Afghanistan (31 page)

The most obvious of Afghanistan’s divisions are ethnolinguistic. Outside observers have a tendency to focus on them, but there is a mosaic of conflicts, with origins that reach through politics, tribes (especially within the tribally divided Pushtuns and, to a lesser extent, Uzbeks), attitudes toward modernization, religious issues (between different Sunni practices and Sunni-Shia), leadership (who exactly rules in Kabul, in terms of individuals, ethnicity, and Islam), corruption (extractive processes by state and substate authorities), center-periphery (Kabul, regional, and local authority all seeking power and security), economic (no working national economy), land and water rights, patronage, gender (what are the appropriate cultural and socio-political roles for women, and who exactly gets to determine them), and relations with foreigners, Muslim or otherwise. There are also the new conflicts that arose out of the divisions of Afghan society during the conflicts of 1978–2001. Former mujahideen, returning exiles, technocrats, former Taliban, former Communists—each with their foreign supporters and different ethnolinguistic and political links—still view each other warily and so far have had difficulty in pulling together for the greater good and unity of the Afghanistan that they all love and wish to preserve (there are no secessionists here). The result has allowed narrow self-interest and corruption to run rampant and enabled the insurgents to present themselves as an alternative.

Afghanistan is not a land of centuries-old ethnic rivalries that doom it to internal conflict, but rather continues to suffer from the results of ethnolinguistic polarization and mobilization during the conflicts in 1978–2001. Afghanistan’s history is marked much more by cooperation across and between groups rather than conflict. Intragroup conflict has been more common than conflicts between groups. Yet the rise of corruption and dependency inside Afghanistan has undercut the ability
of Afghans to resolve conflicts by their own means. The ability of the US, coalition partners, and international organizations alike to manage conflict in Afghanistan has decreased with the deteriorating security situation. There has been a failure to fund a shared “golden tomorrow” that should reward cooperation. Aid has instead created alternative patron-client networks between foreign donors and Afghan recipients, often pushing Afghan government institutions to the side. Other moves, such as cabinet reshuffles, often reflecting US or other foreign donor dissatisfaction with the incumbents and the wish to see Afghans they believe are competent and who they feel comfortable working with, have succeeded in putting a few highly competent individuals into positions of authority, but they have too often proved limited in their ability to improve Afghanistan because this myriad of underlying issues makes significant progress toward stability or economic and social development problematic. Government institutions are often less effective than patron-client relationships in getting things done. In many areas, power brokers and warlords who have access to force and patron-client relationships remain more important than the government.

Ethnolinguistic Conflict

“The main argument has become an ethnic issue and this is a dangerous thing,” Saleh Registani declared in 2008. As a member of parliament for Panjshir province, he has a view of the overarching dynamic of Afghanistan’s politics.
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Ashraf Ghani, former minister of finance and presidential candidate, said: “Ethnicity is problematic. It is not toxic yet. Ethnicity can become toxic from elite competition and mobilization.”
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The ethnolinguistic dimension of conflict reflects the increasing binary division of Pushtun vs. non-Pushtun that has resulted from the exclusively Pushtun insurgency threatening Afghanistan (as discussed in
chapter 2
).

Afghanistan is still determining the post-2001 rules of ethnolinguistic power. Many foreigners perceive this as requiring, for example, that the elected president in practice be an ethnic Pushtun and the two vice presidents be non-Pushtuns, views not shared by many non-Pushtuns who see it as keeping them from access to centralized power. The
current Afghanistan constitution avoids requiring explicit ethnic shares for government positions. In both the 2004 and 2009 presidential elections, Hamid Karzai was supported by a considerable percentage of non-Pushtuns, reflecting his support by foreign donors (especially in 2004) or leaders of some non-Pushtun groups, including those he ran with as vice presidents, in 2009. In Afghanistan, the effects of ethnolinguistic divisions are not set in stone.

In Afghanistan, enmities between ethnolinguistic groups have tended to be localized rather than nationwide divisions. Tensions between neighboring groups often reflect issues such as differing economic spheres, such as the competition between urban Pushtuns and rural Tajiks in Kunduz. Competing agricultural practices include conflicts between Pushtun herders and Hazara and Uzbek farmers, long-standing in places such as Bamiyan and Jowzjan provinces. Conflicts between loyalties to competing warlords became widespread after the 2001 defeat of the Taliban. Most were between Pushtuns, but some, such as that in 2002–04 between Mohammed Atta’s largely Tajik and Dostum’s largely Uzbek supporters near Mazar-e-Sharif that led up to corps-size clashes including artillery and armor, brought different groups into conflict. The ever-present land and water disputes also frequently bring groups into conflict.

However, the longest-lasting and most severe division is that between Hazaras and Pushtuns. This reflects the generations of identification of state power with Pushtun ethnicity and Hazara resentment at having gotten little from Kabul since being brought under its rule by force of arms in the late nineteenth century. Multiple factors—race, religion, language, land use, water rights, social status—have lined up to increase tensions between Pushtuns and Hazaras, exacerbated most recently by the brutal pre-2001 occupation of the Hazara Jat by the Taliban and its foreign allies. The Shia, Mongol-descended Dari-speaking Hazaras, were historically at the bottom of Afghan society. Mobilized and organized as a result of their participation in the 1978–2001 conflicts, the Hazaras have little desire to return to a subordinate status. The current insurgency is seen by Hazaras as the latest Pushtun campaign to bring them under their domination.

In Afghanistan since 2001, terrorism, insurgency, and narcotics
cultivation alike have been largely carried out by Pushtuns. Most of the post-2001 violence in Afghanistan has been within the same ethnolinguistic group, mainly Pushtun insurgents killing Pushtuns living in Afghanistan. Infighting has prevailed within clans and families. Cousins are often competitors for a kinship group or clan’s resources, leadership, or access to patronage (a dynamic termed tarborwali in Pushto). This reflects the impact of decades of conflict on the social structure. In many Pushtun tribes, especially in the south, there is no agreement as to who the leadership figures are or should be, resulting in competing or authority-less chiefs or shuras. The acephalous nature of Pushtun society means that each male is a potential leader. As a result, after decades of conflict, there is often no clarity or agreement about where authority or leadership, tribal or otherwise, lies.

However, there is still significant tension between the largely non-Pushtun regions in the north, central, and western parts of Afghanistan and the Pushtun regions in the east and south, where the insurgency and narcotics cultivation are concentrated. In areas where Pushtun and non-Pushtun groups are mixed, there is local tension and competition. The non-Pushtuns of Afghanistan resent the large share of state power in Pushtun hands, the Pushtun role in terrorism, insurgency, and narcotics, and the allocation of a large share of development and other state resources to the site of the insurgency in Pushtun Afghanistan. “We should take up arms against Kabul and we would receive more aid” is a frequently heard remark from dissatisfied non-Pushtuns in Afghanistan. Non-Pushtuns see Kabul and foreign donors effectively rewarding the Pushtuns through concentrating aid in their areas. To those allocating aid, using it to counter the insurgency is an obvious priority. This is an area where Mountstuart Elphinstone’s identification of envy as among the Afghan’s most intense (and enjoyable) vices has remained valid. As Afghanistan became more dependent on outside aid for development and coalition forces for security, every Afghan became convinced that his or her group was being cut out.

Within Pushtun areas, the rivalry is especially severe between tribes and clans. The insurgents often capitalize on resentments that the coalition or Kabul may have created. Every time one tribe benefits from Kabul’s actions, its rivals, aggrieved, often turn to the insurgents. This has
been matched by Pushtun resentment of non-Pushtun claims to a share of power commensurate with their numbers (which Pushtuns answer with probably inaccurate, but nonetheless passionately believed, claims to be an absolute majority). The failure of the national leadership to interact with the Pushtun grassroots in a way consistent with Afghan expectations of legitimate authority, governmental or otherwise (including holding darbars, receiving petitions, and resolving disputes), has contributed to the Pushtun alienation from the Afghan government that has been motivated by the rise of the Taliban Culture and radicalization. In any context, alienation can easily morph into extremism, with the Pushtun insurgents offering an alternative. The emerging Afghanistan media may offer a potential alternative way to interact with the grassroots, but this has yet to be demonstrated or effectively used.

Ethnolinguistic conflict is complex due to the fluid multiple nature of Afghan identity. The Taliban’s 1994–2001 demands that a unitary Sunni Islamic religious identity trump all others (in theory) were never widely accepted in practice even by their supporters and were hard to reconcile with the overlapping, competing, and often fluid representations of Pushtun identity. In addition to Islam, links to the nation as well as family, clan, and tribe remain important to the Pushtuns of Afghanistan.

By 2008–10, relations between ethnolinguistic groups were deteriorating, reflecting the insurgency and the continued political polarization in Afghan politics. President Karzai, whatever his failings, was a sincere, if romantic, Afghan nationalist at his core. This image has been undercut, especially among non-Pushtuns, by the perceptions of increasing reliance on Pushtun power to rule during his first term, culminating in the extensive corruption reported in the 2009 elections. Karzai’s willingness to personally declare allegiance to Massoud in his conflict with the Taliban and Al Qaeda in 2000 and his original lack of interest in advancing a Pushtun ethnic or especially tribal agenda, or in taking up the trappings of a khan that belonged to him after the Taliban’s assassination of his father, has reduced his support among many Pushtuns, who initially saw this nationalist approach as an ethnic betrayal. To the Pakistani military, Karzai’s pre-2001 allegiance to the Northern Alliance, his lack of links to Pakistan, and his education in India makes him a likely tool of Pakistan’s enemies.

These nationalist origins were part of the hope for a better future that Afghans of all ethnic groups embraced after the fall of the Taliban. Karzai was put forward by his foreign supporters but had broad-based Afghan support, reflected in the 2004 presidential election. Since then, this support has eroded. Non-Pushtuns see Karzai as an instrument of Pushtun power, while many Pushtuns have turned against him for failing to adequately represent their interests. The result has been the tainted 2009 election, ethnic polarization, and an unpopular presidency: 2009 polling showed that Karzai’s support in his native Kandahar province has dropped to 16 percent from 90 percent in 2004.
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Additionally, Karzai is blamed for Kabul’s failure to provide security and economic opportunity. He is derided by Afghan Pushtun nationalists as a “fake Pushtun” set in place by the foreigners to serve at the behest of minorities and prevent genuine Pushtun power in Kabul.
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In response, Karzai has appeared as a spokesman for Pushtun concerns, denouncing collateral damage by coalition airpower and raids by special operations forces. The appearance of presidential incompetence and ineffectiveness and the power of Karzai’s family despite widespread beliefs of their links to narcotics and political patronage have tended to dominate other perceptions and undercut the trappings of legitimacy in the eyes of both Pushtuns and non-Pushtuns. By 2009, polling showed that all Afghans, not just Pushtuns, holding a favorable view of Karzai had declined to 52 percent—still enough to win the election—from 83 percent in 2004.
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The impact of the 2009 election is likely to diminish it further. His popularity among Pushtuns, despite widespread disappointment, is still significantly higher than that nationwide.

What has killed more Afghans than violence between ethnolinguistic groups in post-2001 Afghanistan has been conflict within groups. Tribes, localities, and kinship groups all compete for patronage, access to irrigated land, and trade, as well as to exercise long-standing resentments. In Afghanistan’s Pushtun areas, tribal dynamics dictate why some areas tend to be more cohesive supporters of Kabul and the foreign presence while others send men across the borders to join the insurgents. Such divisions are not limited to Afghanistan’s Pushtuns—they also have led to conflict among Afghanistan’s Nuristanis and other groups—but among no others are they as severe nor have they led to as much conflict.

Religion

Religious alliances have been used to cross ethnolinguistic boundaries in Afghanistan’s conflicts but have not been determinative. The Sunni Islamist Ahmad Shah Massoud opposed the Sunni HiH and was able to make alliances with the Shia Hazara Hezb-e-Wahdat party and with Dostum’s Uzbek Junbish party, whose roots were as a pro-Soviet militia. When the Afghan Taliban invaded the Hazara Jat in the 1990s, their Pushtun mullahs were able to make common cause with Tajik mullahs to persuade Sunni Afghans of different ethnicities to wage a campaign of destruction against the Shia Hazaras. The post-2001 Taliban have attempted to reach out to non-Pushtun Sunni mullahs (Shias being beyond the pale) as common defenders of Afghan Islamic culture against the foreign infidel presence.
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