground against coalition forces. “The high-level guys’ command and control is from Quetta by cell phone; mid-level guys do not like being led in this way. It takes higher level guys to do coordination,” said COL McNiece.
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The Afghan Taliban of 2008–10 is part of a loose coalition where their pre-2001 predecessor was a failed attempt at a unitary organization. This makes it hard to negotiate a settlement with an organization largely created to wage insurgency on autopilot. In many cases, the insurgent groups may share the same name without being part of a unitary organization. The Taliban has followed Al Qaeda’s franchise approach, allowing their name to be used by associated groups. The multiple groups that made up the Pakistani Taliban have never been under the operational control of Mullah Omar. The groups had called themselves “Taliban” for years before 14 of them eventually joined together in December 2007 to become the Pakistani Taliban umbrella group, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, Students’ Movement of Pakistan). Other groups, including those involved in criminal activity, appear to have adopted the name without permission. All of this is evidence that the Taliban remains a powerful “brand name” that apparently has an appeal not limited to Afghanistan and the Pakistani borderlands. The suicide bombings in central Asia in summer 2009 suggest one direction where the Taliban may spread instability through example even if it is not an explicit policy. The IJU and IMU have both modeled themselves closely on the Taliban, even though most of their recent support has been from Al Qaeda.

There are no explicit factions. All of the Afghan Taliban owes at least nominal allegiance to Mullah Omar and the Quetta shura. The Afghan Taliban’s Quetta shura has functioned largely openly since 2001; and this appears to be their major decision-making body. Pakistan claimed to have shut it down in mid-2008, forcing its dispersal to smaller villages in Baluchistan, but there is no evidence that this is
the case. However, the Quetta shura reportedly was by 2008–10 meeting in different locations, including in Karachi and elsewhere in Pakistan as well as inside Afghanistan.
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Along with Mullah Omar, participants in this shura are thought to include Mullah Birader Akhund, his lieutenant and first deputy, and others of his inner circle who shared Mullah Omar’s background.