Afghanistan (3 page)

25 November 2009: Pakistan announces it will prosecute seven alleged planners of the Mumbai attack.

1 December 2009: US presidential address on Afghanistan announces additional troop deployments but concentrates on an exit strategy, with troop withdrawals to begin in 2011.

PROLOGUE

“
The vortex is the point of maximum energy. All experience rushes into this vortex. All the energized past, all the past that is living and worthy to live. All MOMENTUM, which is the past bearing upon us, RACE, RACE-MEMORY, instinct charging the PLACID, NON-ENERGIZED FUTURE. The DESIGN of the future is in the grip of the human vortex. All the past that is vital, all the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex, NOW!”

—Ezra Pound, “The Turbine,”

BLAST, no. 1, 20 June 1914.

T
hey do not read a lot of Ezra Pound in South Waziristan, the Bajaur Agency of Pakistan, or the Doia Chopan district of Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province. If they did, some of the bearded hard men with their Kalashnikovs, laptop computers, Korans, and limitless faith in their cause would undoubtedly find his description appealing. The capital letters and demands for immediate action to sweep away a bankrupt and immoral status quo fits their mixture of absolutist totalitarian Islam and resentful nationalism, a created past intended to give direction and legitimacy to the desired future.

Where Pound opposed the modern world through poetry and his crankish love of totalitarian ideology, the hard men oppose the post-modern world
using explosives, crashing airplanes and bodies everywhere. The hard men are really not about building. They are about destroying, for all their belief that living under Islamic Sharia law in a united worldwide Sunni Khalifait is the path for humanity. The defeat of current elected governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan is a first, necessary, step. The Muslims that hold authority there are tools of an anti-Islamic world order and so are
takfir
, worse than infidels. There will be no place in the future they envision for Muslims who have put worldly power first; even less so for Shias and non-Muslims.

The isolation and underdevelopment of the Vortex that makes up the battlefields of Afghanistan and Pakistan and is trying to engulf the rest of those two struggling countries suits the hard men’s purpose. They are not fighting for development, for schools, clinics, and roads; they often destroy these when they have been built by outsiders or their money. Much as they will use, often effectively, modernity’s tools, they fundamentally oppose the idea of modernity. Modernity makes women immoral and men lust after money rather than living for honor and Islam, which they consider the proper end of existence. This is a vision of fundamentalists, those who look to return to a mythic Islamic past, not that of Islamists, those that see Islam as a sharp sword to clear away all the traditional and colonial hangovers that keep the Vortex poor and backwards. Most of Afghanistan’s Islamists are in Kabul, trying to modernize the country. A few are fighting with the Afghan insurgents despite philosophical differences. That is how the fundamentalist Mullah Omar, leader of the Afghan Taliban, and the Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the Hezb-e-Islami (HiH) party, ended up running parallel efforts in the Afghan insurgency, launched from the Pakistan side of the Vortex. They have targeted a government in Kabul that styles itself the Islamic republic of Afghanistan, contains democrats, conservatives, and Islamists alike, and has a constitution that makes Islamic Sharia the wellhead of Afghanistan’s laws.

Islam permeates and directs life, culture—and instinct—to an extent that outsiders find alien. The people of the region, certainly not limited to Pushtuns, know that they and their faith are always going to be there and that Pakistani and Afghan governments and especially infidel foreigners have always proved transient.

Pound’s invocation of the importance of race and race-memory would be embraced by many of the Pushtuns living in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Their oral tradition provides a very real race memory of resistance to outsiders and an embrace of Islam. It is a patriarchal and patrilineal race-memory, which puts aside the unpleasant fact that without the hard work done by women, everyone starves. It seeks an Islamic justification for its folkways and prejudices. What Pound called race-memory is not a crankish theory for the hard men. It is real, as real as tribal lineages, tradition, and laws—transmitted orally rather than what is understood by the readers of treatises—that guide their lives. People there have long memories of the past, which have been received from earlier generations.

Since 2001, Al Qaeda and the sympathizers of radical Islam have succeeded in adding another chapter to this memory, that Islam and their own culture are both under attack by a infidel conspiracy led by the US, and that only the people of the borderlands are uniquely situated to defeat this and wreak a terrible vengeance on those Muslims that would have made common cause with the infidels or have lived in peace next to them.

The hard men of the Vortex share Pound’s vision—insert the obligatory references to Islam and it could be used by them—as well as his predilection for looking for conspiracies that underlie the realities of everyday life. Pound painted a large bull’s-eye on the pre-1914 version of the established order of a Western, progressive, increasingly globalized world. The hard men who have never read him are going to have a shot at its present-day counterpart.

The better educated among them—they are by no means all illiterate fanatics—would note Pound’s date of publication, a week before the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his consort made their fatal 1914 visit to Sarajevo that ended in the gunsights of Gavrilo Princip. Princip was part of an organization trained and supported by the intelligence services of a neighboring country (Serbia in his case) and funded by that country’s general staff. A youth who resembled today’s teenage suicide bombers more than those that send them on their missions, he was inspired by a transnational ideology mixed with nationalism and religion that aimed to shape the future by creating a past in which the
only legitimate option was to fight to the death against what was seen as an alien occupying force.

Princip’s actions—not a cause but a trigger—brought about the truncated twentieth century (1914–91) of organized violence, ideology as an overweening organizing principle, and man-made mass death, much of it instigated by men who thought like Pound. Today’s hard men would like to use the same potent mixture to bring you their version of the twenty-first century. The West’s distance from the Vortex, its wealth and power are unlikely to provide adequate defenses. The hard men are fighting with Korans, Kalashnikovs, and computers to change your world and your life. Terrorism organized and inspired by the men in the Vortex has struck at what they consider the “primary enemy” in the US, UK, and Europe. The insurgencies being waged in both Afghanistan and Pakistan have the potential to have widespread impacts if they are successful. The globalized economy has had an impact on people’s lives worldwide; globalized terrorism will have no less.

The Vortex’s Multiple Conflicts

Welcome to the Vortex. Though it does not have a mailing address or a seat at the United Nations, it is a place as well as a mindset. The Vortex is the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan, divided by the Durand Line, the controversial British-surveyed 1893 division that today serves as the basis for the international border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is united by the Pushtun ethnicity of those who live on either side of its heart. But the Vortex affects much more than Pushtuns. It presents an existential threat to these two countries and the regions they border. It took decades to prepare and emerged in its current form from the changes flowing from the 2001 defeat of Al Qaeda and their Taliban allies in Afghanistan by Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, enabled by US and coalition special operations forces, intelligence, and air operations.

The Vortex started on the Pakistani side of the old Frontier, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), established and ruled by the national government of Pakistan and Baluchistan and North West Frontier Provinces (NWFP) of Pakistan, along the border with Afghanistan. There, Al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban were able to find
sanctuary, a sympathetic culture, and a Pakistani government that originally moved against only foreign terrorist leaders and plotters, leaving Afghan and Pakistani insurgents alike unmolested. These insurgents’ challenge to Western power, worldview, and conventions in the name of both Pushtun ethnicity and global Islam, was able to plug into a pre-existing Taliban culture and create the Vortex, a place where Western and what appear as non-Islamic ways (by a definition that would gain little support from legitimate theologians) were increasingly defined as illegitimate. The Taliban culture has built on the religious and political experience of the Afghan refugee camps, the political and societal frustrations of Pakistan’s Pushtuns facing underdevelopment in their home districts and exclusion from state power, and Pushtun nationalism. It espouses violent anti-modern (especially as it relates to liberalism and globalism), anti-US, anti-Western, anti-woman, anti-education, anti-rational (Pound would have loved that), and anti-secular views. It embraces all possible (and impossible) conspiracy theories and international jihad as a concept.

Those who have been nurtured by the Taliban culture in the Vortex have aimed to redefine power and authority on their own terms, first in the FATA—making use of changes in internal authority and breakdown of connections with the central government there—and then to bring it to Afghanistan and the rest of Pakistan. It spread from there, to most of southern and some of eastern Afghanistan and throughout that country wherever there was a receptive ethnic Pushtun population, with roots and branches both running throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan and connecting with transnational Islamic terrorism. By 2008–10, it was spreading farther through those two countries and had the potential to bring non-Pushtuns with grievances into a common struggle. In Afghanistan, few non-Pushtuns have joined with the insurgents. Fear of a resurgent Taliban outweighs the widespread disillusionment with the Afghan government and the foreign presence among Afghan’s non-Pushtun groups.

There are multiple threats and conflicts, rather than a unitary Armageddon, emerging from this Vortex. It has assumed an importance comparable to that of the divided states of Germany and Korea in the opening years of the Cold War. In 2008–10, few trends in this region were
running the right way. The return to power of civilian rule in Pakistan in 2008 was perhaps the high-water mark of democracy in the region. The failure of civilian rule to address Pakistan’s problems has been matched in Afghanistan by the widespread unpopularity of the Karzai government, the continued rise of the culture of corruption, and the widespread perception of fraud in the 2009 presidential election.
¹
In a leaked diplomatic cable in October 2008, British ambassador Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles warned that “The current situation (in Afghanistan) is bad, the security situation is getting worse, so is corruption, and the government has lost all trust. The presence of the coalition, in particular, its military presence, is part of the problem, not part of its solution. Foreign forces are the lifeline of a regime that would rapidly collapse without them. As such, they slow down and complicate a possible emergence from the crisis.”
²

Nor were foreigners the only ones concerned. In 2009, polling showed only 40 percent of Afghans thought the country was heading in the right direction, down from 77 percent in 2005; the percentage saying it was headed in the wrong direction has increased from six to 38 percent.
³
The terrorism threat in the Vortex has proven resilient—the absence of a major attack on the “distant enemies” of the US and UK does not mean that the capability has been removed. The insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan have grown and become more effective in almost every measurable way in these years. Opium cultivation, while becoming more concentrated in area, remains intense. While overall poppy production decreased from 2008 to 2009, it continues to contribute to Afghanistan’s culture of corruption, leads to crime and instability that in many areas cannot be distinguished from the insurgency, and provides resources for terrorists and insurgents alike. In no way are the US and its coalition partners close to achieving the result they want, and the potential for everything going up in flames in the face of unforeseen events remains very real. But while each of the Vortex’s conflicts is distinct and independent, looking at any one alone will miss the essentially regional challenge posed by them.

Terrorism is a worldwide threat. It is linked by a main circuit cable that runs from the Afghan border, through Pakistan’s tribal territories, to Karachi, London, and New York. Other links for funding and recruits
run to Arabia and the Gulf. Money for terrorism, insurgency, and narcotics flows along with remittances from expatriate workers. A sanctuary on the Pakistani side is now the base for Al Qaeda and many other terrorist organizations and individuals that were in Afghanistan at the time of the 9/11 attacks and largely withdrew intact to Pakistan.
⁴
In addition to waging terrorist campaigns in both countries, they have explicitly targeted the US and UK, providing inspiration if not hands-on direction to the hands that make the bombs or pull the triggers. Al Qaeda remains committed to achieving an attack that will dwarf that of 9/11.

The Afghan Taliban retreating to Pakistan after their 2001 defeat was able to join forces with a pre-existing Taliban culture that had started to flourish in preceding decades and the support networks that had been built for Pakistani-supported movements in Afghanistan and Kashmir, with the participation of Pakistani intelligence. These networks are shared with transnational terrorists and provide shared access to international funding and support from Pakistan’s terrorist groups and religious parties. The post-2001 insurgency in Afghanistan started as a cross-border conflict, though it has since found local supporters inside Pushtun Afghanistan and gained strength from Afghanistan’s continuing internal conflicts and foreign presence. The cross-border component of the insurgency remains important. The 434 cross-border attacks in the first six months of 2008 was a 40 percent increase from 269 in the same period in 2007.
⁵
2009 saw further increases.