Overshadowed by Iraq, the war in Afghanistan has nearly faded from view. But violence there is on the rise, and things may be about to get bloodier.
By Drake Bennett
The Boston Globe, 16 April 2006
LAST MONDAY NIGHT, Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government hosted what it billed as a rematch between John Deutch, a former director of Central Intelligence, and William Kristol, founding editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard magazine. In October of 2002, the two had met to dispute whether the US should invade Iraq. This time they were arguing over whether the time had come to pull out.
Bob Graham, the former Democratic governor of Florida and US senator, was in the audience. Asked afterward what he thought of the proceedings, Graham, who had served for two years as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, turned the conversation away from Iraq. “The elephant in the room," he said, is the question of where, in the event of even a partial pullout, the freed-up troops will go. Graham himself didn't think they'd necessarily be coming home-or, for that matter, marching over the border into Iran. “They could be going to Afghanistan," he said.
At least, that's where they could be going if he were running things, he specified in an interview the following day. “I think we have been understaffed in Afghanistan since about December of 2001, when we began to pull troops out to prepare to send them into Iraq."
As a senator, Graham voted against the Oct. 11, 2002, resolution giving Bush the authority to go to war to topple Saddam Hussein. As he put it at the time, “Iraq is a primary distraction from achieving our goals or reducing the threat of international terrorism." It's little surprise, then, that today he worries about Afghanistan, whose lawless southern border with Pakistan is still a Taliban and Al Qaeda stronghold.
And yet, overshadowed by news of the ongoing violence and precarious political situation in Iraq-and, increasingly, the menace posed by Iran's nuclear ambitions-Afghanistan has largely faded from view.
That may soon change. Afghanistan has its own violent insurgency-led by the Taliban and aided by dissident warlords-and it has lately intensified. As the country's harsh winter gives way to warmer weather, the Taliban is promising to make this spring and summer particularly bloody. “We will intensify suicide attacks to the extent that we will make the land beneath their feet like a flaming oven," said Taliban leader Mullah Omar (the same Omar who led the Taliban regime destroyed by the US in October of 2001) in a recent statement.
Omar's may not be an empty boast. Suicide attacks have quadrupled in the past year, and attacks by improvised explosive devices have doubled. Steven Simon, a former counter-terrorism expert at the National Security Council and coauthor of “The Age of Sacred Terror," recently returned from a visit to Afghanistan, and he thinks worse is to come. “There will likely be a crescendo of violence, focused largely on Kabul, this summer," he says. And in the country's unruly south, it's widely suspected that insurgents will try to test the NATO forces that are moving in to take over from more seasoned US military troops.
Superficially, the situation in Afghanistan already shares some broad outlines with Iraq: a fragile government, representing three ethnic groups with a history of enmity-in Iraq, Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, and Kurds; in Afghanistan, Tajiks, Pashtuns, and Shia Hazaras-threatened by an insurgency composed of elements from the deposed regime and foreign jihadis. Plus an American commitment, in terms of troops and money, that many feel falls short of what's necessary to truly stabilize and rebuild the country.
Despite these similarities, however, Afghanistan has only recently begun to see a rise in the sort of violence that in Iraq has become familiar. And while there's some disagreement among observers as to whether this spike in violence represents the Afghan insurgency's final stand, or the early stages of an escalation into something more incendiary, a closer look suggests that the US has had advantages in Afghanistan that it lacks in Iraq-advantages that the Bush administration and the newly formed Afghan government may be squandering.
“Insurgencies tend to arise out of a mix of motives: ethnic, sectarian, ideological, economic," says Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow in Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Iraq's insurgency, he argues, “is more a matter of ethnic and sectarian interests." It is, in other words, a civil war, with different ethnic and religious groups each fighting to dominate the other.
Afghanistan is something different, he argues. “It's more like the Vietnam model," he says. He means it to be an encouraging comparison. In Afghanistan, “the conflict is partly ethnic, but largely ideological." The Taliban, though largely Pashtun, is not just an ethnic militia, but like the Maoist Vietcong “has a particular conception of what government should look like for everyone."
That particular conception, based on fundamentalist Islam, has limited appeal in Afghanistan. While the new government, led by President Hamid Karzai, is still weak, with little authority beyond Kabul, the Taliban and the handful of foreign jihadis fighting alongside them are widely hated. A poll of 2,000 Afghans conducted last November and December by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes found that 93 percent had a favorable opinion of Karzai, while 8 percent had a favorable opinion of the Taliban.
War-weariness, too, has limited the support for the insurgency. “Afghanistan has spent 20 years in civil war," points out James Dobbins, former US special envoy to Afghanistan, “and the vast bulk of the population and the leadership are anxious not to go back into it." The presence of US and NATO troops in the country has coincided with a period of relative calm, and, unlike Iraqis, Afghans by and large support the continued presence of American troops in their country. The same recent PIPA poll found that 83 percent had a favorable opinion of the US forces in the country and 66 percent favored expanding NATO peacekeeping forces beyond Kabul.
To some observers, such factors, taken together, are reason for a guarded optimism, despite the uptick in violence. Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Millen served in Afghanistan and is now an analyst at the US Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute. He believes the number of attacks is a “false measurement" of the insurgency's power. “You have to look at the number of cities under their control," he asserts. “The only way it can grow is through control of the people. I don't think there are any major cities that the insurgents definitely have. They may have a scattering of villages."
Steven Simon argues that the spike in attacks might even be a sign of the insurgency's desperation. “From one perspective, there's a view that the Taliban and its militant supporters see the coming year as their last best shot at destabilizing the Karzai government." The longer the current government stays in power, the greater its legitimacy, and the greater the allegiance it can claim from Afghans. “That's why you're seeing these really audacious suicide bombers in Kabul," Simon suggests.
Few observers, however, would characterize the Karzai government as the picture of stability just yet. And while Afghanistan's ethnic and sectarian divisions are not as bloody as Iraq's, they are nonetheless sharp. Afghans may like Karzai, but they still tend to vote along ethnic lines. Karzai owed his win in the 2004 presidential election to the support of his fellow Pashtuns, who make up a majority of the country. His two strongest opponents, Yunus Qanooni and Mohammad Mohaqiq, drew their votes from their fellow Tajiks and Hazaras, respectively. And according to Larry Goodson, a professor at the Army War College and longtime Afghanistan scholar, there are areas, especially in the country's southwest, where ethnic and religious bonds between the populace and antigovernment insurgents are stronger than any sense of obligation to the Kabul-based government.
As Goodson sees it, some of the recent increase in violence may stem from the fact that, under the 2001 Bonn accords-which laid out the gradual, step-by-step process of forming an Afghan constitution and government-many of the thornier political issues, such as the formation of a parliament, were only recently addressed. Many of the losers in last December's parliamentary elections, Goodson says, “went home mad, and in Afghanistan going home mad is different from in Indiana."
“We're likely to get a greater ethnicization of politics in the months and year or so ahead," he says. “Some of that will be violent."
Moreover, according to Barnett Rubin, a former UN special adviser for Afghanistan now at the Center on International Cooperation, the combination of the Karzai government's continued weakness and continued American fecklessness is starting to alienate Afghans. The American policy on Afghan heroin production, for example-it's estimated the industry makes up more than half the country's gross domestic product-has angered many of the poppy farmers who make their living from the drug trade. First, American forces allowed the trade to flourish, then, in a reversal, started a widespread poppy eradication program.
The heroin trade is just one of several causes for worry. Afghanistan is still awash in weaponry from its decades of war, and it still has a neighbor, Pakistan, that functions as a base of operations for the Taliban. And it remains one of the poorest countries in the world. “The United States has set aside inadequate resources for both Iraq and Afghanistan," Rubin says, “but it's far more inadequate in Afghanistan." Many promised infrastructure projects have not materialized, and the latest Department of Defense supplemental budget slashes aid to Afghanistan nearly to zero.
America's inability to quash the Iraq insurgency may be bleeding over into Afghanistan, as well. As Goodson points out, during the Soviet occupation, and then under the Taliban's rule, “Afghanistan used to be Jihad University," a magnet for young Arabs with jihadist ambitions. The US invasion ended that. But now the trend may have reversed as suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices, mainstays of the Iraqi insurgency, have become increasingly common in Afghanistan.
“Arabs used to go to Afghanistan to train," says Rubin. “Now the Afghan insurgency is learning from the new training ground, which is Iraq."
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Citation: Drake Bennett. "The other insurgency," The Boston Globe, 16 April 2006.
Original URL: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/04/16/the_other_insurgency/
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