Out of the Mountains (28 page)

Before we move on to look at the elements of this international connectivity, however, we must first examine the other side of the coin—the way that populations attempt to manipulate and control armed groups.

IV. Population Survival Strategies

March 19, 2008

Office of the Independent Directorate of Local Government, Kabul

Mullah Abdul Salaam Alizai sat at the head of the long teak-veneer table in the conference room of a run-down Afghan government office in Kabul. He was a big man in every sense—big-boned, haughty, with a magnificent scented black beard and a black turban, dressed in traditional garb right down to his curly-toed slippers, every inch a tribal chief. His gaze casually took in, assessed, dominated, and dismissed the room. Only a few weeks before, he had been a pro-Taliban commander in his home district of Musa Q
 
ala, in the northern part of Helmand province in Afghanistan's southwest.

As a leader of the Alizai, the dominant Pashtun tribe in Musa Q
 
ala district, Mullah Salaam had allied with the Taliban and had been a military commander during the Taliban regime of
1996
–
2001
. The Taliban appointed him governor of Uruzgan province, and he later served as governor of Kajaki district in Helmand. After the coalition invasion of
2001
, Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, the newly appointed governor of Helmand province, imprisoned Mullah Salaam for several months: although (or rather, because) Sher Muhammad was also an Alizai, his rivalry with Salaam was intense and personal. Sher Muhammad and Abdul Salaam hailed from competing subtribes, and while Salaam was pro-Taliban, Sher Muhammad was one of the former mujahideen commanders we've already discussed, who sought to divide Afghanistan among themselves after the defeat of the Soviets, and then fought each other and the Taliban during the civil war of the
1990
s.

After his release from Sher Muhammad's prison, Mullah Salaam returned to his compound at Shah Karez, eight miles east of Musa Q
 
ala, and became a member of the tribal council. On the surface, he had reconciled with the new government—he even served for a time as head of Sher Muhammad's bodyguard—but in February
2007
he switched sides. The British Army had moved into Helmand in force in July
2006
, bringing intense fighting to Musa Q
 
ala, interfering with poppy cultivation and other agriculture, and causing major disruption to licit and illicit business. By late
2006
, realizing they were overstretched, the British had agreed to a cease-fire under which both they and the Taliban would withdraw from Musa Q
 
ala district center, leaving it under the protection of the tribal council.

After biding their time and gathering their forces through the winter, in the spring of
2007
the Taliban broke the truce and moved in to seize the town. Salaam sided with the Taliban, leading his Alizai fighters in support of the insurgents as they took the rest of the district. But after a few months Salaam changed sides once again. He'd become disillusioned when, in his words, Taliban leaders had “shown lack of respect for the tribal council.” After secret negotiations with British officers and with Michael Semple, an Irish diplomat who was later expelled from Afghanistan by the Karzai government for making direct contact with Taliban leaders, Salaam switched sides once more to support the government in late
2007
. Since his latest change of sides, his efforts to rally the local population in support of the government and against the Taliban had earned him appointment as Musa Q
 
ala district governor—which was why he was in Kabul now, looking for concrete rewards in the form of weapons, money, protection, and contracts for people in his district.

Now Mullah Salaam surveyed the room confidently, gazing around at the eleven elders from his district (mostly Pashtuns, with one Hazara) who had made the long journey to Kabul to show their solidarity with him, along with a collection of officials of the Independent Directorate of Local Government (IDLG), the part of the Afghan government that is (in theory at least) responsible for district and local administration. Mullah Salaam and his elders had come to put their case for support to the IDLG leadership. Headed by Jalani Popal, President Karzai's cousin, IDLG was working to bring essential services and government presence to local populations across the country, creating local governance centers and appointing district governors, in order to solidify President Karzai's control over the Afghan countryside. This effort was codified two years later as the District Delivery Program, which Popal described at the
2010
London Conference (displaying his, or perhaps his speechwriter's, superb mastery of international development terminology) as aiming “to establish or improve the visibility of the Government by holistically engaging the governance system at the district level to ensure that the basic level public services are available directly to communities.”
66
More concisely, an official from Nangarhar province described the program to me as “the re-elect Karzai campaign.”
67

I was at the table as a visiting official from Washington, D.C., along with a small field team. We were conducting a theaterwide campaign assessment for the U.S. secretary of state, traveling to different parts of the conflict area, talking to local populations and key officials, trying to get a feel for the state of the war and, more important, the reach and effectiveness of the Afghan government. Things didn't look good, to say the least. At this time NATO's campaign plan included a governance line of operation, which declared that the coalition's governance objective was “to extend the reach of the Afghan government.”
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The problem with such a strategy of government extension was that it lacked a comparable governance reform element. If your strategy is to extend the reach of a government that is corrupt, abusive, ineffective, and alienates the people, then the better you execute that strategy, the worse things are going to get—which is exactly what was happening.

Then, as now, the problem in Afghanistan wasn't fundamentally a military one: the Taliban, for all their ferocious reputation, were no match for NATO in military terms, and they'd been solidly defeated several times over in campaigns around the country since
2001
. But because there was no viable, effective, nonabusive government to replace them—or, putting it in competitive control theory terms, because the Afghan government couldn't muster a wide-spectrum normative system to compete with that of the Taliban—the insurgency always returned, because it did things that the people needed and that the government either could not or would not do. Active sanctuary in Pakistan—including advisers, money, weapons, training support, and protection from U.S. interference—certainly helped, but ultimately even Pakistani support wouldn't have allowed the insurgency to continually recover from its military losses had the insurgents not also had a robust normative system that could outcompete the government's. Like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Taliban could and did bounce back from a series of military defeats by using capabilities in the other parts of the persuasion-coercion spectrum.

Now Mullah Salaam began his pitch, with his elders looking on but remaining silent, acting as living props who indicated, by their mere presence, the district governor's influence and prestige. Their role was to demonstrate allegiance to him, while he in turn would act as an intermediary, using their support to prove his influence, and so garner resources from the government that he would in turn distribute to them. Mullah Salaam had come over to the government side a few weeks before, he said, along with all the elders from his district, because he wanted the best for his people. He explained that he needed to protect his district and its population from all comers—the Taliban, the government, the drug traffickers, the British currently occupying his area, everyone. To do this, he needed resources that would be under his personal control. He was happy the British had driven off the Taliban, and he was happy that he had been appointed district governor, but he needed either a permanent garrison to take care of his district or weapons to arm his own fighters. He wanted to establish his own local police (
arbakai
) to secure his district. And he needed contracts—reconstruction contracts, aid projects, transportation and supply contracts—to bring wealth to his people. He and the elders would see to it that any assistance was fairly distributed, he promised.

After half an hour of inconclusive discussion, as we stood to leave, he grabbed my hand tightly. “Give me American troops to protect my district,” he said. “If I can't have Americans, I want my own weapons back so I can protect my people myself.” Explaining that I was just a low-level diplomat with no influence over the military, I asked what would happen if neither of those options was possible. “If I can't have my own weapons, I'll accept the Afghan Army in my district, and if I can't have the army, then I'll accept the Afghan Police—but only as a last resort.” I asked why his own government should trust him with new weapons when he'd been so recently aligned with the Taliban. Didn't he still have his own weapons? Had he really switched sides so completely? Since when did the Alizai take orders from Kabul, anyway?

He smiled at me, perhaps marveling at my idiotic naïveté.

“I wasn't with the Taliban before, and I'm not with the government now. I'm just trying to take care of my people. Before, I thought we were better off with the Taliban. Now I think we're better off with the government, but that could change.”

Clearly, terms such as
pro-Taliban
or
pro-government
are meaningless as a description of a local leader such as Abdul Salaam Alizai. For one thing, these terms represent not fixed and unchanging inherent identities that predict a person's behavior but rather labels that can be acquired and discarded at will. For another, these labels—while they might make sense in the externally imposed construct (what anthropologists might call the etic framework) of counterinsurgency theory—are virtually irrelevant at the local level, where every elder furthers his own interests and those of his group, and partners with whatever outsider he needs to—Taliban, government, or other—in order to advance those interests. A change of sides didn't indicate a change of loyalty, for each local leader's loyalty was only ever to himself and his primary group. Anything else was just window dressing.

Just consider Mullah Salaam's personal history: he was originally a Taliban military leader, and then a provincial and district governor for the Taliban regime. Next he was a prisoner of, then an ally of, then head of the bodyguard for, the new regime's governor, who happened to be his tribal relative and personal rival. Then he fought with the Taliban to throw that governor, and the British, out of his district, and after that he turned against the Taliban once more, welcomed the British back, and became district governor himself. Now he wanted a payoff from the government for his “loyalty,” when it should be abundantly clear that Salaam's loyalty was to nobody but himself, his subtribe, and his subdistrict. As far as he was concerned, the dominant feature of any external intervener—Taliban, British, Kabul government, American, anyone—was precisely that it
was
an external actor, to be allied with or opposed on a pragmatic basis, only to the extent that such an alliance served his or his district's local interest and furthered his ability to defeat his tribal and economic rivals.

A few months after this meeting, after the Taliban had targeted him twice for assassination, Mullah Salaam found himself in an open dispute with the British Army once more. As Jerome Starkey reported:

A former Taliban commander who swapped sides last year has accused his British allies of jeopardising security and undermining his authority in a row that has plunged their relations to an all time low. Mullah Salam was made governor of Musa Q
 
ala, Helmand, after British, American and Afghan forces retook the town in December. His defection was the catalyst for the operation. But the British fear his warlord ways are hampering their efforts to win over local people, and driving them back into the hands of the insurgents. Mullah Salam says British soldiers are wrecking his attempts to bring security by releasing people he arrests and underfunding his war chest—which he claims is for buying off insurgent commanders. . . . The top British diplomat at the headquarters, Dr Richard Jones, said: “He likes to feather his own nest.” . . . Lieutenant-Colonel Ed Freely, who commands the Royal Irish troops training Afghanistan's army, said: “He appears less interested in governing his people than reinforcing his own personal position of power.” . . . The British believe he taxed his own villagers more than a ton of opium at the end of the poppy harvest. They also suspect his militia of stealing land, money and motorbikes, and beating people who can't pay. Mullah Salam denies the allegations. “If I see anyone in my militia doing these things I will shoot him,” he said, revealing his own brand of Taliban-style justice.
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Even by the baroque standards of Afghan tribal leaders, Mullah Salaam has a reputation for eccentricity and drama. But—as we've seen—his words and actions in this case were utterly typical of the behavior of local leaders in environments such as insurgencies, civil wars, and failed states, in feral cities such as Mogadishu, in marginalized urban settlements such as the Kingston garrison communities, or in periurban slums such as those of Mumbai.