Afghanistan (10 page)

Since 2001, the traditional Afghan approach to patronage has often not worked. What has emerged to replace it in many areas—ministries in Kabul or provinces in the countryside—is a toxic adaptation rife with corruption. Alternative patronage networks are offered by Afghan insurgents, who, in return for loyalty, offer to kill today’s extractive policeman. In response, foreigners push for institutions that, like their own, would not depend on patronage but would be built on Western models.

The clients’ power lies in the fact that allegiance, like identity, is seldom fixed. A patron who is oppressive or ineffective will lose clients. This provides a check on top-down oppression, but also means that it is difficult for a patron to get clients to perform required dangerous or unpleasant activities (like cracking down on opium or giving up power). This dynamic only works where clients have the option to transfer allegiance away from a patron, as was the case in much of Afghanistan in 1978–92, when there were normally multiple local or regional leaders, each with their own patron in the form of a foreign-supported political party, competing for clients. There has been no such competition in much of Afghanistan since 2001. In many areas, the central government is ineffective compared to the foreign presence (in the form of military forces or aid donors). The only source of Afghan power has often been local or regional patrons, including warlords. As a result, there is less check on oppressive behavior, and violence and oppression spreads. In southern Afghanistan post-2001, such actions have created fertile ground for the emerging insurgency, which became an alternative source of patronage in much of that area.

The importance of patronage relations extends to the battle of ideas in Afghanistan. Afghans are exposed to many different and often competing sources of news, but there is a tendency to follow the views of the provider of patronage or other Afghans that they desire to emulate. This contributes to the prevalence and strength of conspiracy theories and rumors. The power and the speed with which rumors can spread even among a population of sophisticated and experienced consumers of international broadcasts is often astounding to foreigners.

In practice, in Afghanistan, even among the educated and elites, perceived truth is defined as what a dispenser of patronage or a person of high status believes. Even sophisticated Afghans tend to believe whatever their patron or others they admire and emulate believes, however objectively wrong or incredible it may be. Similarly, self-perceptions of victimization or persecution are often not supported by objective evidence, but are no less strong for that. Most of Afghanistan’s major groups, regardless of how defined, consider themselves persecuted.

This leads to a vulnerability to the improved propaganda generated by Al Qaeda and connected terrorist organizations in recent years.
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It also contributes to the speed and power of “bazaar rumors” in Afghanistan, which could generate mobs in minutes even before there were over 6 million cell phones. Those Afghans perceived as losers—whose future patronage is unlikely to be good—are the usual targets of such rumors while winners—from whom future patronage is expected—become beneficiaries. This contributes to the speed with which setbacks in Afghanistan can become disasters and underlines the connection between legitimacy and patronage. Those unable to provide or sustain patronage have their ability to achieve legitimacy limited.

Qawms

Afghan society is the “human terrain” over which the conflicts defining Afghanistan are being fought. The qawm (affinity group) is the building-block of that human terrain. In Afghanistan, the qawm has traditionally been and remains strong; the state has, correspondingly, traditionally been and remains limited. The qawm remains the basic unit of community and subnational Afghan identity based on kinship, residence, and
sometimes occupation.
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Qawms can be family, clan, or tribal groups, but the term also applies to Afghans who lack a tribal identity. The qawm’s local, more traditional, focus is as a solidarity group reflecting (or modeled on) kinship ties. The qawm, not the state, remains the basic unit of community and, outside of the family, the most important focus of individual loyalty.

Afghan social cohesiveness encompasses tribal clans, ethnic subgroups, religious sects, locality-based groups, and groups united by interests. All of these are reflected in the makeup of the qawms. Because qawms do not have to be homogenous in ethnolinguistic terms, though they often are, their importance prevents these divisions from being the primary key to Afghanistan’s conflicts.

During the 1978–92 war against the Soviets, local resistance commanders usually initially represented and led individual qawms. During that war, the (externally imposed) political party structure (from Peshawar) or pro-Soviet groups organized and paid for from Kabul both had limited impacts (and that through patron-client relations) on clusters of qawm units with common identities.

During the course of this war, many qawms had new leaders (pushed forward by the war), access to foreign aid, new patrons (in the form of the resistance political parties and Pakistan), and a sense of larger community coming from the participation in jihad that was also a war of national liberation. Listening to foreign radio broadcasts such as the Voice of America, BBC, and Deutsche Welt also changed the focus of many Afghans away from the purely local. Larger ethnic, regional, and linguistic identities were encouraged by the qawms’ patrons, either Peshawar-based mujahideen or Kabul-based pro-Soviets. Outside resources such as US aid to the mujahideen or Moscow’s aid to Kabul were alike used to build new patronage networks to make possible this change.

Qawms were mobilized—normally through patronage—and politicized by all sides, generally along ethnic or regional lines. In some areas—with the notable exception of much of Pushtun Afghanistan divided by tribe—disparate qawms were unified through the emergence of regional leaders and shared patronage networks. This was seen especially in Dari-speaking Afghanistan. Ahmad Shah Massoud moved
from the commander of the anti-Soviet resistance in the Panjshir Valley to the foremost regional resistance commander in northern Afghanistan in this way.

The transition of many of Afghanistan’s qawms from the politically mobilized and often militarized elements of 1978–2001 has, since then, been challenging. The political, economic, development, and religious actions to re-integrate them into a peaceful Afghanistan did not affect much of rural Afghanistan where the grassroots lived. Pushtun qawms have given their loyalty to the insurgents in many districts.

Parties and Warlords

Afghanistan is today defined by conflict, and these conflicts are about power. Those that would use power must use it in the context of Afghan institutions and concepts—including patronage—in a way that is perceived as legitimate. Because use of power by the state is often weak or ineffective, parties and warlords play an important role in decisions and actions, either legal or illegal, that affect the entire population. Neither parties not warlords were part of traditional Afghanistan. But they shaped it in the years of conflict in 1978–2001. Their strengths and their limitations have the potential to further affect Afghanistan’s current conflicts.

Party organizations were not permitted under Afghanistan’s Golden Age experiments with parliamentary democracy. Those that emerged were, by definition, part of the two (then-illegal) oppositions, Islamist and Communist.

In 1978–2001, the party in Afghanistan was a social as well as a political institution. In Afghanistan, the political mobilization and polarization that accompanied the conflicts of 1978–2001 created another level of identity: that of the political party. The party was the institution used to carry out mobilization through militarization, and it facilitated awareness of inter-ethnic differences and intra-ethnic commonalities. In this period, the party became an alternative source of patron-client relations. This largely reinforced and hardened pre-existing patronage networks, and in some instances it replaced them.

In 1978–92, Pushtuns dominated one of Afghanistan’s two
Communist parties and six of the seven Peshawar-based Sunni resistance parties (with the others dominated by Dari-speakers but including substantial Pushtun membership), creating organizations in Afghanistan that cut across tribal lines. The Hezb-e-Islami (HiH) of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (a detribalized Pushtun from Kunduz) became the most powerful of the six Peshawar-based Pushtun parties in 1978–92. It had the highest priority for Pakistani aid and a strong top-down organization. HiH was able to overcome many of the divisions inherent in tribal and religious networks in the other parties. Hekmatyar himself perceived the party as adapting the tactics of a Leninist “vanguard part” to Islamism.

In 1978–92, Pakistan backed only a single Sunni predominantly Dari-speaking major resistance party among the “Peshawar Seven,” Jamiat-e-Islami Afghanistan (JIA). This brought together the disparate Tadji geographical groups—Panjsheris, Heratis, Badakshis, and others. JIA’s Islamist ideology had to extend to both traditional and revolutionary politics and religious orientation among Dari-speakers because there were no separate parties for them, unlike the Pushtuns.
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Ahmad Shah Massoud, who started as the charismatic leader of anti-Soviet resistance in his native Panjshir Valley in 1978 (he had previously led a Pakistani-funded revolt there against Kabul in 1975), was in later years able to use the JIA to help build what became the Northern Alliance.
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The Taliban of 1994–2001 lacked an effective party organization but continued the party-originated move toward militarization as they attempted to politicize and, more lastingly, ethnically unify Pushtun Afghanistan and lead it in civil war against their opponents.

Post-2001 Afghan political parties were largely identified with the ethnolinguistic and ideological polarization associated with the decades of conflict. This contributed to the 2004 decision by Hamid Karzai—over international objections—to employ an electoral system intended to marginalize political parties in parliamentary elections. However, once the parliament was operating, parties proliferated; by 2008, there were 104 registered. But none has emerged as a viable, strong force, whether independently or as part of a recognizable coalition. “Afghanistan politics are very personalized; institution building
has been taken hostage by personalities,” in the words of Ambassador Mahmoud Saikal.
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In 2008–10, there were political parties on both sides of Afghanistan’s conflicts. The post-2001 Taliban has moved away from the party model of organization. HiH remains a part of the insurgent coalition, although Hekmatyar’s model has reportedly shifted to that of the Lebanese Hezbollah, embracing armed struggle while not ruling out political participation.

In the absence of effective state authority in much of Afghanistan, “warlords,” who combined both local authority and armed force without the check of being part of a legitimate state structure and had emerged from the 1978–2001 conflicts, were important post-2001. Warlords are not a traditional Afghan institution. There is no agreement as to who are warlords. Ahmad Shah Massoud, the defense minister and de facto military leader of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, the mujahideen-based regime that tried to rule from Kabul in 1992–96 and was assassinated by Al Qaeda immediately before the 9/11 attack in 2001, was characterized as a warlord by many (especially Pushtuns), but in death he has become the national hero of post-2001 Afghanistan.

The absence of effective governance at the grassroots level post-2001 has ensured that warlords remain a part of Afghanistan’s institutions. In much of Afghanistan, leadership figures from the 1978–2001 conflicts remain in de facto power, with or without the color of state authority. They frequently practice non-inclusive and extractive politics that are resented by their involuntary network of clients; other clients see them as the only viable alternative to what they perceive as a non-responsive over-centralized state that has little effectiveness outside of Kabul.

A Different Country

Influencing all of the conflicts that define Afghanistan is the fact that it is fair to conclude that Afghan society is overall inherently collectivist and Islamic, religious in its orientation and deeply conservative. Afghan cultural conservatism is at heart a survival strategy. Its effectiveness is demonstrated by the fact that many of Mountstuart Elphinstone’s 1815 observations are valid today. It is based on the assumption that, at the end
of the day, outsiders—Soviet, British, Arabs, American—will go home or vanish to smoke and the Afghans will be left with what they have always had: their land, their faith, and each other.

Foreigners who are trying to push change on polite but resistant Afghans may find cabinet ministers with doctorates from Western universities and village elders untroubled by literacy alike in their ability to deflect unwanted change while assuring the outsiders of their gratitude for wishing the best for Afghanistan. Neither ministries in Kabul nor shuras in remote villages are configured for bold and decisive change. Both are conservative institutions, aiming first to preserve the interests of stakeholders (which usually center on patron-client relations).

For Afghan government institutions and ministries, change is often resisted, a task made easier by a system that often combines the least responsive elements of traditional Afghan ways and Soviet-imposed central planning. Afghan government ministries tend to be profoundly conservative institutions. Not only do they defend their bureaucratic turf, as government institutions do worldwide, but they perceive a vital interest in blocking any change that they cannot control or that threatens the networks—especially the patron-client relations—which is how such organizations tend to operate in an Afghan context. “Lots of Kabul ministries mean nothing to people in the sticks. Further out [of Kabul] not much governance is going on,” in the words of one UN official.
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