Armed politics and political competition in Afghanistan
Dr. Antonio Giustozzi, Crisis States Research Centre, LSE
[Draft: not for quotation]
Introduction
The post-conflict transition in Afghanistan is incomplete in more ways than one. Not only
open conflict has resurfaced in large tracts of the country and is spreading,1 but even
where open conflict is not present the legacy of conflict continues to have a strong impact
in several aspects of recovery and reconstruction. The development of a competitive
political system is one of the areas where this legacy is felt, due to the continuing
presence and influence of non-state armed groups. Such groups intervene in the political
process to various degrees, but their influence is always felt. Inevitably, in the absence of
a central monopoly of armed force political competition becomes distorted. Neither the
effort to disarm official militias (DDR),2 nor the one aimed at disarming unofficial ones
(DIAG) even remotely came close to resolving the problem.3 The introduction of
legislation to prevent candidates with links to armed groups from running only succeeded
in forcing about 32 of them to step down, leaving the large majority undeterred.4 This
paper analyses the role of different non-state armed groups in post-2001 Afghan politics
and to trace their evolution. It starts by developing a concept of ‘armed politics’ and by
identifying ‘ideal types’ of particular models of armed politics. It then identifies different
actors in armed politics. A section of the paper examines the techniques of armed politics
used in Afghanistan. The rest of this work examines each of these models in the context
of Afghanistan, establishing to what extent they have been used, what impact they had
and what type of evolution they have known. The paper concludes with a discussion of
the prospects of armed politics in Afghanistan.
The non-state armed groups this paper is dealing with have their origins in the 1980s
jihad against the leftist government and the Soviet army, although some of them fought
on the government side as militias. The initial mujahidin were a mixed bag of Islamist,
nationalist and Maoist activists, clerics and their supporters, tribal and community leaders
1
For a detailed analysis of the insurgency in post-2001 Afghanistan, see A. Giustozzi, Kuran, Kalashnikov
and laptop: the Neo-Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, 2002-2007, Columbia University Press, 2007
(forthcoming).
2
On the Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration effort see S. Rossi and A. Giustozzi,
Disarmament Demobilisation and Reintegration of ex-combatants (DDR) in Afghanistan: constraints and
limited capabilities, Working Paper 2 Series 2, London : Crisis States Research Centre (LSE), 2006.
3
On the Disarmament of Illegal Armed Groups (DIAG) see the UN press release dated 20 March 2007,
‘International Community Must Move Quickly to Help Afghanistan as Efforts to Secure Peace, Stability
'Were Being Put to the Test', Security Council Told’.
4
Some 208 out of 5,800 had been reported to the Joint Electoral Management Body as linked to armed
groups. See AIHRC-UNAMA, Joint Verification of Political Rights, Wolesi Jirga and Provincial Council
Elections, Second report (4 June – 16 August 2005)’, Kabul, 2005.
with their followers and outlaws. However, during the long-lasting war the different
social origins of the fighters gradually ceased to matter, leading to the emergence of a
military class of ‘specialists in violence’. The process of formation of a military class was
not uniform throughout Afghanistan, but after 2001 the remaining non-state armed
groups could largely be circumscribed to this military class. Political activists were by
2001 a virtually extinct force in terms of their involvement in armed groups. Clerical
activism would soon resurface in the shape of the Neo-Taliban insurgency, which
however will not be covered by this paper. Some communities re-armed after 2001,
particularly in areas affected by the insurgency, but their interests were largely local and
did not play a significant role in terms of armed politics as defined in this paper.
Models and actors of armed political competition
Although the term ‘armed politics’ is used in a variety of ways, including to indicate the
intervention of state armies in politics5 or political insurgencies tout-court,6 I use it here
to describe the distortion caused by the presence of non-state armed groups on the
competitiveness of an otherwise open political system.7 In other terms this paper will
look at the influence of non-state armed groups on electoral contests and at the
competition among those same groups to capture important state offices. I deliberately
abstain in this definition from implying that armed force has to be actively used to
achieve political aims, even if that might often be the case, as my submission is that both
the simple possession of armed force by private actors and the threat to use it are
sufficient to fundamentally change the dynamics of any political system. For the purpose
of this study I am going to identify a number of ‘ideal types’, each representing a
particular model of armed politics.
‰
5
Self-defensive: characterised by its reactive character and by the merely local use of
violence or threat thereof. In a situation of broken or non-existent state monopoly of
violence, or wherever armed state agencies are perceived to be factionally biased and
hostile to specific groups, political actors and communities may organise armed
militias at least initially for the purpose of defending themselves. This was for
example the case of several leftist organisations in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.
Often, these armed militias might end up contributing to the general climate of
insecurity and threat and push yet other actors to arm.8
See for example Perspectives on Armed Politics in Brazil, Ed. by Henry H. Keith and Robert A. Hayes.
Tempe: Arizona State University, 1976.
6
See for example Said Adejumobi , 'Conflict and peace building in West Africa: the
role of civil society and the African Union', Conflict, Security & Development, 4:1, 59
- 77.
7
In this sense it is used in Peter R. Neumann, ‘From Revolution to Devolution:
Is the IRA Still a Threat to Peace in Northern Ireland?’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies,
Vol. 13, No. 1, 79–92, April 2005.
8
See for example Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and Political Violence,
1929-33, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.
‰
Conservative: militias are used to establish or consolidate the territorial control and
influence of leaders or groups and as a resource to forcefully mobilise support or
prevent other political actors from operating within such an area of influence. It
largely occurs at a regional level rather than national. One typical example is that of
Latin American ‘caudillismo’.9
‰
Expansionist: armed politics aimed at expanding the influence of a particular group
or individual and/or conveying a particular image of them. It often implies reducing
the spaces of activity of competing groups and its arena tends to be a large region or
the whole country. Classical examples include Maoism, which in the early stages of
its strategy uses armed force sparingly to achieve psychological gains,10 and fascism,
where the emphasis is on the psychological impact of a display of discipline and
strength as a demonstration of the resolution of the group to address issues at the
core of the concerns of its base of support.11 Expansionism can be driven by personal
ambition, ideology or the presence of attractive opportunities.
These models of armed politics can be matched to a number of different political actors
on the Afghan scene. Although initially UN officials were reluctant to discuss the
existence of non-state armed groups apart from those engaged in open insurgency, by
2004 both they and the Afghan authorities were openly recognising that this was a major
problem. The launch of the DIAG program was meant to address the problem, but in the
end the main contribution of the program was to map the presence of these groups on the
territory. A census which is likely to be incomplete had by 2006 counted as many as
2,000 ‘illegal’ militias with an estimated up to 180,000 members in all of Afghanistan.12
In practice that means the presence of a non-state militiaman every 140 inhabitants. To
these, legal or tolerated irregular formations should be added, such as 63,000 members13
of the official militias (AMF or Afghan Military Force), gradually disbanded during
2004-5 but possibly in part at least driven underground, 20,000 or so private security
guards, many of whom linked to active politicians, arbakai tribal militias in the southeast,14 a few thousands of governor’s militiamen and some thousands of members of antiTaliban militias operating in southern, south-eastern and eastern Afghanistan. These
groups can be grouped into three ‘ideal types’:
9
For a review of the concept of caudillism, see Michael Riekenberg, ‘Caudillismus. Zu einem Grundbegriff
der spanishen and hispanoamerikanischer Geschichte’, Neue Politische Literatur, 40:2 (1995).
10
Metz, S. and Millen, R., Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in the 21st Century: Reconceptualizing
Threat and Response, Carlisle : Strategic Studies Institute (November 2004)
11
See Mimmo Franzinelli, Squadristi, Protagonisti e tecniche della violenza fascista, 1919-1922, Milano,
Mondadori 2003; Richard Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism: Stormtroopers in Eastern
Germany, 1925-34, Yale UP 1984; Gerhard Botz, Gewalt in der Politik. Attentate, Zusammenstöße,
Putschversuche, Unruhen in Österreich 1918 bis 1938, München : Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1983.
12
Sylvie Briand, ‘Warlords and weapons -- gunpowder for Afghanistan’, Agence France Presse, 28 March
2007; Asian Development Bank, Country Strategy and Program Update 2006-2008: Afghanistan, August
2005, p. 2; AP, 27 February 2007.
13
This is the official figure of those DDRed accoring to the UNDP-run Afghanistan New Beginning
Program (ANBP).
14
See A. Giustozzi, ‘The privatizing of war and security in Afghanistan: future or dead end?’, The
Economics of Peace and Security Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2007), pp. 19-23; Giustozzi, Kuran,
Kalashnikov…, cit.
‰
Local communities: led by elders or in any case by non-charismatic men of
influence, they tend to have strictly limited and local aims and interests. Since
communities too tend to incorporate dissident elements or to be ridden by personal
rivalries, the elders might want to enforce unanimous compliance, including in
political/electoral matters. As explained in the introduction, however, in post-2001
Afghanistan’s case local communities played a very small role in armed politics.
‰
Strongmen: autonomous charismatic leaders, initially arising from a local/regional
power base, who derive their influence both from some at least partial form of
legitimisation (tribal, kin, provision of patronage and security, mediatory/regulatory
role) and from the control of an armed force. In the Afghan context, several of them
started their career as religious leaders, but religion played little role in their
legitimisation after the end of the jihad in the eary 1990s. Their primary interest is to
consolidate their influence and prevent challenges. I use this category here as
inclusive of various categories of actors, including warlords, as for the purposes of
this paper it is not essential to distinguish between them.
‰
Parties: these can either be alliances or hierarchical organisations which are not
entirely dependent on a single charismatic leader but have instead comparatively
complex leadership arrangements. In other terms, they at least relatively
institutionalised. Their interests are less local then those of strongmen and consist in
spreading their influence as wide as possible or claim monopoly over a relatively
large area.
The relevance of these ideal types derives from the fact that not all actors were equally
susceptible of cooptation into a more mature political system or equally inclined to use
armed politics to enhance their position. Another term will be used in this paper, which is
useful to clarify: the term ‘commanders’ denotes in this paper members of politicomilitary organisations with a leadership role. The key difference from the strongmen is
that the commanders are not autonomous but belong to a structure with at least an
implicit hierarchy.
Techniques of armed politics
As it will emerge from the following paragraphs, the most common form of armed
politics in Afghanistan 2001-2007 was ‘in being’, i.e. it relied mainly on its deterrent
power and on the universal knowledge that reprisal would follow to any challenge from
outsider individuals and groups. This deterrent power was usually helped by a good dose
of ‘soft’ intimidation, including through personal visits or anonymous telephone calls,
where no violence was used but the possibility of ‘incidents’ was hinted. Even during the
sessions of the Loya Jirgas this type of intimidation was reported.15 All the protagonists
15
Human Rights Watch, Afghanistan on the eve of parliamentary and provincial elections, New York,
2005, p. 9-11; Human Rights Watch, “Killing You is a Very Easy Thing For Us”: Human Rights Abuses in
Southeast Afghanistan, New York, July 2003, chapter IV: ‘Attacks on Political Actors and Political
of armed politics in Afghanistan had an established track record of ruthlessness and
resilience, which might not contribute to make them popular but certainly advertised
against challenging them in the absence of strong protection from either alternative nonstate armed groups or state security agencies. The diffuse presence of factionally aligned
armed groups and the unreliability of the police must inevitably have weighted heavily on
any political player unable to enlist the support of armed groups16 and not only on them.
Their interests were often taken into account even by the UN body in charge of
organising the elections (JEMB, Joint Electoral Management Board), which often
appointed complacent officials to run elections in the more problematic districts. The
most blatant example of abuse in this regard concerned the leader of a minor armed
faction, Dawat-i Islami (formerly Ittehad-i Islami). Despite the discovery of a massive
rigging effort in his home district of Paghman, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf was allowed to enter
the parliament, although with a much reduced score.17
It should be added that some of these armed groups were officially recognised, enhancing
their influence and status, like the governors’ militias, or unofficially tolerated, like the
southern anti-Taliban militias. According to Afghan law, governors are allowed to form a
personal militia of up to 500 members, mainly for the purpose of self-protection. In
practice, autonomous militias abounded, particularly in southern Afghanistan and when
the leaders were personally close to President Karzai and his family. Dismissed officials,
like former chief of police of Uruzgan Matiullah and former governor of Helmand, Sher
Mohammed, continued to employ militias of several hundreds well into 2007. These
official or tolerated armed groups are likely to have influenced the electoral process more
heavily than others, which particularly after the first Loya Jirga were mostly unable to
display their weapons in public. Sher Mohammad’s brother was a candidate in the 2005
parliamentary elections and although he was disqualified at the last minute for links to
armed groups, he did obtain a large number of votes.18 Although there is no immediate
evidence of these militias having being engaged in the electoral campaign, it is clear that
their existence was not conductive to a ‘free and fair’ environment.
The next most common form of armed politics in Afghanistan is state
infiltration/capture. It can mean two things: a reversion of processes of
institutionalisation and bureaucratisation leading to non-partisan structures of the state
becoming factionally aligned, or groups/factions not coinciding with the coalition in
power at the centre taking control of chunks of the state. In the context of Afghanistan,
since the abstraction of the state from factional conflict is a process which never went to
far in the first place, we are in practice always talking of the second case. It is often
motivated by the pursuit of personal gain as well as by the promotion of the interests of a
Activities’; ‘Christian Parenti in Afghanistan: Saturday's Elections Were A Farce’, Democracy Now, 12
October 2004 (http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/12/1347201); AIHRC-UNAMA
Joint Verification…, cit., First Report (19 April - 3 June 2005), Second report (4 June – 16 August 2005).
16
See Human Rights Watch, Afghanistan on the eve…, cit..
17
Personal communication with UN official, Kabul, October 2005; S. Mudassir Ali Shah, ‘A fractured
parliament’, The Nation, 14 October 2005.
18
Personal communication with UN officials, Kabul, February and March 2007; personal communication
with Afghan journalist, Kabul, October 2006; Tom Coghlan, ‘Taliban flee Afghan-led Nato offensive’,
Daily Telegraph, 30 March 2007.
specific political group.19 The infiltration and occupation of the structures of the state by
non-state armed groups affected most institutions of the Afghan state, from the
ministerial level down to the district one. In this paper I will only deal with the issue to
the extent that it directly affects political competition and the functioning of the political
system. The following institutions are relevant for this analysis:
‰
Police;
‰
National Security Directorate;
‰
Sub-national administrations, particularly provincial governors;
At the provincial level, with which we are mainly concerned here, in late 2001-early 2002
police forces were largely taken over by the dominant faction, group, strongman or
coalition thereof and staffed with their followers. The predominance of private interests
in the police force was perceived as a problem both by at least some sections of the
government and by the international coalition supporting it. From mid-2002 a series of
attempts to reform the Ministry of Interior started, first with Minister Taj Mohammad, an
elderly royalist, and then somewhat more incisively from 2003 with Minister Ahmad Ali
Jalali. While a trend towards a greater professionalism and lesser factional bias was
clearly perceivable during the first three quarters of 2003, by the end of that year the
trend had reverted and appointments seemed again to follow a factional logic. This was
particularly evident in Badakhshan, where following former president Rabbani’s pledge
to support Karzai in the elections many of Rabbani’s supporters were appointed in the
place of professional or non-factional policemen.20 Tension between Karzai and Jalali
appears to have been growing throughout 2004 and 2005, until Jalali finally resigned
from his post just after the parliamentary elections of 2005. The growing insurgency
during 2005 and even more so 2006 led to renewed international pressure for the reform
of the Ministry, with much stricter supervision of the policy of appointments and the
imposition of recruitment criteria. The results were mixed. Many factionally aligned,
incompetent, unskilled or corrupt officials were removed from the ministerial
headquarters, but in the provinces changes were muted. Moreover, most changes
occurred after the parliamentary elections.21 At that time, most of provincial police forces
were still aligned with some faction or strongman and UN officials received allegations
that they were involved in intimidation or participated in the electoral campaign.22
Factional control over the NSD (national Security Directorate) was never seriously
challenged and by 2005 it remained an unchallenged stronghold of an Islamist faction,
19
The concept of state capture is mostly used in the context of the area of the former Soviet Union. For its
application to Afghanistan see Madalene O'Donnell, ‘Post-Conflict Corruption: A Rule of Law Agenda?’ in
Civil War and Rule of Law, International Peace Academy, forthcoming.
20
Personal communications with UN officials, Kabul, September 2004; Antonio Giustozzi, Bad State vs.
Good Warlords? A Critique of State-building Strategies in Afghanistan, Working Paper No. 51 of the Crisis
States Program, London : LSE, 2004.
21
Personal communications with UN officials, Kabul, October 2006 and February 2007.
22
Eurasia Insight, ‘Afghanistan: Election Officials, Security Forces Prepare for Presidential Poll’, 7
October 2004; AIHRC-UNAMA, Joint Verification…, cit., Second report (4 June – 16 August 2005).
Jamiat-i Islami, both at the centre and in most provinces. The main exception was much
of northern Afghanistan, where the NSD was under the control of Junbesh, although by
2004 there were signs that Junbesh’s control over provincial NSD units was eroding, with
some officials refusing to follow the directives of Junbesh’s leaders.23 At least one case
of NSD involvement in the electoral process occurred during the 2003-4 Constitutional
Loya Jirga elections, when police and NSD tolerated a plot orchestrated by some jihadi
groups to oust Baghlan candidate Sayyid Mansur Naderi. Unauthorised individuals were
allowed into the election site and were reportedly putting pressure on the grand electors
to support specific candidates; NSD agents were also present inside the site, contravening
the regulations, and did not intervene. Apart from that, harassment of political opponents
was reportedly carried out by NSD on behalf of both Shura-i Nezar, Junbesh and Dawat-i
Islami. As long as Shura-i Nezar and Karzai were allied, the NSD served the purposes of
the president too, for example by putting pressure on the delegates to the Constitutional
Loya Jirga to agree on Karzai’s draft.24
Often, police and NSD were rather guilty of omission than of active harassment or
repression on the behalf of their local patrons. The knowledge that the security agencies
were aligned with certain political players is likely to have contributed to discourage
competition, particularly in its most aggressive forms. Several governors were also
reported to be involved in intimidation and threats through their militias, including Sher
Alam and Asadullah Khalid of Ghazni.25
Armed politics ‘in being’ of course tends to offer diminishing returns over time if it is not
displayed in action at least occasionally. Potential challengers need to be periodically
reminded that the threat still stands. Moreover, occasionally dissent surfaces for a number
of reasons and has to be put down. In Afghanistan, apart from conflicts among armed
strongmen and factions, which steadily declined after 2003, direct challenges to
local/regional monopolies over political activity emerged periodically and were mostly
met with ‘controlled violence’. This typically consisted of instances of beatings and
harassment, which were reported during the presidential and parliamentary elections
particularly but not only in northern Afghanistan. The main targets were reluctant
notables and party activists trying to establish a foothold in the fiefdom of some militia.26
More extreme forms of violence such as assassinations of candidates, delegates and MPs
took place in a number of cases, in Badakhshan, Ghor, Laghman and Balkh. Usually,
local strongmen and militias were accused of their deaths.27
23
Personal communications with UN officials, Mazar-i Sharif, June-September 2004; personal observation,
Kunduz, November 2003; Human Rights Watch, “Killing You…, cit., chapter IV: ‘Attacks on Political
Actors and Political Activities’. Naderi would later stand as candidate in the parliamentary elections,
winning the largest number of votes in Baghlan.
24
Human Rights Watch, ‘Loya Jirga Off to a Shaky Start’, press release, 13 June 2002.
25
Human Rights Watch, Afghanistan on the eve…, cit., pp. 9, 13.
26
Human Rights Watch, Afghanistan on the eve…, cit., passim; AIHRC-UNAMA
Joint Verification…, cit., First Report (19 April - 3 June 2005), Second report (4 June – 16 August 2005).
27
This lift of provinces is limited to cases in which the involvement of non-state armed groups (excluding
the insurgents) was reported. Personal communication with Loya Jirga delegates from Badakhshan,
October 2003; United Nations, Daily Highlights, 21 May 2002; Pajhwok News Agency, 15 March 2005;
Radio Liberty 15 December 2006 (http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/12/216ef1be-d4dd-4d09-b17ba461db18f501.html); UNHCR, Chronology of Events in Afghanistan, May 2002
Larger scale violence and prevarication also occurred in several instances, despite not
being the norm. During the initial years of the post-Taliban transition the hold of nonstate armed actors was still precarious, mainly due to the need to assess the intentions of
international players, now presence on the Afghan scene with relatively large military
contingents and the much feared US Air Force.28 During 2002-3 non-state armed actors
needed to show to an uncertain public that they meant business and that international
intervention was neither diminishing their resolve nor should be taken as implying open
political competition everywhere. By the end of 2003 and even more so by the end of the
summer 2004 their bluff had been called, following a series of incidents in which they
opted to back down from confrontation with Kabul andits international patrons. From
2004 large scale display of armed force and violence had different motivations and was
mainly the preserve of actors who were being marginalised from state power and
patronage. They needed to show that they still had the potential to destabilise large
regions of the country and that they needed to be incorporated in the ruling alliance. On
the whole, the most blatant forms of armed politics in action used during this period and
to a lesser extent after 2003 too can be summed up under three categories:
‰
Armed rioting;
‰
Blockading;
‰
Direct seizure of the electoral process in specific localities/regions.
During 2002-3 armed politics was practiced quite aggressively and assertively in trying to
establish a monopoly of political representation over specific areas. During the first phase
of the Emergency Loya Jirga elections of 2002, for example, northern Afghanistan
witnessed the blockading of specific areas with the aim to keep ‘hostile’ candidates out
of the competition or to prevent from voting some communities known to be hostile.29
Seizures of the electoral process mostly occurred during the first Loya Jirga (2002) and
took different shapes. Sometimes the tactics used would consist in seizing control of the
whole selection process and pre-selecting the candidates. Other times they would take the
shape of maintaining a presence of militiamen in the polling station, as to intimidate the
grand electors.30 After 2002 such tactics became difficult to implement on a large scale,
due to increased international scrutiny. During the elections to the Constitutional Loya
Jirga of 2003-4, no seizure of the first phase of the process (local selections) was
reported. During the second phase at least one incident occurred, involving Sayyid
Mansur Naderi. Up to two hundreds individual external to the selection process managed
(http://www.unhcr.org/home/RSDCOI/415c614b4.pdf); ‘Candidate killed in Afghanistan’, BBC News, 27
September 2005.
28
Interview with former Loya Jirga commissioner, Kabul, May 2003.
29
Dr. Christine Noelle-Karimi, ‘Report on Loya Jirga Elections Phases I and II, Provinces of Balkh and
Samangan
May 1-28, 2002, Loya Jirga Elections Phases I and II, Kabul, May 29-June 7, 2002’, unpublished report,
courtesy of the author.
30
Noelle-Karimi, ‘Report…, cit.
to storm the polling station in Kunduz and riot against his candidacy, eventually forcing
him to withdraw his candidacy.31
As outright military confrontation came to be seen as an unacceptable challenge to the
occupation and peacekeeping foreign forces deployed in Afghanistan, non-state armed
actors used their supporters to create ‘popular revolts’ which were aimed at legitimising
their demands and embarrass the government and its foreign sponsors. In 2004, larger
riots organised by the militias occurred in Maimana and Sar-i Pul, in both cases
succeeding in dislodging administrators appointed by Kabul. In Herat (also 2004), were
they aimed at protesting against the removal of Ismail Khan from the position of
governor, the riots failed however to achieve their aim, although Ismail was later
appointed minister in compensation for the loss of the governorship. In 2005,
demonstration at least in part organised by non-state armed actors were repeated in
Baghlan, again with success.32 There seems to be sufficient evidence that actors of the
same kind were involved in the Kabul riots of June 2006.33 Their involvement may also
have occurred in a number of riots in eastern and south-eastern Afghanistan in 2005 and
2006, of which the Jalalabad riots of May 2005 were the largest, but it is not proven.
The last form of armed politics which I will review is armed propaganda. In post-2001
Afghanistan, the only significant manifestation of this has been the effort of Hizb-i Islami
to mount a symbolic insurgency, mainly in eastern Afghanistan. As of early 2007, tens of
small armed groups, mostly numbering 3-15 men, were active with small scale military
activities. In their case, armed activity and violence were meant to convey an image of
strong opposition to the presence of foreign troops, against whom most attacks were
targeted. Afghan police and army were mostly spared or at least not actively targeted.34
These military activities seem to have been meant to work in tandem with a ‘political
front’ and attract the support of (expanding) sections of the population who resented
foreign presence in the country. The task of the political front was to capitalise on the
image of opposition to foreign presence in the country, which armed resistance created or
reinforced, and turn that positive image into political gains (see Ideologies, parties and
expansionist armed politics). The creation of political fronts is far from unusual among
insurgent groups, but what qualifies Hizb-i Islami’s insurgency as ‘armed propaganda’ is
the fact that its purpose is not to directly conquer control of the state, but to create an
image of strength and resolution.
This is akin to the violent tactics used by fascist movements in the 1920s-1930s Europe –
violence was used on too limited a scale to seriously weaken the opponents; it real
31
See note 23 above.
Personal communications with UN officials, Mazar-i Sharif, June-July 2004, and in Kabul, September
2004; ‘Afghans Stop Governor From Assuming Office’, Arab News, 13 June 2004
(http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4&section=0&article=46704&d=13&m=6&y=2004&pix=world.jpg&ca
tegory=World); Carlotta Gall, ‘Afghan Crowds Loot and Burn Over Governor's Dismissal’, New York
Times, 13 September 2004; Pamela Constable, “Afghans Riot over Dismissal of Governor in Herat”,
Washington Post, 13 September 2004; Arman-e-Milli, 6 September 2005; Waheed Rahmani, ‘Two northern
Afghan governors replaced’, Pajhwok Afghan News, 4 September 2005.
33
Personal communication with ISAF officer and journalist Carlotta Gall, Kabul, June 2006.
34
For more details about the military activities of Hizb-i Islami, see Giustozzi, Kuran, Kalashnikov…, cit.
32
purpose was to mobilise specific sections of the population around a leadership and
conquer power through ‘legal’ means. The difference is that fascist movements mainly
relied on the display of military discipline to achieve their aim, as aspect absent in Hizb-i
Islami. A strictly ‘fascist’ style of armed propaganda never had much currency in
Afghanistan, despite long years of war and the rising issue of ethnicity and ethnonationalism. The fact that the Afghan war was never about large battles and that training
and indoctrination by the various players in the conflict was limited at best are probably
the key factors in explaining why the specific fascist model of armed propaganda, with its
stress on discipline and esprit de corps, never made it very far. Despite some influence of
Turkish far right groups among Uzbeks after 2001, not even the most radical wing of
Junbesh, that is its youth movement, ever flirted with demonstration styles and tactics
which vaguely resembled the fascist model. Even the most successful of Junbesh’s street
demonstrations, when in Maimana (2004) they succeeded in dislodging an unwanted
governor and the commander of the local 200th Division of the Ministry of Defence,
resembled more riots than displays of discipline and efficiency.35
Conservative armed politics, or ‘caudillism’ in Afghanistan
Armed politics in post-2001 Afghanistan has predominantly taken a conservative
character. Until 2001, Afghanistan’s ‘caudillos’, that is the strongmen, had mostly been
playing feudal politics, that is use their regional influence to bargain with factional
leaders and form alliances in terms as favourable as possible. The strongmen should not
be confused with the so-called ‘commanders (kumandanan)’ tout court, as the strongmen
have an autonomous power base and are virtually independent, even when they maintain
some formal affiliation with a faction. In a sense they could be described as the top tier of
the ‘commanders’. The power of the strongmen had been rising throughout the 1980s and
1990s, as the Afghan state grew weaker and weaker and unable to exercise any direct
control over the countryside. At the same time, opposition political organisations based
abroad were also in most cases too weak and too keen to expand their influence to
exercise effective control over their affiliates inside Afghanistan. The only interruption to
the power of the strongmen was the emergence and consolidation of the Taliban
movement in 1994-2001, which almost eliminated the strongmen from the scene. By the
end of 2001, however, the strongmen were re-emerging fast, filling the vacuum left in
much of the countryside by the collapse of the Taliban regime.36 In this paper I will
distinguish between individual strongmen, who rely on a personal following without
significant organised support, and factional strongmen, who were part or leaders of
organisations targeted at structuring and expand their following.
From 2002 onwards, the individual strongmen increasingly adopted three separate
survival strategies in order to adapt to the post-conflict environment. The first one was a
modified version of the old ‘feudal politics’ of the 1980s and 1990s, whereby the
strongmen tried to strike alliances with individuals and factions in power in Kabul in
35
Personal communication with UN officials, Kabul and Mazar-i Sharif, June-July 2004.
See on this A. Giustozzi, Respectable Warlords? The Politics of State-building in Post-Taleban
Afghanistan, Working Paper No. 33 of the Crisis States Program, London : LSE, 2003.
36
order to secure their regional influence and possibly gain a foothold in Kabul as well.37
The alternative strategy was to enter electoral politics, either directly or indirectly
supporting allies and relatives. The two strategies were not necessarily at odds, although
inevitably the weaker the link with Kabul, the stronger the temptation to seek an
alternative sources of legitimisation and influence in elections.38 The third option was to
seek employment by the state in high status positions or to devote themselves to moneymaking activities such as business and crime.39 The slim chances of making it to the
parliament was a factor in the decision of many to stay away from politics. In fact, the
‘withdrawal from politics’ option was mainly the choice of the smaller strongmen,
usually controlling not much more then a single district, often even significantly less than
that. Lack of resources might have been another factor for the poorer strongmen, as the
electoral campaign was widely expected to be expensive. Finally, a few strongmen were
banned from competing because of allegations of maintaining armed militias, or opted to
stay out fearing that they would otherwise attract unwarranted attention to their
‘underground’ activities. Badly connected strongmen were particularly ill positioned for
an entry into electoral politics: since all strongmen maintained underground militias,
being singled out for exclusion was likely to be a political choice made in Kabul. In this
paper, I shall deal exclusively with the electoral strategy.
The first manifestation of the strongmen’s involvement in competitive politics was during
the 2002 Emergency Loya Jirga elections. These were indirect elections, in which 30,000
grand electors were to be selected by the different districts and would then in turn elect
500 delegates to the Loya Jirga. A number of individual strongmen was strongly
intentioned to run, but were initially prevented to do so by the UN-sponsored regulations,
which banned leaders of armed groups from the contest. As the selection process was
ongoing, however, such principled stand was rapidly abandoned and the strongmen were
allowed to compete.40 At the following Constitutional Loya Jirga elections of 2003,
which followed a similar selection system, the strongmen were allowed to participate
from the beginning. Finally, at the parliamentary elections of 2004 the individual
strongmen also did well and several of them were elected as MPs, although a few of them
were prevented from running because of evidence of being linked to armed groups (see
Map 1). In many cases, they ranked at the top in terms of votes at the provincial level (see
Table 1). The strongmen’s involvement in politics did not end with their national
electoral campaigns, as others ran for election in the provincial councils.
Map 1: locations where individual strongmen were elected to parliament.
37
See Giustozzi, Good state…, cit.
For more on this see A. Giustozzi, ‘Afghanistan: Political Parties or Militia Fronts?’ Chapter 8 of
Transforming rebel movements after civil wars, ed. by J. de Zeeuw, Lynne Reinner Publishers, forthcoming
2007.
39
See A. Giustozzi, ‘War and Peace Economies of Afghanistan’s Strongmen’, International Peacekeeping,
Vol.14, No.1, January 2007, pp.75–89.
40
Personal communications with former Loya Jirga commissioners and UN officials.
38
Table 1: how well did the individual strongmen did in the elections.
Ahmad Khan
Piram Qul
Hazrat Ali
Padsha Khan
Alam Khan Azadi
Fataullah
Dr. Ibrahim
Amir Lalai
Haji Abdur Raouf
Ismatullah Mohabat
Payenda Mohammad
Khan
Province
Samangan
Takhar
Nangarhar
Paktya
Balkh
Faryab
Ghor
Kandahar
Kunduz
Laghman
Sar-i Pul
Percentage
obtained
23.9
6.2
3.4
4.7
5.4
5.3
11.2
5.0
3.8
7.3
Ranking
1
1
1
3
2
2
1
5
2
3
8.8
2
Source: JEMB electoral results.
All these strongmen were staking a claim to local/provincial leadership and to
representation of local, tribal, ethnic or regional interests. Apart from benefiting from the
support of armed militias, they also invested sizeable resources to guarantee good
performances which would legitimise their claims and consolidate their status of
strongmen.41 Coming on top was in a sense a requirement for them, in order to justify
their claim to provincial leadership. From the perspective of analysing the impact of
armed politics, the most important question to be answered here is to what extent their
relied specifically on it to secure election to representative bodies. Particularly after the
two Loya Jirga elections, there is only limited evidence that most of them actively used
their armed followers to intimidate voters and threaten alternative candidates.42 The
parliamentary electoral system, based on provincial boroughs, and the extreme electoral
fragmentation contributed to make threats to other candidates redundant: in some cases it
turned out to be possible to become the most voted candidate at the provincial level even
with just over 3% of the votes. Most of the strongmen had also access to substantial
financial resources, which already conferred to them a key advantage over the mass of
challengers. The financial strength derived depending on the cases by their ability to tax
sections of population, involvement in smuggling and trafficking of various sort,
proximity to foreign powers, support by sections of the trading class, land and property
grabbing and exploitation of state resources through alliances with local authorities.43 As
a result, violent incidents and abuses happened on a small scale and even armed force
was rarely displayed, contrary to what had happened particularly during the 2002 and
2003 Loya Jirga selection processes. Some presence of militiamen was reported in parts
of Parwan province, Ghor and Kunar, while threats and physical attacks occurred at least
in Dai Kundi, Herat, Ghor and parts of Nangarhar.44 As mentioned in Techniques of
armed politics, the main contribution of armed politics to securing representative posts to
the strongmen came from the climate of fear which they had successfully established in
their respective areas between 2001 and 2005. This combined with other factors such as
patronage and protection against local rivals to deliver electoral success. Some of the
strongmen might have benefited from a falsification of the electoral process. This was
alleged for example in the case of Piram Qul in Takhar province, although it was never
proven.45
Fraud cases apart, the votes received by the strongmen seem to have been to a large
extent real enough. As well as the implicit threat of violence and financial strength, their
success was also likely the result of the ability to provide a modicum of security in the
absence of strong state institutions, similarly to what had been the case of the Latin
American caudillos. Their ability to provide a modicum of security to specific sections of
the population was more pronounced in some cases, such as Ahmad Khan’s and Hazrat
Ali’s. Moreover, several strongmen tried to improve their political standing and
41
Personal communications with candidates and UN officials, Kabul and provinces, August-September
2004 and October 2005; Andrew Wilder, A House Divided? Analysing the 2005 Afghan Elections, Kabul :
AREU, pp. 27-8.
42
See AIHRC-UNAMA, Joint Verification…, cit., First Report (19 April - 3 June 2005), Second report (4
June – 16 August 2005).
43
See Giustozzi, War and peace economies…, cit.
44
‘Afghanistan: Where the rule by the gun continues’, IRIN, 7 April 2007; AIHRC-UNAMA
Joint Verification…, cit., First Report (19 April - 3 June 2005), Second report (4 June – 16 August 2005);
personal communication with party activist returning from Kunar, Jalalabad, February 2006. This list of
course excludes the insurgency affected provinces of the south, south-east and east.
45
Telephone communication with UN official, Kunduz, October 2005.
legitimise themselves by sponsoring popular causes. Ethnic and tribal causes were the
most common choices. Ahmad Khan, for example, openly sympathised for the cause of
Uzbek ethnic rights and was linked to Gen. Dostum’s Junbesh-i Milli Islami from its
early days until 2006. To a lesser extent, Payenda Mohammad Khan and Haji Abdur
Raouf also did the same and were also involved with Junbesh, although the latter only
superficially. Both maintained a high degree of autonomy throughout their relationship
with Junbesh, which is why I have included them among the strongmen. Although Hazrat
Ali was not so obviously touting his Pashai ethnicity as a legitimisation tool, probably
because he was hoping to cast his candidate’s nets far wider than this small ethnic
minority, in the end his distribution of patronage among Pashais was the key factor in
getting him elected. He appears to have received very little support from non-Pashai
voters. Others, like Alam Khan Azadi, played both the ethnic card (in his case Arab) and
the religious/ideological one (in his case Ikhwani). Some, like Piram Qul, stressed their
role in the jihad and their anti-communist profile, while Padsha Khan campaigned on a
‘more royalist than the king’ platform. Finally, Amir Lalai tried to cast himself as a jihadi
figure and at the same time appealed to tribal voters.46
The relative ‘ideologisation’ of the strongmen blurred the boundaries between individual
strongmen and factional strongmen or parties. Apart from being dictated from tactical
considerations, it can also be taken as a sign of the ongoing evolution of the Afghan
political scene, but major differences remained. In particular, the conservative character
of their actions set them apart from their more sophisticated colleagues. Such
conservatism was to a great extent the result of their limited organisational capabilities
and to the absence of institutionalisation.
Between conservatism and expansionism: the factional strongmen
The importance of organisational capacity and institutionalisation is well illustrated by
the case of Hazara factional strongman Mohammed Mohaqqeq, whose fast (and shortlived) conversion into charismatic political leader was in a league of its own. Contrary to
Junbesh or Jamiat, the Hazara-dominated Hizb-i Wahdat did not include many strongmen
in its ranks and its factional commanders were largely small and politically weak. The
only significant exception was Haji Mohammad Mohaqqeq, who had risen to prominence
during the resistance against the Taliban, when he had led Hazara resistance in northern
Afghanistan. Tension between political leaders of Wahdat and Mohaqqeq surfaced in
2003, when he was expelled from the government following a controversy with Finance
Minister Ashraf Ghani.47 His expulsion opened a gap between the political leadership,
embodied by Deputy President Karim Khalili, who remained associated to Karzai, and
Mohaqqeq, who proceeded to mobilise the small field commanders of Wahdat, mostly
left without occupation or status. Mohaqqeq also attracted the Hazara youth, the
intelligentsia and the junior clergy around a platform of resentment and ethno-nationalist
46
Personal communications with UN officials, Kunduz, Mazar-i Sharif, Kabul, Jalalabad and Kandahar,
January 2004-February 2007.
47
Amin Tarzi, ‘Dispute Erupts Over Afghan Minister's Purported Resignation’, RFE/RL Report, 11 March
Volume 3, Number 10, 2004.
claims. He launched his own party, Hizb-i Wahdat-e Mardom-e Islami (Unity Islamic
Popular Party) and became a serious rival for Khalili’s claim to leadership. Although
Khalili run on Karzai’s ticket during the presidential elections of 2004, running as an
alternative candidate Mohaqqeq received a large majority of Hazara vote with 11.6%.
During the parliamentary elections of the following year, Mohaqqeq not only entered
parliament as the country’s most voted MP, but out of a total of 38 Hazaras in the Wolesi
Jirga, 13 more were loosely affiliated with his party.
Although there were allegations that Mohaqqeq utilised his armed force in northern
Afghanistan in order to limit access to alternative Hazara candidates,48 it is clear that he
succeeded at least temporarily in mobilising support on purely political ground in Kabul,
Bamian and other Hazara-populated areas outside his northern fiefdoms. Mohaqqeq’s
decisive exploitation of ethnic feelings was key to his success and was helped by the fact
that such feelings are probably stronger among the Hazaras than any other Afghan ethnic
group. Mohaqqeq’s example illustrates that the transition from strongman to politician
could happen quite quickly even without much resort to armed politics. It also shows,
however, that the qualities and skills required as a politician differ markedly from those
of a strongman or military commander. Mohaqqeq rapidly lost the support that he had
gathered once he dedicated himself to clumsy political machinations in Kabul. In
particular, his supporters did not forgive his alliance with the political leader most hated
by the Hazaras, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, whose race for the position of speaker of the lower
house he supported. His popularity was reportedly in rapid decline during 2006. Despite
having launched a party, Mohaqqeq was never able to give it any effective organisation.
Once his charismatic leadership started to evaporate, nothing was left to retain the
support earned during the previous years.49
From the perspective of my ideal types, after leaving the mainstream Wahdat Mohaqqeq
resembled more an individual strongman than a factional one. In the new post-conflict
context, a strong rationale for maintaining such structures continued to exist in the eyes
of most of their members. It is clear that the influence of the individual strongmen was
significant at the peripheral level, but less so at the national one. Their numbers in
parliament were small and their ability to influence legislation or even the main political
trends was at best modest. Other ‘caudillos’ who tried to send their men to parliament
without the support of a strong organisation usually performed poorly. This is for
example the case of Gul Agha Shirzai, who in Kandahar province could only get elected
one of his men (Khalid Pashtun). By contrast, the real factional strongmen proved able to
cast their influence and domination much wider than individual strongmen. They also
proved to be much more resilient. Their power was based on two developments, which
were the result of wartime pressures and other factors.50 One was the establishment of
alliances of strongmen, often formed under external pressure, where one of them is
recognised as leader. The other was the establishment of formalised hierarchical
48
Human Rights Watch, Afghanistan on the eve of parliamentary and provincial elections, New York,
2005, p. 11.
49
Personal communication with Niamatullah Ibrahimi, Crisis States Research Centre, Kabul, March 2007.
50
On Herat see A. Giustozzi, Genesis of a Prince: The rise of Ismail Khan in western Afghanistan, 19791992, Working Paper 4 Series 2, London : Crisis States Research Centre, 2006.
structures and sometimes of some degree of institutionalisation, which could take the
shape of a political party. As a result, factional strongmen like Ismail Khan’s and Gen.
Dostum’s were able to cast their influence over wide regions, bring to parliament more
substantial numbers of supporters (respectively 8 and 2251 MPs) and most importantly
maintain their influence throughout the ups and downs of Afghan politics.
In Herat, strongman Ismail Khan thought himself above membership of parliament, but
put part of his resources to the disposal of allies and followers who were competing for
seats in the parliament and in the provincial council. This evolution from the simpler
charisma-based leader/followers model of the individual strongmen was a consequence of
Ismail Khan’s ability to build a more complex and hierarchical power system, in fact a
proto-state with some degree of identification among the followers. That, combined with
his appeal to conservative Islamic networks, allowed supporters and allies to win half of
Herat’s parliamentary seats in 2005. The winners were mostly ideological jihadis rather
than strongmen or commanders themselves. Although Ismail Khan had nowhere as
intense an appeal or popularity as some of the individual strongmen of other parts of
Afghanistan, through his power system he was able to maintain a strong influence.
Strongmen and commanders who did not like Ismail’s hierarchical system defected from
his group and courted the favours of Kabul, receiving positive answers. In 2004 they
were instrumental in bringing him down, but were not able to establish an effective
network or alternative power system afterwards. 52
In northern Afghanistan the power structure developed by Gen. Dostum differed
substantially from Ismail Khan’s. In some regards it was even more complex and
sophisticated than the latter’s, mainly thanks to the contribution of remnants of the left
wing party which had been in power in 1978-1992 (HDK, Hizb-i Demokratik-i Khalq).
In addition to the effect of intimidation deriving from the existence of underground
militias, Dostum relied on KGB-like structures, sometimes hijacked from the official
NSD and sometimes existing separately and autonomously. These structures were
carrying out most on the intimidation and harassment against potential political rivals. On
the other hand, Dostum was not able to enforce on his militias the same degree of
discipline as Ismail Khan did. In fact several of Junbesh’s supporters were almost largely
autonomous strongmen like Ahmad Khan and Payenda Khan or lesser figures.53
The importance of this lack of discipline and weak control over the militias becomes
clear once we look at Junbesh’s attempts to increasingly move the focus of its activities
towards political organisation and electoral politics. On the one hand, it is true that it
succeeded in making recourse to violence and intimidation rarer and rarer. Already by
2004 episodes of violence were mostly limited to aggressive demonstrations of civilians
under the armed ‘protection’ of militiamen standing at the back. On the other, the
51
This number includes some of the strongmen mentioned in the previous paragraph: Ahmad Khan.
Payenda Khan, Fataullah.
52
Interviews with former commanders, notables and intellectuals in Herat, April and November 2004, May
2005 and September 2005; Giustozzi, ‘Good’ state…’, cit.
53
A. Giustozzi, The ethnicisation of an Afghan faction: Junbesh-i Milli from the origins to the Presidential
elections (2004), Working Paper No. 67, London : Crisis States Research Centre, 2005; personal
communications with UN officials, Mazar and Kabul, June 2004-September 2004.
inherent tension between the ‘armed’ and the ‘politics’ sides soon manifested itself.
During the Emergency and Constitutional Loya Jirgas, Junbesh presented many
commanders, alongside more political figures. However, by the time of the parliamentary
elections, Dostum’s advisers had convinced him that the party needed to send to Kabul a
group of educated and professional representatives, rather than a bunch of semi-illiterate
commanders. As a result, friction occurred between the commanders, now supposed to
play a more discrete role on the back scene, and the ‘politicians’, chiefly former members
of the HDK. The frustration of the commanders and the Junbesh-aligned strongmen was
highlighted by concerns about their future status. Only in Jowzjan was Junbesh able to
fully prevent commanders from running (with the obvious exception of Dostum himself)
and even here he had to intervene directly to stave off the resistance of some of them.
Elsewhere, Junbesh was forced to accommodate a number of prominent strongmen to
run, such as the already mentioned Ahmad Khan, Payenda Khan and Fataullah. In the
more remote (from Junbesh’s core areas) Takhar province the tension between the
civilian and educated candidates chosen by Junbesh and the commanders effectively led
to a massive exodus of strongmen from Junbesh. Only a handful of them and not the most
powerful ones stayed with Junbesh. As a result, although Junbesh did rather well in
Takhar during the elections, its main competitors for the Uzbek vote were its own former
allies among the strongmen. Although only one of them was elected (Piram Qul), the
damage done to Junbesh was considerable as it lost most of its military base in Takhar.54
The worst, however, was yet to come. Many of the 22 MPs linked to Junbesh in the new
lower chamber were seriously interested in improving relations with the government as
well as Junbesh’s tarnished image, gradually leading to growing tensions between the
MPs and Dostum himself. Widely seen as part of Junbesh’s image problem because of
his reputation of ruthless warlord, Dostum was also increasingly frustrated by his
inability to convince Karzai to appoint him in a position of responsibility and status,
rather than the merely honorary positions held after 2001. His increasingly aggressive
behaviour towards some of the MPs culminated in the open split between the majority of
the parliamentary group and Dostum, with open demands that he retire from active
political life. The split seems to have affected the delivery of external help to Dostum,
leading to financial shortages and the defection of many commanders throughout
northern Afghanistan, mostly to the side of the government, all too keen to weaken a
source of regional autonomy. In the end Junbesh was saved by the fact that both foreign
supporters and MPs (particularly those who were lacking an autonomous power base)
needed Dostum as the only figure able to keep together the political and military wing of
the party. Although Dostum’s creation (Junbesh) was clearly more resilient than
Mohaqqeq’s, its case highlights the difficulties and the drawbacks deriving from the
attempt to create a more institutionalised organisation.55
54
Telephone communication with UN official, Kunduz, October 2005; personal communication with UN
official, Kabul, May 2006.
55
Interviews with local notables and Afghan intellectuals, Mazar-i Sharif, Kabul and Kunduz, May 2005,
May 2006, September-October 2006.
Ideologies, parties and expansionist armed politics
Because the Jamiatis had occupied Kabul at the end of 2001, they had in hand a golden
opportunity for using state infiltration as a route to highjack the political process and turn
it in their favour. A composite group, Jamiat included plenty of loosely affiliated
strongmen, ranging from small ones to ‘prince’ like Ismail Khan, as well a more tightly
knit party militia which had been developed by late commander Massoud. Despite their
increasing internal fragmentation, the Jamiatis were united in pursuing the capture of
state institutions, particularly at the centre where it monopolised the Ministries of
Defence and Interior. Their ability to maintain an esprit de corps distinguished them from
the individual strongmen who entered state institutions. At the provincial level, they
monopolised positions in the regions under their control (north-east, west, Kabul’s
region), they had to concede positions to the other factions which controlled territory.
Where a vacuum existed, like in Logar, Wardak and Paktya provinces, they put their men
in place. Map 2 shows the situation in late 2001 – early 2002, as far as provincial
governors are concerned. Although in the parliamentary elections of 2005 49 MPs from
the various branches of Jamiat were elected, it is of course difficult to quantify the impact
that this degree of state capture might have had, not least because part of it had already
been eaten away. However, it is worth noting that neither in Wardak nor in Paktya were
Jamiat’s factions able to elect anybody during the Wolesi Jirga elections of 2005. The
two MPs elected by them in Logar only partially offset this impression of scarce impact,
as Jamiat had had a significant presence in Logar from the 1980s and therefore it cannot
be considered as area of new expansion.
Map 2: governorship positions in 2002, by affiliation.
Source: local notables, administration staff, Afghan intellectuals, UN officials.
The leader of Jamiat, Prof. Rabbani, did his best to fill the Afghan state with his men
during his tenure of the presidency in Kabul in November 2001, but a trend in the
opposite direction soon started under President Karzai, who had to place his own friends.
Rabbani even managed to reconcile with Karzai and supported him in the presidential
elections, in exchange of a new wave of appointments of party faithful, but this fell much
short of what needed to satisfy the plethora of Jamiati strongmen. As a result, turmoil
started surfacing within the leadership and soon among the strongmen too.56
Like in Junbesh’s case, reconciling ‘armed’ and ‘politics’ turned out to be problematic.
Minister of Defence Fahim was caught between participating in the political process and
his unwillingness to break completely with the militia commanders and eventually would
lose both. Not only was he dropped from Karzai’s presidential ticket, where he was
supposed to occupy one of the two the vice-presidential posts, and sacked from his
position of Minister of Defence, but he also lost much of his support base among the midrank commanders because of his concessions to foreign pressures on disarmament. When
in August 2004, after learning that he had been dropped out of the presidential ticket, he
tried to organise a ‘pronunciamiento’ in his favour among the MoD units deployed in and
56
Tanya Goudsouzian, ‘Analysis: Former Afghan President Says Election Process May Divide Afghan
People’, Radio Liberty, 14 August 2004; Carlotta Gall, ‘Ex-President Says He'll Back Afghan Leader’, New
York Times, 4 October 2004; Abdel Wali, ‘Jamiat Faces Break-Up’, Afghan Recovery Report, No. 18, July
09, 2002.
around Kabul, he failed to gather sufficient support and had to back down.57 By then the
leadership of Shura-i Nezar was losing its cohesion and it was proving increasingly
difficult to control the increasing restless commanders, who were increasingly unhappy
about demobilisation of the militias and the lack of alternative routes to social prestige
and status. In Badakhshan, for example, the promotion of one of these commanders
(Zalmay Mujaddidi) by Karzai deeply alienated bigger commanders like Nazir
Mohammed and Sardar Khan, who were prevented from competing in the elections
because suspected of holding on to weapons and lacked the Kabul connections to
circumvent the ban, contrary to Mujaddidi who had been able to establish a personal
relationship with Karzai when taking care of his personal security in Kabul.58 Threats to
shut down Panjshir and other valleys from government influence were often heard. It
could be argued that it was only the heavy presence of international troops in Kabul that
prevented the situation from degenerating.59
Jamiat’s armed politics did not manifest itself exclusively in terms of state seizure. Even
after the end of official DDR in 2005, small armed groups continued to patrol many parts
of Parwan, Kabul and Kapisa provinces. The purpose of these groups seemed to maintain
territorial control and reassure/convince local communities that the militias of Jamiat-i
Islami and derivative groups were there to stay. In much of Parwan and Panjshir this had
a clear impact on the electoral campaigns of 2004 (presidential) and 2005
(parliamentary). Candidates not aligned with Jamiat reported feeling intimidated by the
presence of armed men even when they had good personal relations with Jamiati leaders
and those among them who could afford it hired armed escorts in order to be able to
campaign.60
The Jamiatis were not the only ones making use of ‘expansionist’ armed politics. Apart
from the smaller groups, which I shall not mention here, the other main branch of
Afghanistan’s Islamist movement, Hizb-i Islami, used armed propaganda after 2001,
mainly in eastern Afghanistan, as mentioned in Techniques of armed politics. An
essential component of Hizb’s armed propaganda was the formation of a political front
able to capitalise on the image of resilience and opposition to foreign presence which it
was supposed to convey. Such political front had a troubled start during 2002, when early
attempts to bring together militarily inactive members of the party met severe repression
in Kabul from the Jamiat-dominated National Security Directorate and police. Hundreds
were arrested, although most of them were not detained for long following the
intervention of foreign diplomats. After them, attempts to organise a ‘political’ Hizb-i
Islami simmered for a while, until in 2004 the decision was made to launch a party of the
same name under the leadership of Arghandiwal and Farouqi, two long-standing
functionaries of Hekmatyar’s organisation. Again the attempt faced resistance in Kabul,
under the rather spurious claim that a party of that name already existed. Finally,
registration occurred in 2005.
57
ISAF sources; personal communication with military attaché, Kabul, May 2005.
Personal communication with UN official, Kabul, March 2007.
59
Personal communication with UN official, Kabul, May 2005; personal observation, Shamali plains,
February 2005; interview with former official of the Minister of Interior, Kabul, January 2006.
60
Interview with candidates from Parwan, Kabul, October 2005 and October 2006.
58
The legal Hizb-i Islami did not play much of a role during the parliamentary elections of
2005 as an organised structure, similarly to what happened to all other parties. However,
a substantial number of members and sympathisers were elected. According to one count,
as many as 42 former members of Hizb-i Islami made it to the Wolesi Jirga in 2005,
although quite a few of them completely cut their relations with the party long before.
The actual number of MPs with some ongoing connection to Hizb-i Islami was probably
no more than 30, still enough to represent one of the largest blocs in the parliament if
they were formally united under a single banner. After the elections, Farouqi’s Hizb-i
Islami engaged in a campaign to bring together the many MPs linked to Hizb-i Islami
under his banner, with some success. As of October 2006, about 15 had joined him, while
negotiations were going on with some more. Several of those elected had received
support from other groups, including some faction of Jamiat-i Islami, and were reluctant
to show ‘ingratitude’ towards their new patrons. Although formally Farouqi’s Hizb-i
Islami claimed to have broken up with Hekmatyar, when challenged on this issue all the
members refused to condemn Hekmatyar. Quite the contrary, they maintained that he had
been ‘a great leader’ and that he had ‘done a lot for Afghanistan’.61 This, together with
the half-hearted insurgency led by Hekmatyar and a few commanders of the party, can be
seen as a confirmation that the political front and the armed insurgency are two
components of a single strategy of armed propaganda. While it is very difficult to judge
the extent to which armed propaganda contributed to the electoral successes of Hizb-i
Islami, the geographical distribution of the successful candidates shows a concentration
in areas where Hizb-i Islami is most active militarily (see Map 3).
Map 3: MPs with links to Hizb-i Islami. MPs wit a past in Hizb-i Islami but currently
affiliated with other groups have been excluded.
61
Interviews with former and current members of Hizb-i Islami, Kabul, London, Jalalabad 2006-7.
Source: interviews with former and current members of Hizb-i Islami; personal
communications with UN and diplomatic staff.
Armed politics as self-defence
In post-2001 Afghanistan self-defence played little role. To some extent it can be argued
that different factions maintained a defensive armed presence in areas where they were a
minority force in order to prevent the largest militias from prevaricating and closing the
political space to their disadvantage. This was particularly the case of northern
Afghanistan, as well as of some parts of north-eastern Afghanistan. Another type of
armed politics of self defence which in Afghanistan is community militias. However,
despite having been originally formed for self-defence purposes, their intervention in the
political environment was often aimed at intimidating dissident elements. Elders mostly
mobilised during the presidential elections of 2004, when in many parts of the ‘Pashtun
belt’ they actively endorsed Karzai’s candidacy, in some cases going as far as threatening
non-compliant members of the community with punishments such as burning their
houses and being ostracised from social rituals.62 There is however little information
available about the threat to use armed force by elders during the parliamentary elections.
In any case, both party and community self-defence were clearly ambiguous cases in
Afghanistan and the distinction from conservative armed politics was at best blurred.
62
Crispin Thorold, ‘Vote threat to Afghan tribesmen’, BBC News, 24 September 2004.
Conclusion: the uncertain transition of armed politics
At the roots of the continuing importance of armed politics in Afghanistan are several
factors. First among them is of course the inability of the post-2001 government to
establish an effective monopoly of armed force, that is to impose disarmament to the
factions and the strongmen. There were other reasons too, however. The most important
among them is the inability of the ‘renascent’ Afghan state to act as an effective
regulatory force and a broker among interest groups, a fact which in turn made
disarmament more difficult to achieve. It is debatable whether the government in Kabul
should have been more inclusive or not, but the slow progress in de-patrimonialising the
security agencies prevented the state from being able to appear as impartial to many
major players. The internationally-imposed adoption of meritocratic criteria at the
Ministry of Interior, for example, as of mid-2007 was still struggling with patronage and
factionalism in the appointment of key personnel. After many years of civil war, different
organisations and individuals were unable to trust each other. The UN in part replaced the
government as a regulatory body and broker and successfully started processes of
reconciliation particularly in parts of northern and north-eastern Afghanistan, but also in
the south and south-east. This led to a very partial process of disarmament and to a
decline in factional fighting after 2003. However, the UN’s efforts to de-factionalise the
state were repeatedly frustrated, which prevented the process of reconciliation from going
very far. Under these conditions, an effective disarmament was probably never a real
possibility in post-2001 Afghanistan. Even if a fully inclusive government had been
formed after 2001, it would likely have taken several years for some degree of mutual
trust to develop among formerly rival groups. By 2006 the expanding violence was
further removing any incentive for the armed groups to disarm. Indeed, there were signs
during that year that rearmament was going on in northern and north-eastern Afghanistan.
The logical conclusion deriving from these considerations is that a more realistic
approach towards the realities of armed politics in Afghanistan was needed to achieve
greater success in gradually pushing arms away from the political scene. After 2001,
virtually all the most powerful armed actors present on the Afghan scene tried to convert
into political parties and to establish a foothold in the new parliament, although many
individual strongmen opted to retire from public life. Their main concern seems to have
been to legitimise their political role in the new post-conflict environment. Voters’
support, no matter how genuine, came to be seen as the best way to be shielded from
complete marginalisation at the national level and to entrench as local leaders. As I have
pointed out, the process was inevitably deeply controversial, as in order to maximise
chances and dimensions of success they had to make at use of their original source of
influence, that is armed force, while at the same time distancing themselves from it. This
is indeed the curse of armed politics. Particularly for the more sophisticated factional
strongmen and the ideological groups, the transition to political legitimisation implied not
only the need to overhaul their image, a problem which they shared with the individual
strongmen, but also a conflict of interests between the actual commanders of militia
groups and their more political leadership. This was most evident in the cases of Jamiat
and Junbesh. This conflict of interest opened a window of opportunity in which the
process of transition away from armed politics might have been strengthened and
accelerated, had these organisations been given the right incentives. Kabul, however,
opted to exploit the divide between commanders or strongmen and the organisations to
which they were affiliated, in the hope of crucially weakening them. In reaction, the
organisations moved to consolidate the relationship with their armed wings, greatly
slowing the transition away from arms.
Kabul’s courting of small and big strongmen and commanders in order to lure them away
from the large non-state organisations combined with the varying degree of success of
some of their members in achieving status and power within the post-conflict
environment to result in the organised factions gradually losing cohesion. The decreasing
pressure to stand united in the face of a diminished danger also contributed to make
factional alignments less important. From 2002 it was instead the rise of narco-mafias
throughout the country to increasingly dominate the political landscape, leading to new
cross-ethnic, cross-regional and cross-ideological alliances. Time will tell whether this
development has the potential to bring about the appearance of a new type of armed
politics, based on the desire of narcotics producers to have at their disposal tools to
pressure local and national authorities and to ensure that elected representatives respected
their wishes.63
63
On this point see Giustozzi, War and peace economies…, cit.