Afghanistan (23 page)

Maulavi Abdul Latif Mansur, pre-2001 the nominal Minister of Agriculture, has been reported to be the head of the Quetta shura’s political committee. Abdul Qabir, the former head of the political committee, is reported to have been the Afghan Taliban’s military commander for eastern Afghanistan since 2007.
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He was reportedly captured by Pakistani security forces in 2005 but has apparently returned to action.
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Mullah Abdul Jalil, who served as foreign minister pre-2001, is thought to be an advisor to Mullah Omar and possibly the Quetta shura
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s shadow Minister of the Interior. Mullah Agha Jan Mu’tasim, who served as finance minister pre-2001, has been reported to be the former head of the Quetta shura’s finance committee and the former or current head of the political committee.

These men have been Mullah Omar’s comrades in arms since the 1980s. They mainly have their roots in Ghilzay tribes in Durrani-dominated provinces in the south. They tend to tolerate of necessity but distrust Sufic-influenced religious practices as non-Islamic and tribal loyalties as divisive and instead embrace a fundamentalist Islam without borders. They went to the same Deobandi-influenced madrassas in the FATA and fought together against the Soviets, owing at least nominal allegiance to the “Peshawar seven” parties, first to the Harakat-e-Inqilab-e-Islami of Mohammed Nabi Mohammedi and, as that declined, to the Hezb-e-Islami of Younis Khalis.

Other Afghan Taliban shuras in Pakistan operated by 2008–10, each with its own logistics and transportation support. Whether these resources are centrally allocated between them is uncertain. There is also a Rahbari shura, a subset of the Quetta shura chaired by Mullah Birader. This organization reportedly handles coordination between the Quetta shura and senior field commanders, who are also members. There is reportedly a Peshawar shura that, despite its name, is based in South
Waziristan and a Miran Shah shura that are both reportedly concerned with military operations while the Karachi shura handles logistics and the all-important outside funding.
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US MG Mark Milley described the Afghan Taliban as having “no unitary actor, no charismatic leader, a diffuse organization with similar—but not the same—structures.”
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The Afghan Taliban has appointed shadow provincial and district governors for Afghanistan.
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Originally, many of these Taliban-appointed governors remained in Pakistan, but by 2008–10 a number have moved inside Afghanistan.
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Several of these Taliban governors have been targeted and killed or captured, including those for Kandahar and Helmand provinces. In 2008–10, the Afghan Taliban claimed they were operating governing shuras in several southern provinces.
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They have installed Sharia courts, enforced taxation, and conscripted Afghans for fighting and labor. They have also publicized that there exist mechanisms for complaints against Taliban officials inside Afghanistan to be received. Ashraf Ghani, the former Afghan minister of finance, said, in 2009, “The Taliban has appointed governors, but these do not function in providing services to the populace on the model of the Chinese Communist or Malayan insurgents. They do have an ombudsman against their own officials, because the number of those that present themselves as Taliban and perpetrate terrible crimes has increased.”
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Taliban leaders at the lower level tend to be young, many too young to have fought in the anti-Soviet jihad. Few held power under the pre-2001 Taliban regime (and so did not share their loss of legitimacy). While Mullah Omar’s inner circle is still drawn largely from the Ghilzay tribes that provided most of the pre-2001 Afghan Taliban’s leadership, most of the other leaders have Durrani backgrounds.
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One of the most significant Taliban leaders who was not a comrade of Mullah Omar in the 1980s is the commander of the Tora Bora Front, Anwar-ul-Haq Mujahid, who is reportedly the current military commander for Nangarhar province. He is the son of the late Younis Khalis, head of the Hezb-e-Islami (Khalis) (HiK) party, an Islamist party that was one of the “Peshawar Seven” Sunni Afghan resistance parties supported by Pakistan in 1978–92. Mullah Omar and his inner circle were reportedly nominal HiK members in the late 1980s. Mujahid remains the
nominal head of HiK. He has extensive Khogiani Pushtun tribal links in Nangarhar.

Hekmatyar and Haqqanis

The Afghan insurgency has attracted few Afghan elites, secular or religious. The senior Afghan Taliban, some Pakistan-based Taliban, Hekmatyar, and Jaluladin Haqqani are veterans of the 1978–92 war against the Soviets and the 1992–2001 civil war. But many of the insurgent leadership come from the new generation, Pushtuns who spent 1978–92 growing up poor in a refugee camp or village in the FATA and attending the local madrassas.

The Afghan insurgents are strongest in areas where their leaders are already established. For example, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar remains popular among Pushtuns in his home town of Kunduz, even though he himself lacks a strong tribal identity and, as an Islamist and a modernizer, is ideologically opposed to the tribal system, though the Pushtun ethnicity of his supporters means he has had to pay lip service to it in the past. His group is most significant in Kunduz and elsewhere in the north. They are important in Kunar and Nuristan where they can muster a significant number of fighting men. They have also launched suicide attacks in Kabul and other cities. Hekmatyar remains popular among some Afghan Pushtuns. If he chose to run for parliament in Kunduz, he would probably win in a fair election.

Hekmatyar has been a major figure in Afghanistan’s politics since 1975, when he was one of the leaders of the Pakistan-backed abortive Islamist revolt against the Afghan government of President Prince Mohammed Daoud. Starting in 1978, he led the most radical Islamist of the seven Peshawar-based Sunni resistance parties, his personal faction of Hezb-e-Islami (HiH). This had the highest priority in receiving outside aid through much of the war against the Soviets. Hekmatyar’s group saw much fighting in Afghanistan, but he positioned himself to ultimately seize power in Kabul. This included carrying out an assassination campaign against pro-Western Afghan elites living in Pakistan and fighting against other resistance groups inside Afghanistan, especially those associated with Ahmad Shah Massoud.

HiH was Pakistan’s chosen policy instrument in Afghanistan from the 1980s to 1996, but his radical politics and lack of a tribal base made him unable to rally Afghan’s Pushtuns and he was displaced from favor with Pakistan by the Taliban. Since then, Hekmatyar has been in exile in Pakistan and Iran. After 2001, Hekmatyar made up with the Taliban, despite their ideological gap. Hekmatyar’s origins were as an Islamist, looking to religion to modernize a backwards Afghanistan, while the Taliban’s ideology is largely fundamentalist. They may use cell phones and laptops but have no use for modernization except to better promulgate Islam. Yet their reconciliation has been to their mutual advantage. Hekmatyar’s years of exile in Iran has given him links to the leadership, especially of the Revolutionary Guards, the bitterly anti-Shia Mullah Omar and the Afghan Taliban lack. Hekmatyar also has long-standing links to Al Qaeda; the “Afghan Arabs” fought on his behalf in 1992, trucked to Kabul by the ISI to try and displace Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance forces.

By 2008–10, Hekmatyar was said by several Afghan political figures to desire a settlement that would allow HiH to function in Afghanistan much as Hezbollah does in Lebanon, participating in parliament but retaining both an armed militia and criminal-economic networks and strong links with foreign patrons.
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If this is true, it would distinguish his own group from the Afghan Taliban’s insistence on the primacy of an armed struggle to ultimate victory. HiH is likely to demand top-down negotiations to achieve this goal.

Yet there has been little evidence of Hekmatyar being open to negotiations, despite unconfirmed reports of talks being held with representatives of the Karzai government in Saudi Arabia. Only a few lower-level HiH figures, mainly from Nangarhar, have joined with Kabul. Other former HiH leaders have joined with Wahabi-backed groups in the Kunar valley in a competition dating back to the 1980s. Hekmatyar and his inner circle of “hard men,” despite many rumors to the contrary, remain aloof and intact.

Jaluladin and Sirajjuddin Haqqani can claim a block of support from their Jadrani Pushtun tribe. They also controlled, in 2008–10, a sizable area of Pakistan’s North Waziristan. They also have access to funding
from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf and strong links to both Pakistani radical parties and Al Qaeda, as Osama bin Laden himself fought alongside the older Haqqani against the Soviets. Siraj also has close ties to Pakistan’s ISI.
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David Rohde, a
New York Times
reporter held prisoner in the FATA in 2009, has written: “My suspicions about the relationship between the Haqqanis and the Pakistani military proved to be true. Some American officials told my colleagues at
The Times
that Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, turns a blind eye to the Haqqanis’ activities. Others went further and said the ISI provided money, supplies and strategic planning to the Haqqanis and other Taliban groups.”
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“Siraj is part of a younger, more aggressive generation of Taliban senior leadership that is pushing aside the formerly respected elders,” said Army LTC Dave Anders, former director of operations for Combined Joint Task Force-82 in 2007. “Now, the Haqqani network is clearly in the hands of Siraj, and the face of it is evolving, becoming more violent and self serving.” MAJ Chris Belcher, then spokesman for CJTF-82, added that Sirajjudin’s links have increased his capabilities and Sirajjudin’s “extended reach brings foreign fighters from places like Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Chechnya, Turkey and Middle Eastern countries into Afghanistan.”
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The Haqqanis gained prominence in January-February 2002 as they were able to organize, secure, and feed many of the Al Qaeda and Taliban “bitter enders” that retreated into the FATA from Tora Bora in Afghanistan following Operation Anaconda, the ultimately unsuccessful US military operation to cut them off. Once they were in the sanctuary of the FATA, Sirajjuddin Haqqani was able to resolve tensions between these groups and their hosts, the local Pushtuns. In 2008–10 he has been involved with organizing attacks against Kabul itself. “Most suicide bombs here [Kabul] are Haqqani. Haqqani is most responsible for suicide bombings. He is the closest to Al Qaeda of any insurgent [leader],” according to COL Patrick McNiece, ISAF deputy director of intelligence in 2008.
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A Diverse Insurgency

The insurgency is limited on an ethnic (almost purely Pushtun or foreign) basis. While most terrorist/insurgent action has cross-border roots, from
Pakistan, internal insurgency has been increasing, especially in five key southern and eastern provinces. The insurgency is heavily cross-border. In 2008, the amount of cross-border activity increased 28 percent, and previous years had seen increases of ten to twenty percent.
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In 2008 “72 percent of the incidents happened in ten percent of the territory and [directly] involved six percent of the population,” according to BG Richard Blanchette, Canadian Armed Forces, the ISAF spokesman.
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Polling shows that the impact of the insurgency on Afghans is also concentrated; in 2009, while only 14 and 23 percent of Afghans in war-torn Helmand and Kandahar provinces respectively have a positive view of local security, 75 percent of those in Kunduz (which has some ongoing insurgent activity) and 76 percent of those in secure Balkh province did.
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The insurgency has been growing. GEN David Petraeus said: “2009 showed a sixty percent increase in security incidents above 2008, which in turn was an increase over 2007. . . . The total spiked at 900 in July 2009. In 2009 Badghis and Kunduz provinces [in the north] included a district in red [indicating 51–100 security incidents] which were not there before.”
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Only Pushtuns were fighting Kabul and the coalition, with the exception of a relatively few individuals from other groups. The Afghan insurgents are generally unwilling to accept a major Western role or presence in Afghanistan. They include Pakistani radicals, many of them focusing on Afghanistan rather than Pakistan, reflecting, among other influences, the direction of their Pakistani patrons, including the military. Former pre-2001 Afghan Taliban members are one of the largest insurgent groups along with former Khalqis (who largely found their Pushtun ethnicity and anti-urban mindset suited them to cooperation with the Taliban) and those linked to them by religious practice.

In 2008–10, the insurgency had evolved into several different areas, each with different insurgent (and counter-insurgent) groups. The south is the heart of the insurgency, in Kandahar, Helmand, Uruzgan, and Zabul provinces, corresponding to the coalition Regional Command South (RC-S).
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It extends also up the main road to the west, to Herat and in pockets beyond, almost to Turkmenistan. This insurgency is rooted in the infrastructure and networks created in Pakistan’s
Baluchistan. The insurgents are primarily those identified as Afghan Taliban, but with many foreigners based in Pakistan. The number of foreign fighters has increased in 2008–10, reflecting the heavy losses to local Taliban in 2005–07. Supposedly, the Afghan Taliban’s Quetta shura and Mullah Omar have the closest links and most direction over this area. It is also the area where the Pushtun tribal system is still the strongest, although the realities of how it interacts with the conflict differs from place to place. But all politics is local, and in these provinces, local politics are Pushtun tribal politics. These provinces are also the heart of Afghanistan’s poppy production, and this is the area where the insurgency is closely linked to it.