Out of the Mountains (27 page)

This rule setting and enforcement system was one of two major Taliban governance behaviors; the other was creating a monopoly of force. The religious police operated alongside the Taliban's security police, whose primary role was to disarm the population so as to establish a monopoly of force for the Taliban regime. As the Afghan writer Nushin Arbabzadah points out, when the Taliban captured Kabul, they didn't “make use of their unspoken [customary] right to pillage and loot. They searched the conquered populations' homes, but only to confiscate weapons and so ensure a monopoly of violence for their state. The Taliban were exceedingly ignorant—which made them cruel—but there's no doubt that they saw jihad as a means to establish a state rather than legitimacy to pillage a conquered territory. Building a state was of utmost importance to the Taliban because without it the sharia law could not be enforced. . . . With the Taliban, rural Afghans came to power, ruling over the more sophisticated urban populations.”
58

Arbabzadah's comment here echoes that of Nuruddin Farah in Chapter
2
on what happened in Mogadishu when the urbophobic “country cousins” captured the city and controlled its population. In Kabul, the rural Taliban government's behavior between
1996
and
2001
showed a similar disdain for the urban population and a distrust of the capital's cosmopolitan and worldly traditions—they dropped most of the traditions of Afghan courtesy and moved their capital out of Kabul and back to Kandahar, in part to avoid the polluting effect of governing from the ancient royal capital.
59
Their primary goal was to impose behavioral control over the urban population and establish a monopoly of force, not to govern the city or develop its institutions or economy.

It's instructive to contrast the Taliban-as-government of
2001
with the Taliban-as-insurgent of
2011
. A decade of conflict has changed the movement's approach, forcing it to focus much more on local-level administrative and governance activities, designed to put in place a Hezbollah-like spectrum of coercive, administrative, and persuasive tools to control and mobilize the population. These include the mobile court system, as we've seen; a public safety structure at the village level that seeks to prevent and punish crime; an ombudsman or accountability committee that investigates accusations of corruption or abuse by the Taliban itself; a system of provincial, local, and district shadow governors; a published code of conduct (
layeha
) that states the rules and obligations incumbent on Taliban commanders; a taxation system; an economic and agricultural policy; a series of small-business assistance programs; and even infrastructure projects. Vajid Mojdeh, a former Taliban foreign ministry official who monitors the movement, argued in
2010
that the Taliban “have totally changed. They've totally put behind them their international agenda of spreading Islamist revolution and now are just focused on Afghanistan. . . . There's a new generation. They are familiar with computers. They communicate with text messages. They're in favor of education.” Unlike the Taliban of the
1990
s, he said, “they are no longer all illiterates.”
60
Mojdeh pointed to changes in the Taliban policy on education for women, inoculations, and school curricula. He's not an impartial observer, of course, but this still suggests a significant evolution in the Taliban's approach over time. The intent—to establish a predictable rule set and thus control the population—doesn't seem to have changed, but the methods have expanded to fill almost the entire spectrum of competitive control, from persuasion to coercion.

State Versus Nonstate Normative Systems

Insurgents such as AQ
 
I, the Taliban, and Hezbollah are not, of course, the only actors who are trying to corral, control, or manipulate a population: governments do exactly the same thing, using rather similar methods. In this context, governments can be considered as owners or proponents of a wide-spectrum normative system.

This also is a critical point, because it means that populations are confronted not with one system of control but with several—the insurgent's, the government's, and the systems of social control that occur naturally within the population itself, based on locality, kinship or economic ties. Indeed, in a real-world situation the members of any given population may confront several actors, all of whom are trying to control them—multiple different insurgent groups, competing government officials, foreign occupation forces, organized crime networks, and governments of neighboring countries. The way populations deal with and exploit this situation is discussed in detail in the next section. For the moment, all we need to note is that in order to understand which of the possible options a population is likely to choose, we must understand both the initial attractiveness of each option and the strength of the incentive spectrum that locks the population in once the choice is made.

But comparing the strength of state systems of control with those of insurgents, tribes, gangs, smuggling networks, and so on is extremely difficult if we think in terms of organizational structure, since state and nonstate systems are so structurally different. For example, although populations in rural societies usually meet the state only in the person of police officers, district officials, and tax collectors, modern states have relatively elaborate bureaucratic, legal, military, and administrative structures. These involve many employees, buildings, and facilities, organized into a large, obvious, permanent footprint that includes everything from mobile police patrols, roving courts, and itinerant officials through district administrative centers, government branch offices, checkpoints, provincial offices, and so on, right up to the ministries themselves at the level of the central state.

By contrast, nonstate armed groups tend to lack such a permanent and obvious structure—they often deliberately seek invisibility, in fact—and although they may field a comprehensive shadow governance system, this is neither overt nor necessarily large-scale. Such a system usually works in a nonobvious “underground” manner that makes it hard to observe and even harder to compare with competing structures. The well-developed, overt structure that Hezbollah has created is a rare exception in this context: the vast majority of nonstate armed groups have nothing of the kind.

For example, we might look at an Afghan district and count the number of school buildings, state-employed teachers, and children attending school as a means of gauging the strength of the Afghan education ministry in that area. These are all relatively obvious and easy to count, especially the number of school buildings, one reason why this is such a popular measure of performance for aid agencies and governments providing assistance in Afghanistan. There are problems with this metric, by the way—it measures inputs (expenditure on education) rather than outcomes (how many teachers and students in schools) or impact (changes in literacy levels or the effectiveness of programs). But at least the number of schools is an observable though partial
negative measure
of government presence, since if there are no schools in an area, there's clearly little influence by the government education ministry.

But measuring the strength of a nonstate armed group in this structural way is deeply problematic. The Taliban don't build school buildings. Nor do they establish many of the other obvious statelike bureaucratic or administrative structures that governments create. Even their intimidation may not be obvious—in
2009
, after killing a few teachers and burning schools to send a message, Taliban in some parts of Afghanistan began letting children go to school unhindered, so that if we were to try to gauge Taliban influence over the school system in these areas through the number of teachers or students being killed or school buildings being burned, there would be nothing to see. And yet, of course, nobody in these districts had the slightest doubt as to who was in control—some I talked to even said that they were grateful to the Taliban for “allowing” their children's education.
61
Likewise, according to U.S. officers in a district in eastern Afghanistan, the Taliban didn't interfere with school attendance but did dictate the curriculum: at a school in the village of Chawni, “the Taliban recently posted a letter on the wall detailing the curriculum that was to be taught. ‘So here they get money from the government, books from the government, and they think it's perfectly legitimate to teach what the Taliban tells them.'”
62

How then can we compare the strength of a nonstate armed group to that of the state—an essential activity, if we want to understand which actor is becoming dominant in the competition for control? As Bernard Fall suggests, we need a functional model rather than a structural one, and we need to think in terms of competitive systems of control. Joel S. Migdal suggested just such an approach in his
1988
study,
Strong Societies and Weak States
.
63
Migdal argued that you could understand state effectiveness by measuring capability across four clusters (or subsystems) of government activity—“the capacities to
penetrate
society,
regulate
social relationships,
extract
resources, and
appropriate
or use resources in determined ways.”
64
The distinguished analyst and Afghanistan-watcher William Maley applied Migdal's model in his history of state collapse in Afghanistan,
The Afghanistan Wars
, demonstrating its applicability to both state and insurgent capabilities.
65

This functional approach lets us compare the strengths of various incentives and control systems. Though they don't own and operate school buildings, the Taliban do run underground indoctrination programs. They
penetrate
the school system and attempt to
regulate
the behavior of people in it, so that their ideas are reflected in the school curriculum and individual teachers are pushing the insurgent line in the classroom, and they try to intimidate teachers and students, using threatening text messages on cell phones or threatening notes on school buildings or the houses of teachers. They
extract
resources from the school system through extortion or by taxing teachers, parents, and local businesses, and they
appropriate
those resources to their own programs.

To summarize, it's worth referring back to the systems of competitive control we observed in the previous chapter—in particular, the “System” in Tivoli Gardens, Kingston. Like the Taliban system of local courts, the informal justice system in garrison communities creates a mechanism for dispute resolution, mediation, and enforcement that makes populations feel safe, creates order, and generates predictability. At the persuasive end of the spectrum, the parties and community events sponsored by the gang, the political participation of the community in the JLP's electoral process, and the subjective feelings of respect, affection, and prestige that built up over time created a resilient, wide-spectrum system of competitive control for Christopher Coke's group. In the administrative part of the spectrum, the ability to access government contracts, social services, housing, health care, and food supplies provides incentives for the population to support the posse, while locking them into dependence on the gang's largesse. And at the coercive end of the spectrum, the gang controlling each garrison has the demonstrated capacity to kill informers, fight off rivals, and punish those who transgress its rules. It also polices its own members in order to maintain internal discipline and external predictability. Thus, at the hyperlocal level, we see exactly the same pattern of competitive control at work in the gang environment of Kingston as we saw in the Taliban, Hezbollah, and AQ
 
I. This, along with the mafia, street gang, prison gang, and drug trafficking network examples mentioned earlier, suggests that the mechanism of competitive control isn't restricted to insurgency or civil war but is rather a universal aspect of the way in which nonstate actors control population groups.

There's one very obvious difference, however, between what the Shower Posse achieved in Tivoli Gardens and what the Taliban has attempted to establish in Afghanistan, and this is the transnational network—initially an international protection racket, then a drug trafficking organization—that the Shower Posse created by exploiting the urban, networked, littoral environment in which it operated. In particular, as local levels of violence spiked in the
1970
s and people escaped to the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, these emigrants created urban networks that connected the Kingston garrisons to cities across the planet. As they remitted money back to the gang to ensure protection for their families still in Jamaica, members of the diaspora created the basis for a transnational system of competitive control. This has also been seen with Hezbollah and with insurgencies such as the Tamil Tigers, both of which exploited large diaspora populations to generate international support networks, and with Kenyan and Nigerian organized crime, as well as with the Russian, Italian, and Albanian mafias, Latin American
narcos
and street gangs, and Chinese snakeheads (people smugglers) and Triads (transnational organized crime networks). As coastal urbanization and connectedness increase, transnational networks of this kind, tapping into the flows of urban connectivity between home populations and diasporas, will increasingly be able to create transnational systems of competitive control that mimic the functions of the state and compete with governments. Indeed, they'll be even better able to compete with national governments, which will be tied to one particular territory and limited by national sovereignty and international law, while transnational networks will be increasingly able to skip between jurisdictions at will, avoiding governments whenever the pressure on them gets too great.