How Do You Solve A Problem Like the Pashtun?

Charlie: Thank you for the introduction and the welcome.

Against the backdrop of the joint Afghan & Canadian operations against Taliban fighters near Kandahar it seems appropriate to take a look at the current issue of International Security which has two articles on Afghanistan. Each takes a look at a different aspect of the roots of the security challenges there and provides some competing policy recommendations for the US and its allies.

The Arguments

First off, in "The Rise of Afghanistan’s Insurgency," Seth Jones explores the emergence of the insurgency in Afghanistan in the wake of Operation Enduring Freedom. Jones argues that the dominant explanations for the emergence of internal conflict/civil wars offered by the social science literature (grievances, particularly of the ethnic variety and economic opportunism) do not apply to Afghanistan.

On the ethnic front, he contends that there is not much evidence to support the ethnic grievance argument: only certain Pashtun groups support the Taliban, while the central government has done a reasonable job of balancing representation among the country’s various ethnic groups. On the economic front, poppy cultivation and narco-trafficking are a result, in his estimation, of the insurgency/instability, not its cause.

Instead, Jones makes the case that the collapse of authority in Afghanistan post-OEF and the new government’s inability to provide basic services as well as law & order across the country created the necessary space for an insurgency to emerge. That is did so is attributed to Jones’ second factor: the radical Sunni ideologies of the Taliban, Hisb-i-Islami and Al Qaeda. In this situation: "Much of the local Afghan population was motivated to support the Taliban—or too fearful to oppose it—because of governance failure."

From an academic perspective, Jones can say with some justification that his arguments (which probably appear to be fairly straightforward to many readers of this blog) are challenging some of the orthodoxy on internal conflict. Without slighting Jones, however, this is probably as much an indictment of the state of social science research on insurgencies as anything else.

In contrast to Jones’ structural based argument with its focus on governance, Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason advance a cultural argument in "No Sign Until the Burst of Fire." Drawn crudely they are telling us "It’s the Pashtuns, stupid!" Since October 2001, thousands of Taliban fighters and their senior leadership have found sanctuary in Pakistan’s FATA, NWFP and Baluchistan. As Johnson and Mason point out,

These areas coincide almost exclusively with the area of Pakistan overwhelmingly dominated by the Pashtun ethnic group. The Taliban and the other Islamic extremist insurgent elements operating on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border are almost exclusively Pashtuns, with a sprinkling of radicals from non-border ethnicities. The implications of this salient fact—that most of Pakistan’s and Afghanistan’s violent religious extremism, and with it much of the United States’ counterterrorism challenge, are centered within a single ethno linguistic group—have not been fully grasped by a governmental policy community that has long downplayed cultural dynamics.

With this observation in hand, the authors ask an important question: Why have the Pashtuns been so accommodating to the Taliban/Al Qaeda while their tribal neighbors (be they Baluch, Uighurs or Chitrals) have largely resisted these radical Islamic ideologies?

Johnson and Mason point to the unique social code of Pashtunwali (the way of the Pashtun), which holds personal independence, honor, revenge and chivalry as sacrosanct. According to the authors, Pashtunwali has long made the Pashtun inherently conservative, resistant to external authority and engendered a consensual form of governance and decision-making within tribes. It has also, at times, made them susceptible to religious insurgencies when their society came under great pressure be it internal or external.

Over the last thirty years, Pashtun society has come under sustained assault. The Pakistani state’s attempts to foster Islam (rather than ethnicity) as the primary identity in the Northeast (which was aided and abetted by the Saudis and their "gentle and inclusive" brand of Islam), following Bangladeshi independence, coupled with the mass dislocations of Pashtuns in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (which for many meant life in refugee camps away from "traditional" village society), combined to shred the Pashtuns social fabric while increasingly radicalizing them. In many places, the traditional role played by tribal elders and jirgas was usurped by mullahs. As a result, the Pashtun tribal structures have been eroded by Islamist extremism. While Jones and Mason note that the Taliban is hardly the first "mad mullah movement" to beset the Pashtuns, the length of its tenure (both in Afghanistan and in "exile" in Pakistan) has allowed it to alter Pashtun society in ways that previous jihadi movements were unable to do.


The Recommendations

Following on from his belief that the lack of governance is at the heart of the matter, Jones advocates extending "governance into the rural areas of the country. This includes providing key essential services such as electricity to the population." These efforts are to be coupled with the establishment of effective law & order. This will require increasing the abilities of the police while curbing the power of the warlords. At present, Jones estimates that there is a gap in the security forces (Afghan + NATO/U.S.) of 150,000. With NATO countries largely unwilling to contribute more troops and the U.S. largely unable to do so, training and mentoring local Afghan forces will be a high priority. Finally, Jones believes that the U.S. must lean heavily (via loan/aid conditionality) on the new civilian government in Pakistan to assert its authority in FATA and Baluchistan, making a more sustained effort to capture or disrupt the jihadists based there.

Johnson and Mason take issue with the view that the Pashtun areas in Southeastern Afghanistan and Northeastern Pakistan should be viewed as "ungoverned space." Instead they contend that these tribal areas have been and are best controlled by the "complex and sophisticated conflict-resolution mechanisms, legal codes and alternative forms of governance [which] have developed in the region for over a millennia." (i.e. Pashtunwali). According to Johnson and Mason attempting to extend governance to the Pashtuns from the center (i.e. the policy advocated by Jones) is exactly the wrong thing to do. Rather, "the short-term solution for bringing the Pashtun lands back from the radical brink is to strengthen and rebuild the tribal structures from the inside while reducing the pressures on them from the outside, rather than the current policy of doing the opposite." In regards to Afghanistan, a specific recommendation they offer is to amend the constitution so that provincial governors and deputy governors are directly elected, rather than appointed by Kabul.

So…increased central authority or increased autonomy for the Pashtuns? Which will it be?

Fortunately, both articles agree on the need to "bring rapid improvements in everyday people’s lives." This may seem to be a banal point, but Johnson and Mason contend that "the level of nonsecurity-related (i.e., police and army) aid actually reaching the Pashtun people in Afghanistan since the U.S. invasion has been shockingly low, less than $5 per Pashtun per year, an astonishingly miserly effort considering the critical strategic nature of the region."


Assessment

Jones’ policy advice is, as he readily admits, rather conventional. The real challenge is its implementation over the long-term. Troy would have liked to see a more extensive discussion/appreciation of the need to develop institutions a part of a "governance strategy." For example, police are largely useless if they can not be backed by courts, a functioning justice ministry, etc.

Turning to Johnson and Mason, Troy has to admit some biases here: Not being schooled in cultural anthropology, he tends to incline towards governance based arguments about insurgency. No one would deny that culture can "matter" in shaping the perception or outlook of an individual, however, at the same time Troy tends to have problems when "culture" is advanced as "the" key explanatory variable.

More particularly, can we really say that there is some immutable cultural characteristic/practice such as Pashtunwali that explained Pashtun behavior in the 19th century as well as today? Troy suspects that Johnson and Mason are "over-egging" their argument a bit with some of the "noble Pathan on the frontier" material that the Victorians used to peddle. It is not even clear that we can say there is a single Pashtunwali that applies equally across the various Pashtun dominated areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

That being said, Johnson and Mason do make an interesting case and their recommended policy runs diametrically opposite to what Troy understands to be the current strategy in Afghanistan. It would be interesting to see what Kip and Londonstani (himself a violent Pashtun if his profile is to be believed) would have to say on this matter, as well as any of the readers.


Update: Stephen Pampinella attempts to bridge the arguments made by both Jones and Johnson & Mason by invoking Alex Wendt in an interesting post titled Deconstructing the Taliban.