The Country as a Hole:
Imagined States and the Failure of Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan
Ivan Arreguín-Toft
Boston University
February 2012
Draft essay: Please don’t cite without permission.
The place we think of as Afghanistan has been riven by insurgency for much of its
existence. In this essay I argue that contemporary counterinsurgency (henceforth abbreviated as
COIN) in Afghanistan has been a problem because essentially, Afghanistan is an imagined
state, rather than a real one. Contemporary COIN cannot succeed except piecemeal, and then
only temporarily, because the territory marked on maps as Afghanistan no longer possesses a
sufficient critical mass of public servants to form a unified state or, put differently, a
government capable of governing more than a fraction of the territory. This leads to a foreign
policy and development dilemma not unique to Afghanistan but particularly intense there:
because public servants in the territory tend to serve loyalties subordinate to the state (say,
local warlords in distinct valleys and provinces), there is no “Afghanistan” without the
administrative support of foreigners; yet the administrative support of foreigners (including
security contractors and NATO forces), prevents the possibility of “Afghanistan” as an
independent, post-colonial state. In short, the history, topography and ethnography of the
territory mitigate against the formation of a stable, independent state, much less a stable,
independent democratic Afghanistan.
I begin by unpacking the argument that public servants are the sine qua non of states, showing
how as a result of the timing of historical traumas such as major interstate war, civil war, and
famine, in imagined states ranging from Somalia to Afghanistan, the minimum critical mass of
public servants have proven prohibitively difficult to recruit, train, and maintain. I then highlight
the period following the end of World War II (WWII) to show how in Afghanistan’s case, a
long-suffering and fragile national unity was shattered by superpower rivalry, culminating in the
Soviet Union’s assassination of Mohammed Da’ud Khan in 1978, and accelerated by its
decade-long occupation and COIN efforts there. I then advance to a brief history of Operation
Enduring Freedom (OEF), and ISAF’s contribution to Afghan identity Balkanization before
concluding with theoretical and policy implications which extend from the Afghan case to a
larger class of similar cases.
Arguments
There are two parts to the argument that civil or public servants are necessary but not
sufficient to form and support a state. Both arguments are essentially negative. As a first
question, we should ask “why a state?” Is the state, as a form of political association,
necessary, and if so, under what conditions will the positive utility of the state outweigh the
costs of association? Second, we should ask, “who in the territory of Afghanistan actually wants
a state, or, wants a state more than some alternate form of political association”?
The present difficulties that NATO has experienced in Afghanistan since the temporary flight
of the Taliban in 2001 are due primarily to not having asked either question. Instead, NATO’s
strategists and their political leaders assumed that (1) states are the ideal or necessary form of
political association; (2) that Afghanistan in 2001 was a state, but one compromised by the rule
of organized criminals with a conservative religious agenda; and (3) that non-Taliban Afghans
yearned to rebuild a centralized state which would provide a foundation (especially as regards
physical security) for reconstruction and economic development. All three assumptions have
proven wrong, but it’s worth exploring their basis before moving on to draw lessons from the
Soviet experience in Afghanistan.
The Priority of States?
The history of opposition to the state as a form of political association is very much weighted
toward two nearly-identical critiques: (1) the Anarchists of the late 19 th century; and (2) the
Marxists of the same period. The core of both groups’ critiques was that states would invariably
intervene in the affairs of citizens to preserve the power of the ruling classes, and for the
Marxists in particular, their wealth. In addition to abridging civil and economic liberty within,
competing states would invariably draft citizens for costly wars. Taken all together then, the
critiques reduced to the claim that for all but a tiny minority of people, the benefits of
citizenship would invariably be eclipsed by the costs. The primary difference between Anarchists
and Marxists proved not to be their critique of the state, but their solution to the state’s
tyranny. For Marxists, states would “wither away” after a spontaneous and transnational
worker’s revolution swept away the props of state power in a glorious realization of shared
production and consumption. All that was needed was (Marx-Engels) the right historical and
economic conditions, or (Lenin) a vanguard of the Proletariat capable of enlightening workers
sufficiently to set them on the path to revolution and earthly paradise.
But there were two challenges to the argument that costs of citizenship necessarily eclipsed
benefits. First, there was the problem of war, and, as Charles Tilly so pithily reminded us, the
strong association between the origins of the state as a form of political association and war:
“War made the state, and the state made war.” The logic is simple: the state survived
competition in a kind of natural selection with alternative forms of political association (e.g. clan,
dynasty, tribe, and so on) in a context in which assault by another state was – as Thomas
Hobbes would have it in Leviathan – “a climate wherein the will to contend was always present.”
Thus, even if the costs of living in states were as high as those claimed by its critics, given
the manifest horrors of war, this single utility could render those costs bearable and, over time,
made bearing them seem unquestionable. Second, neither the Marxists nor the Anarchists could
conceive of states being ‘hijacked,’ as it were, by everyday average citizens (both workers and
the middle classes), who could (and did) turn the power of the state toward the rule of law
and toward more egalitarian distributions of wealth and resources. Taken together, these two
features of citizenship have resulted in a net benefit to citizens sufficient to make the state,
since the late 17th century, appear to be both necessary and inevitable.
And what are the chief attributes of the state as such? Its chief attribute, as Max Weber had
it, was that it alone exercised control of legitimate violence within a bounded geographic space.
The utility of this monopoly is well known: citizens have recourse in the event of injury, and
may seek redress from authorities. Widespread awareness of the possibility of sanctions
ranging from fines and shaming to execution then conduce to stability and predictability, which
in turn permit investment, transaction, and development. The end result is the potential of
reciprocal advance, in which stability leads to wealth accumulation, which increases the capacity
of the state to protect its citizens from internal and external threats, which in turn leads to
more wealth accumulation, and so on.
But there are two important points to note in this connection. First, the distribution of
topography and climate favoring centralized control of large territories is not universal, and
where human engineering cannot supply communications, the capacity of the state to insure its
minimal obligation of physical security and remedy after injury is necessarily abridged. Second,
as we are often reminded nowadays, the likelihood of interstate war – or at least our perception
of that likelihood – has declined precipitously since WWII. To the extent that both factors are in
play, we can derive two important hypotheses, which bracket the conditions under which the
state is likely to be ideal. The first is that where topography and climate limit centralized
government, the benefits of citizenship will be diminished, perhaps to the point where the costs
of citizenship outweigh the benefits. The second is that where citizens do not worry about
assault and occupation by neighboring political associations (viz., states), the benefits of
citizenship will likewise be diminished. Stated more formally:
H1: The more costly it is (in terms of communications across physical space) for a
government to extend its control from its capital to its borders, the less security it will
be capable of providing its citizens.
H2: The less likely a state’s citizens think the threat of conquest is, the less likely
they are to value state citizenship.
It is not necessary here to test each hypothesis here, nor is it necessary to assert that there
are no people within Afghanistan who wish for a unified state or who are prepared to stand as
public servants within such a state. It is sufficient to point out that there are circumstances in
which a rational individual might prefer, in a cost-benefit sense, to live within a political
association other than a state or, failing that, to live within a micro state.
Afghanistan is just such a place. It is an imagined state.
Public Servants in Afghanistan
By “public servant,” I do not simply mean a bureaucrat capable of effective administration –
Kabul has many of those, and many are quite capable – but one capable and interested in
serving an imagined community called Afghanistan. The point cannot be over emphasized that
so long as Kabul’s public servants are beholden to Hamid Karzai and his clan, they are
unlikely to count as “public” in the sense I mean. The serve, and they administer, but they do
neither with respect to the country as a whole.
If today we find a dearth of public servants either able or willing to reside in Kabul and help
administer the imagined state of “Afghanistan” (and I include the nascent Afghan National
Army), this should only serve to highlight just how out of place was the broad political objective
of the well-intentioned foreign aid and stability program for the country as originally conceived.
Functionally, it remains much more accurate to think of Afghanistan as a very loose
confederation of micro states, each capable of working together for a short time in limited
circumstances (namely, during an invasion by “foreigners”).
Afghanistan was in fact a state from about 1928 until the assassination of Mohammed Da’ud
Khan and his family by Soviet-supported Afghan Marxists in 1978. Since then three factors
have made state formation (or reformation) impossible. First, the attempt by Afghan Marxists to
govern Afghanistan forced most public servants whom the Marxists could not murder outright
(all those with the skills and experience necessary to actually govern from Kabul to the frontier)
to flee. After 1979 the country was effectively governed by Soviet administrators with help from
Afghan Marxists.
Second, as if this were not bad enough, Soviet COIN was (like OEF’s) under-resourced in
almost every respect, which meant that Soviet COIN strategy would need to focus on mobility,
and to concentrate Soviet forces on one province or valley in Afghanistan at a time. The effect
was to further Balkanize Afghan identity. Second, the Taliban fighters who eventually succeeded
in unifying the country after the Soviets departed were not themselves interested in re-forming
a state. Theirs was a functional government for two reasons: (1) they were interested in
resource extraction rather than government as such (which eventually corrupted them); and (2)
their positive political objective was not a state, but a transnational caliphate, governed by their
particular interpretation of Shari’a law. Neither objective required more than tacit support from
Afghanistan’s tribal warlords and elders.
Third, operation OEF brought with it a new set of foreign administrators following the ejection
of the Taliban. Beyond a very successful punitive expedition, the forces assigned to OEF were
well aware that they would be inadequate for nation or state building. We will never know
whether the four-year grace period following the defeat of the Taliban and their return might
have proved decisive had a positive reconstruction and development plan been actually
implemented. Much aid was promised, but little was delivered. And much of what was delivered
was pocketed by Afghanistan’s warlords.
But the end result of three decades of war and successive foreign occupations has been the
devolution of loyalty to the state we call Afghanistan, into intense loyalties at the substate level.
The bad news is that this has made NATO’s broad strategy of rebuilding a state existentially
impossible because for the time being, there is no state to rebuild. The good news is that
historically, other states with complex topography and powerful subnational identities have
proven able to work together constructively within a larger state, so there is theoretically
nothing to prevent Afghanistan from becoming more akin to Switzerland at some point in the
future.
Before turning to a more in-depth discussion of the failure of OEF, however, it is worthwhile
having a brief look at Soviet efforts to achieve “stability” in Afghanistan after their invasion in
1979.
The USSR in Afghanistan, 1978–1989
By now the history of the Soviet Union’s ill-fated intervention in the Afghan civil war which
followed the murder of Mohammed Da’ud Khan and his family in 1978 is better known.
However here I want to focus on three key aspects of that intervention which are most relevant
to OEF, and what I have asserted will be the necessary failure of COIN in Afghanistan: (1) the
asymmetry of effect which is graven into the very topography of Afghanistan makes it very
costly to secure communications and concentrations of resources and people, and very cheap
to interdict communications and thereby threaten concentrations of resources and people; (2)
the strong tendency to techno-fetishism; and (3) the bewildering complexity of patterns of
authority and legitimacy in Afghanistan.
But allow me to begin with some background history; beginning with a brief summary of the
salient events which followed the independence of India from Great Britain in 1947. I’ll follow
this with another brief introduction to the Soviet Union’s military intervention in Afghanistan from
1979 to 1989.
From WWII to 1978
Afghanistan’s prior status as a genuine sovereign state had taken generations to engineer:
Afghanistan became a state by virtue of a succession of skillful leaders dedicated to
maintaining a careful balance between tradition and modernization. Their success forced the
centuries-long patchwork-quilt identities of tribe and valley to slowly yield to a collective Afghan
identity.
But the violent division of the Indian subcontinent into Pakistan and India following Britain’s
departure in 1947, provoked the president of Afghanistan’s constitutional monarchy, Sardar
Muhammad Da’ud, into seeking development aid in order to strengthen his country’s economy
and military. When the Eisenhower administration demurred, the Soviet Union stepped into the
vacuum, offering billions of rubles to Afghanistan with “no strings attached.” Da’ud clearly
understood that Soviet aid would be a Trojan horse, and he continued to outlaw communist
participation in government. In 1963 Afghanistan’s king fired him, and Da’ud’s successors
allowed multiple political parties to have a say in Afghanistan’s government. In 1965 the
Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan was formed, and after steadily gaining power in
parliament, in 1976 it split into two factions. This factionalization accelerated, as did opposition
to Afghanistan’s constitutional monarchy. In 1973, Da’ud, with Soviet support, staged a
bloodless coup and attempted to restore the equilibrium between modernization and tradition.
But in doing so, Da’ud attempted to diversify aid sourcing (Da’ud alarmed the Soviets by
seeking aid from Iran and Saudi Arabia) and slowing the pace of political liberalization
(including adding restrictions on communist and Islamist political parties).
In April of 1977 Da’ud was summoned to Moscow by Brezhnev for a dressing down. He was
bluntly ordered to cease permitting foreign advisors on the grounds that they were NATO spies.
Da’ud hotly retorted that the Soviets had no business meddling in Afghanistan’s politics. In July
of 1977, the Soviets forced the rival communist factions to unite, and a year later Da’ud and
his family were murdered.
But the forced unification of the two communist factions – the Parchamis, led by Babrak
Kamal, and Khalq, led by Muhammad Taraki – proved unstable following the murder of Da’ud.
As one historian who lived through these events reported, infighting between these rival groups
(each seeking both to enrich themselves personally, and to murder each other) was only one
of two problems. The second and bigger problem is that having imprisoned, murdered, or lost
through flight all of Afghanistan’s public servants, the ruling Marxists now faced the daunting
task of attempting to govern with zero government experience and in possession of a template
for government which was entirely alien to the social, historical, and political context of
Afghanistan:
each [of the men who replaced Da’ud] was convinced that the PDPA blueprint was
the guideline for reorganizing both society and the state. Thus, they relied on Soviet,
not Afghan, experience, and thus, too, they broke with the Afghan past. This may
explain why, after they rose to power, they became ever more alienated from their own
people and ever more disunited among themselves. (Kakar, 1995: 15)
Thus, with the Marxists taking power, all hope of restoring the equilibrium that had made
Afghanistan a genuine state disappeared.
The process of destroying the old order was only the first stage in what would soon
dramatically underline the destruction of Afghan national identity and replace it with the complex
and interlocking patchwork of provincial, ethnic, religious, and geographical sub-loyalties which
matter most today. I am speaking of the evolution of Soviet COIN strategy over the next
decade.
From 1979 to 1989
Most observers of contemporary Afghanistan are not well versed in the Soviet experience of
COIN. After WWII the United States and its NATO allies found the disparagement of Soviet
military accomplishments in that war simpler and more politically palatable than the difficult
alternative of giving the Soviets their full military due (patient scholarship and the collapse of
the USSR in 1991 have led to a reassessment, but the politics of memory still tend to unwisely
discount Soviet military effectiveness and innovation; and now do the same with Russian
military effectiveness and innovation).
As a result, the core memory of the Soviet experience surrounds the issue of US covert
support of allied Afghan fighters (collectively remembered as “mujahideen”) through the
impossible-to-seal border with Pakistan; and in particular, the role of Stinger MANPADs in
forcing the Soviet COIN effort’s ignominious collapse. Both factors played a key role, but that
shallow understanding led to two unfortunate consequences which to bedeviled early COIN
operations against the Taliban in OEF. First, Soviet military failure was attributed mainly to the
notion that communists were rigid and inflexible and driven by ideology. In other words, the
Soviets lost Afghanistan. This obscured the operational and tactical sophistication of the
mujahideen fighters who opposed the Soviets. Second, the victory of the mujahideen was
attributed to Stingers (whose effectiveness was not attributed to their skillful use by the
mujahideen, but to the superiority of US technology over Soviet technology).
I will not here do justice to the full historical record of Soviet COIN efforts, but my intention
instead is to call attention to the Soviet COIN effort’s contribution to the destruction of the
Afghan state as an empirical reality, and its replacement with a kind of virtual place-holder,
what I have called (to paraphrase Benedict Anderson’s famous formulation), an “imagined
state.”
Upon reflection it should not surprise us that the Soviet Union’s original mission, and the
nature and quantity of the forces authorized to support that mission, were limited, in the
important sense of limited war. The Soviets did not wish to risk a confrontation with the United
States or Pakistan which might inadvertently escalate to a nuclear crisis or even nuclear
exchange. More importantly, the forces assigned to Afghanistan were limited because the task
at hand was thought to be relatively simple and negative: secure the nascent Marxist
government in Kabul from collapse and defeat, and thereby maintain stability on the Soviet
Union’s southern flank while protecting Marxist “inevitability” from an embarrassing and
potentially delegitimizing defeat.
Operationally, the goal was to use mainly third-echelon forces of the Soviet Union’s 40th Army
to secure Kabul, and Afghanistan’s few major communications assets, until the Democratic
Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) could right itself and use its own forces to establish order
throughout Afghanistan. But Soviet military doctrine and forces had been designed to preserve
Soviet security from a conventional assault by another state. They were heavily mechanized,
and included heavy weapons (mortars, artillery, and crew-served machine guns). This created
two sets of difficulties which it would take the Soviets years to overcome. First, vehicles require
fuel and spare parts, and heavy weapons require heavy ammunition. All of these would be
forced to traverse ill-developed roads and bridges within easy range of mujahideen soldiers on
foot. Tactically, this placed the relatively inexperienced Soviet forces at a lethal disadvantage,
but that disadvantage was difficult for them to anticipate in part because the Soviets had
something the mujahideen would never have: air support (note the similarity between early
Soviet experience in Afghanistan and US experience in North Korea in the winter of 1950).
Second, Soviet doctrine, training, leadership, and technology, in tandem with its NATO
counterpart, assumed that killing necessarily conduced to victory. Its armed forces were
designed, in other words, to kill their way to victory just as they had against the Third Reich in
1945. This made them ill-suited for COIN in Afghanistan, because killing could not conduce to
victory. As individuals, Afghanistan’s diverse peoples fear death just as anyone else might, but
not above all else. Killing Afghan mujahideen would never convince them to give up, and beyond
the threat of death the Soviets and their DRA clients could offer the mujahideen nothing.
But none of this was obvious in the first few years. What quickly developed was what we
now call “mission creep.” Bases, whether Kabul itself, or supply depots, or any town or site of
value, could only be secured by fortification and garrison, each of which required large
quantities of supplies in order to maintain. Those supplies, in turn, would have to traverse
highly vulnerable lines of communication. Securing those lines of communication would require
more combat forces, which weren’t available because the overall mission had been strictly
limited (recall that the intervention was begun on Leonid Brezhnev’s watch, but he died soon
after, and was succeeded by two General Secretaries before the accession of Mikhail
Gorbachev in 1985). This meant that local Soviet commanders were going to have to
improvise, and their first innovation was an obvious one: concentrate your forces on the
greatest threat to communications of your most valuable base (Kabul). Once secured, shift
available forces to the next greatest threat, and so on, until the threat to your communications
is lifted.
The logic was sound, and from a military standpoint there was only one other option (which I
will come to presently). But it didn’t work, at least not until very late in the COIN effort. From
1980 to 1985, concentrating forces on a particular valley (say, the Panjsher valley, which was
subject to not one but seven separate assaults over the decade of Soviet support of the DRA)
eliminated the threat to communications only so long as operations continued. Once they
ceased, the mujahideen would move back in and begin interdicting communications and
ambushing bases all over again. The topography of Afghanistan also turned Soviet mobility
assumptions on their head: the mujahideen, mostly on foot, and armed with small arms (and
portable crew-served weapons) proved more nimble than the Soviets, whose vehicles were
forced to stay on roads, and whose only hope of salvation in case of ambush was air support.
I have recounted the various strategic innovations of both sides, and the vulnerabilities
inherent in the Soviet’s growing dependency on air mobile operations elsewhere. For our
purposes it is only necessary to point out that due to a structural condition – limited aims and
a limited contingent – Soviet forces were not sufficient to provide communications security
between key values (Kabul, Bagram air base, and so on). As a result, they tended to
concentrate their available forces in Spring offensives, each aimed at a different valley or
province within Afghanistan (Kunar valley, Panshjer valley, and so on). This made military
sense, but politically it solidified the tendency of Afghan resistance to identify with the territory
on which they fought, rather than Afghanistan as a whole: Soviet war was making – not a state
– but micro states. Each would emerge from Soviet failure and withdrawal with a separate
subnational identity, complete with a skilled local political leadership (including public servants)
capable of maintaining order and security within each respective province or valley. These
micro states each came to possess modestly different justice systems too.
Following the war, this Balkanized Afghan identity aided the Taliban in conquering the entire
country, because unlike the Soviets (who had unified resistance against themselves and, by
association, the DRA), the Taliban were not ‘godless communists’ (in addition to many of the
Taliban having been mujahideen and being ethnically Pashtun, many also made strategic use
of marriage as a way to establish themselves as non-foreigners). More importantly, the
mujahideen fighters which had finally ejected the Soviets and then destroyed the DRA and its
leadership, could never agree on a plan of reconstruction and reform, and instead set about
attacking each other and shamelessly looting what was left of Afghanistan’s assets. Their
venality and infighting, combined with the lack of a ‘rally against the foreigners’ reaction to the
Taliban, effectively doomed them, in part because the Taliban were based in Pakistan and sat
astride logistical support for the victorious warlords, whose combat effectiveness still depended
largely on supplies now both dwindling in quantity, and controlled by Taliban fighters.
In sum, the Soviets left an Afghanistan which had been reduced to a loose confederation of
autonomous micro states, each complete with its own ethnicity, language, and leadership. The
Soviet exit also removed the chief underlying common cause of among Afghanistan’s micro
states, which was ‘ejecting the foreigners.’ The Taliban then moved in, claiming to be
incorruptible, and taking advantage of their years of patient social mobilization beyond Soviet
reach in Pakistan, and leveraging their ability to interdict now dwindling supplies of food, arms,
and ammunition to the squabbling and venal post-DRA warlords. It should go without saying
that any Afghan administrators the Soviets had trained during their occupation either fled, or
were captured and subsequently either killed or imprisoned.
For their part, the Taliban soon had to face the difficulty all revolutionaries do: once the
incumbents are defeated, the revolutionaries must accommodate themselves to the far less
romantic task of governing. In their case, the Taliban set about attempting to do so by means
of a narrow interpretation of Sharia law, while awaiting what they believed would be the
inevitable spread of their revolution to Central Asia and beyond. The result of their
“government” was two-fold. First, as they settled down, their marriages resulted in children,
which made it difficult for them to avoid the temptation to steal. Opium poppy cultivation
exploded, and with it a flow of drug money which made the Taliban rich. Second, their obvious
corruption, and brutal (and medieval) ‘one size fits all’ approach to justice rapidly alienated the
survivors of the war. Far from recovering from the war and rebuilding, the Taliban seemed
content to preside over Afghanistan’s devolution into a kind of gigantic criminal enterprise. The
resentment the Taliban’s hypocricy bred would be the single biggest cause of their rapid
collapse and defeat during OEF.
Operation Enduring Freedom
The groundwork for OEF, as it was called by the United States after the terror attacks of 11
September 2001, had been laid well before the attacks of that day. Details of the planning and
execution of what became a punitive expedition against the Taliban in Afghanistan are best
recounted elsewhere. Here I want to focus on two key aspects of the Operation, which is
technically still in effect.
First, we should ask and answer whether as a result of US and allied efforts since 2001,
there is today a significant body of Afghans whose first interest is rebuilding Afghanistan, as
opposed to shoring up the power of one warlord or another over his rivals. Second, we should
ask whether, as a result of OEF, the long-term prospects for COIN success – as judged by the
state of the art in terms of strategy – are likely to result in the formation of a state in
Afghanistan. In other words, will Afghanistan be sufficiently free of insurgency that it can begin
to undertake long-term investment and contracts capable of rebuilding its infrastructure and noncriminal economy?
OEF began on 7 October 2001. Its original stated aim was to oust the Taliban from power
as punishment for their complicity in the terror attacks which caused the deaths of over three
thousand people in the United States. In short, it was a kind of punitive expedition. The fact
that as a punitive expedition it was so successful so quickly has spawned a number of
excellent analyses, but the best point out three key features.
First, the number of US combat forces was severely limited. Afghanistan is land-locked, and
surrounded by six other states, none of whom could easily abide a major US logistical effort.
Thus, the first US personnel into the country were a mix of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
special activities division teams, and US special operations forces. This small footprint had two
important consequences: (1) it rewarded collaboration with the Taliban’s local opposition groups
(mainly, Ahmed Shaw Messud’s Northern Alliance); and (2) it prevented the traditional Afghan
‘rally against the foreigners’ effect. In terms of collaboration, this is doubtless the single most
important cause of OEF’s early success, because the surviving opponents of the Taliban
possessed intimate knowledge of Taliban forces’ tactics, resources, bases, and leaders.
Second, the Taliban had overrun Afghanistan by 1996 against forces who did not possess air
support. Tactically and operationally, they were not accustomed to the difficulties of movement
and concentration when an opposing force controlled the skies and possessed weapons such
as the AC-130 Spectre gunship. US special forces knew what each Taliban unit had, and
where it was located. It was then a relatively simple task for highly skilled coalition forces to
call in air strikes on Taliban heavy weapons and vehicles, or in support of local offensive
operations.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the Taliban could not mimic the insurgency of the
mujahideen against the Soviets because of all the ill-will they had built up with their draconian
Sharia law, and their naked venality. Their rule had been established by a combination of force
and bribery, and above all by an assertion that god was on their side. Tactical reversals
appeared to give lie to that claim, and their accumulating defeats made effective bribery
impossible. Without social support the Taliban were forced to confront a massively firesupported Northern Alliance in pitched battles; a contest they were bound to lose (and did).
On 9 November, NATO and Northern Alliance forces forced the Taliban from the strategically
vital city of Mazar-i Sharif, and NATO and Northern Alliance objectives began to diverge. The
Northern Alliance wanted to evict the Taliban from Afghanistan and take power; whereas the
United States and Britain were increasingly distracted by a need to find and capture or kill
Osama Bin Laden.
On 12 November, the Taliban fled Kabul, and the their control of Afghanistan began to
unravel. In the ensuing weeks, one after another of Afghanistan’s major cities fell to allied
forces as Taliban commanders and their security teams fled to make last stands in cave
complexes near the border with Pakistan, or across the frontier proper into Pakistan itself,
where they would remain relatively safe until 2009.
By December, Afghanistan had no effective central government. Two developments are key.
First, the United Nations hosted the Bonn Conference to arrange a transition government. The
Taliban were not represented, but four of the opposition factions were. The idea was that the
interim government would have a mandate to draft a constitution and prepare for elections.
Second, the United Nations authorized the formation of the International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF), on the grounds that unless and until security could be established in Kabul and
other major population centers, no progress could be made on reconstructing the Afghan state.
The process and its logic should sound familiar by now. Effectively, an alien principle of
legitimacy – elections – would be imposed on Afghanistan’s micro states as a way of selecting
which warlord would have the right of first access to the international community’s wealth and
security resources. In terms of security, a limited contingent of armed forces would be required
to establish and maintain security within and between the country’s major cities and bases.
What is remarkable is how little security was actually needed in 2002. Keeping in mind that
a great deal of the Taliban’s legitimacy had been based on the ancient principle of trial by
combat (in which victory serves as an indicator of god’s favor). The root principle of Salafism –
the return of Islam to the pinnacle of global civilization – was to be accomplished by
enforcement of strict adherence to god’s laws (Sharia). The more conservative religious victors
against the Soviet Union (most famously, Osama Bin Laden) attributed mujahideen victory not
to Stinger MANPADs but to god’s favor: it was god who directed that the mujahideen ‘David’
should defeat the Soviet ‘Goliath’ (a reversal of the 1948 Nekbah, in which a vastly
outnumbered Israel was victorious over a coalition of Arab (and Islamic) armies; again,
attributed by Salafists to god’s collective punishment for Muslim sin).
So the rapid defeat of the Taliban damaged their legitimacy, and their rapid exit made them
appear to have received god’s judgment in the negative. Into this vacuum the international
community promised, in keeping with COIN doctrine, to re-establish the rule of law (non-Sharia
law), and rebuild Afghanistan’s eviscerated infrastructure and non-criminal economy. But
straightaway the effort was bedeviled by two problems. First, as argued throughout, there was
no public service network which could administer incoming aid. Instead, it had to be funneled
via foreign administrators through the warlords (eventually Hamid Karzai), and that meant that a
great deal of what arrived would never reach the people, and by extension, hurt rather than
help the COIN effort.
Keep in mind that if this sounds like an accusation of corruption and venality and by
Western standards, it should. But the system of familial loyalty in Afghanistan demands that the
head of a clan take care of his family and relatives first. This must be true regardless of the
skill sets of those who are hired under such circumstances. From the standpoint of managing a
large multinational state, this sort of nepotism is lethal, but it works fine in a small-scale state
or province; especially when the aim of government is narrowed to warfighting and survival.
Second, once the Taliban fled and Afghanistan’s roads, rails, and air bases came under
ISAF control, there was no structural limit to the number of coalition forces which could be
deployed to Afghanistan, and this created the looming problem of ISAF and aid personnel as
’foreigners’. The bigger the footprint, the greater the hazard. There was simply no avoiding this,
because unlike war, development cannot be run by a few well-informed special operations
forces. It demands contractors, heavy equipment, and skill sets which Afghanistan, after twenty
years of bitter war, no longer possessed. What most Afghans were good at was survival; and
that meant a talent for accumulating wealth, weapons, and fighters.
In the Winter of 2006, for example, NATO introduced Provincial Reconstruction Teams
(PRTs) into southern Afghanistan, but the effort did not go well. The Taliban had been
returning since 2003, and by 2006 had fairly well established themselves across much of the
territory of Afghanistan. From the Spring until the next Winter, the Taliban battled NATO forces
in a series of engagements in which they were never completely defeated.
The interaction began to look increasingly like the pattern of Soviet engagements had. A
corrupt, semi-competent government in Kabul, supported by ‘foreigners,’ was able to mount
limited offensives against insurgent (Taliban) positions which resulted in short-term tactical
victories, but did not alter the long-term strategic picture.
In 2007 ISAF forces went on the offensive, and achieved important victories that nevertheless
did nothing to alter the basic strategic picture. Why is this?
Some of the answers are well-known: Pakistan proved either unwilling or unable (likely a bit
of both) to interdict fighters across its frontier with Afghanistan. Many areas in Pakistan became
functional sanctuary for the Taliban. But what is less well understood is that the interaction
between ISAF and the Taliban favored (and still favors) the Taliban, because all ISAF can do
well is kill (they have proven more lethal to the Taliban and, for all the reports of collateral
damage which are horrible, an order of magnitude more discriminate than the Soviets had ever
been). The Taliban are about ideas, not corpses. They are modestly effective at killing Afghan
security personnel and ISAF soldiers, but this is not how they will win. They will win the battle
of ideas because their preferred principle of legitimacy, ‘god wills it,’ is closer to Afghan
experience than ISAF’s, ‘democratic elections’. The international community’s reconstruction
efforts have not resulted in creating job opportunities other than the traditional smuggling and
fighting ones. Young men still have very few options conducive to the creation of a stable and
functional non-criminal economy.
In short, the Taliban are killing ISAF and Afghan armed forces, and being out-killed by a
large margin in almost every engagement. But they don’t have to kill or even kill proportionately
to win. They can win by simply waiting for ISAF to leave, and then going after government
forces while playing off one warlord against another. They will have Pakistan as a logistical and
intelligence base area as before, and once the skies are clear of ISAF air support, and
relatively more clear of drones, their forces will simply roll up whatever the “Afghan”
government puts in their way.
OEF’s transformation from a punitive expedition (a resounding success) quickly morphed into
a preventive minimalist neo-colonial enterprise (ISAF), in which a limited contingent of armed
forces sought to secure key political and communications sites from destruction. ISAF opened
the floodgates to international governmental and nongovernmental organizations, many of whom
genuinely undertook great expense and personal risks to aid Afghanistan’s peoples. But they
were all foreigners. Unlike the Taliban they don’t marry locally and everyone understands they
aren’t staying.
ISAF’s COIN campaign has gotten progressively better over time (especially since 2007,
when in the US Pentagon, the “counterinsurgency” faction won out over the “fight and win the
nation’s wars” faction), but has suffered most from a lack of resources that reach the people of
Afghanistan in sufficient quantity to give young males an alternative to criminal or insurgent
activity. In order to get things done, resources must be funneled through local warlords, and
this means that too much of it went to increasing each recipient’s security and wealth.
Bottom-up COIN is much more effective at denying the Taliban bases and interim political
objectives, but has come at the political cost of intensifying Afghanistan’s political Balkanization.
So at the end of the day, OEF and ISAF will leave an Afghanistan which is really a collection
of rival micro states.
The Afghan National Army?
Starting in 2009, US General William Caldwell was tasked with devoting serious resources to
creating an Afghan National Army capable of supplanting ISAF’s chief role of securing the
population and key values from insurgents. By 2012 – two years before the planned draw-down
of ISAF combat forces – Caldwell is supposed to have increased the number of ANA forces
(now standing at 300,000) to 352,000. ANA troops should be the single greatest empirical
counterargument to my claim that Afghanistan lacks sufficient public servants to succeed as a
functioning state, because soldiers are the original and quintessential public servants.
There are two problems with these efforts. First, ANA troops have been “trained” and
equipped to operate very much as their ISAF mentors do. Under limited circumstances, this
means they are lethal. As already highlighted, however, most Afghans, whether Tajiks, Uzbeks,
Turkmen, Pashtun, or Hazara fear many things besides (and in a few cases, more than) death.
So in terms of governance, even when these soldiers can kill Taliban, Al Qaeda, Haqqani, and
Herb i-Islami insurgents effectively, it is hardly clear this killing will conduce to coercion and
stability any more than it has for ISAF and the CIA. More troubling, ISAF forces gain a great
deal of their advantage over insurgents because they are adept at logistics and at
supplementing their infantry combat skills with heavy fire support (artillery and air). ANA forces
remain largely illiterate, and are still a long way from being able to integrate fire support into
their operations. In a sense then, their “training” may be making them more vulnerable on
several counts.
Second, in an ISAF unit, there are likely to be soldiers whose family members live far
outside the battle space, and moreover, many will not live in the same place (an Air Force
sergeant’s parents might live in Ohio, for example, while his sister and her family live in
Illinois). For ANA soldiers this is not true. Most of their families live in a specific province or
valley in Afghanistan. As a result, it is not clear whether when under duress, many ANA
soldiers won’t desert their units and take their weapons and skills back to protect their families
or to join the forces of the warlord whose job it is to do the same thing. We can put this a
different way, if “Afghanistan” only exists so long as ISAF and other foreigners stay, then won’t
the ANA, at a minimum, effectively revert to Karzai as a warlord after they depart?
One possibility, sad but hopeful, might be we answer that question “yes.” Assume for the
sake of argument that Hamid Karzai ends up with an ISAF-trained and equipped military loyal
to him. Won’t that military then be capable, as ISAF wasn’t, of both sweeping aside the
insurgency and consolidating control of Afghanistan?
No.
The ANA is only a national army so long as sufficient ISAF personnel remain. It is only an
effective force so long as ISAF forces can be called upon to assist with fire support. Once the
draw-down begins in earnest (and ideal strategy and US military opposition notwithstanding,
budget constraints and lack of popularity in ISAF home countries seem destined to make a
draw-down a reality), expect the ANA to begin dividing along provincial and ethnic lines.
Already, ANA forces have been implicated in direct and lethal assaults on ISAF forces, and
sadly, this is likely to escalate as ISAF combat forces depart.
In sum, the ANA is not likely to survive as the nucleus of an Afghan state. And while ISAF
strategists were right in their understanding of what minimally would be necessary in order to
achieve their assigned missions – including especially the creation of an effective national
security service – they were never given sufficient time or resources to do so. There is
supreme irony in this, because ISAF’s current strategic bind is identical to Soviet General
Mikhail Zaitsev’s in 1986: not only no more troops, but fewer, and the fear that all gains
patiently earned over the past decade would soon be wiped out. More painfully, as with the
Soviet experience, the failure of these well-intentioned efforts are likely to make Afghanistan an
increased threat to the security and interests of ISAF home countries after ISAF departs.
Conclusions
OEF is scheduled to end in 2014. Its goals were, like the Soviets before them, to provide
security and enough subsequent stability for a local government in Kabul to establish sufficient
legitimacy and coercive capacity to consolidate power and re-form a functional state. Those
goals are unlikely to be met for two additional reasons.
First, Pakistan has worked tirelessly to undermine Hamid Karzai’s efforts to establish himself
as chief warlord and nucleus of a stable functional Afghan state. The US and its allies have
struggled over the past decade to change Pakistan’s mind, but no one imagines that effort has
succeeded, in part due to a continued lack of will, and in part due to a chronic lack of
capability.
Second, communications, finance, and transport technology have evolved to make it too easy
to exit, rather than stay put and compromise. One of two things is likely to happen as we
approach the deadline for withdrawal of ISAF in 2014. If Karzai and the other more direct
beneficiaries of ISAF largesse over the past decade want to stay in Afghanistan, they will have
sufficient incentive to make the tough compromises – including with the Taliban and Pakistan –
needed to re-establish a functional government. That government will be less democratic and
more confederal than ISAF’s supporters would like, but it will work. The other possibility is that
Karzai and others “tainted” by support from ISAF will take their hundreds of millions and leave
to form an ex-patriot lobby group in one or several ISAF countries, where they will devote
themselves to rallying support for OEF part 2 (they will have my sympathies, especially as
regards the plight of Afghanistan’s amazing women).
In sum, Afghanistan was once a real state. It was never a strong state. It was never a
democratic state. As a state it had been built on a consensus which took constant effort and
great skill to maintain. The power equilibrium that resulted made it possible for the territory of
Afghanistan to function as the state of Afghanistan. The advent of the Cold War and in
particular the independence of India in 1947 set in motion the forces which would shatter that
equilibrium. Afghanistan became a kind of place-holder, an imagined or, in more hopeful
moments, imminent state.
Soviet intervention supported a Marxist coup which forced most of Afghanistan’s public
servants – those with a genuine sense of Afghanistan as such – to flee. They were replaced
mainly with Soviet public servants who were faced attempting to govern through a corrupt,
incompetent, and illegitimate leadership in Kabul. The outrage provoked by Soviet military
intervention in 1979 led to a fierce insurgency, and Soviet COIN attacked that insurgency valley
by valley, province by province, only underlining and intensifying subnational identities. Political
commands were relocated to Pakistan, where each warlord developed a coterie of private
servants and administrators skilled at war, fundraising, and recruitment (survival). By the end of
the war in 1989, Afghanistan had become a collection of micro states, each prepared to jockey
for control of the entire country, but each vulnerable as foreign military and logistical assistance
dried up.
The Taliban entered from Pakistan with a simple unifying mission: to establish a conservative
vision of Sharia law and establish a beachhead for a new transnational religious revolution.
Whereas the warlords had administrators who served a substate loyalty, the Taliban had
administrators prepared to serve a superstate loyalty, but not to govern a state. In neither case
would Afghanistan as such benefit from a sufficient mass of skilled public servants capable of
forming and supporting a functional state.
OEF forced the unpopular Taliban to flee, and in keeping with state-of-the-art COIN strategy,
promised to rebuild Afghanistan’s non-criminal economy. ISAF set about importing administrators
and attempting to rebuild the country from Kabul. It didn’t work. Ultimately, ISAF and foreign
aid groups shifted from a top-down to a bottom-up COIN and development strategy, which
increased short-term effectiveness but at a cost of developing public servants with a territorywide identity.
Theoretical Implications
In terms of theoretical implications it is best to start with a simple explanation of why
Afghanistan, and places similar to it, matter, and why it makes sense to devote resources to
helping them.
The first major entry in the post–Cold-War discourse on failed states must count Robert
Kaplan’s “The Coming Anarchy,” an essay he penned for Atlantic Monthly in 1994. In it, Kaplan
argued that many states in Africa had disintegrated, and that what economists might call
‘negative externalities’ – including plague, refugees, war, genocide, environmental degradation,
and organized criminal activity – were likely to spread to the advanced-industrial world.
The first argument – that failed states produced negative externalities – was his strongest. His
second argument – that these negative externalities would harm citizens in the developed world
– was weak at the time, but proved prescient. After 9-11, it became clear that failed states
(Afghanistan) could be sites of negative externalities which could not only reach the developed
world, but do so in lethal fashion.
There are other depressing examples. Chechnya, after de facto independence in 1996,
became effectively a state-level criminal enterprise, which began to kill Russian Federation
citizens, among others. Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is another example. Beyond the destruction
of its economy, the collapse of Zimbabwe’s healthcare infrastructure made it the site of a
cholera epidemic which killed thousands in Zimbabwe, and hundreds in neighboring countries.
In each case, the international community asked the wrong question: what mix of resources
can we devote to rebuilding the state? It did not ask “is there anyone in this territory who is
both interested in, and capable of, running a state?” In an increasing number of countries
where the state as a form of political association was imported, that answer is “no.” Political
actors – tribes, clans, ethnic and religious groups – want other things, and don’t see the value
in undertaking the burden of rebuilding and maintaining a state. This may be due to a moral
hazard problem: having been so successful at preventing interstate war, the relative benefits of
life within states have declined as compared to the relative costs. For states in the advancedindustrial world, however, the dilemma is clear: either accept the negative externalities that flow
from these “failed” states, which appear to be escalating in intensity and frequency over time,
or mount a costly intervention and import public servants (administrators) capable of running a
functional state (neocolonialism).
Afghanistan is a perfect example of the dilemma. The Soviets and ISAF both imported public
servants whose mission was to provide security for a centralized state from Kabul. That makes
them neocolonial enterprises, a liability that has served Taliban propaganda well.
Logically, the solution to the dilemma is to mount an intervention and transitional occupation
analogous in scale and duration to that undertaken by the United States in Germany and
Japan following WWII. But this is politically impossible, both because the international
community does not have the resources to do so, the investment would be dramatically more
costly in the short term than the short-term costs of crime, terrorism, plague, and environmental
degradation, and because it would be seen as a colonial, illegitimate, and dangerous precedent.
This is to say nothing of the fact that however hostile to interstate peace, both Germany and
Japan were real states prior to the war, and after the war, each possessed a critical mass of
public servants sufficient to govern. This is not true in Afghanistan, and it is not true in
Chechnya, Somalia, or the Democratic Republic of Congo (to cite but three).
I note in closing one other important case which supports my argument. Iraq after 2003.
Again, the details of coalition efforts to transition out of Iraq following the defeat of Saddam
Hussein’s government are best read elsewhere, but on one feature of the Coalition Provisional
Authority’s (CPA’s) early actions most historians of the period agree: its first to orders proved
disastrous. CPA order number one was to summarily dismiss Iraq’s public servants from their
posts, on the grounds that they were Ba’ath Party loyalists. CPA order number two was to
summarily dismiss Iraq’s army. In short, the first two acts of the CPA destroyed any possibility
of Iraq governing itself as a prelude to the formation of an Iraqi government. To be sure, the
CPA imported its own public servants to help manage the transition, but like its chief, L. Paul
Bremmer, these imported foreign administrators had no knowledge of Iraq, its history, or culture.
No government meant no security, and within a few months coalition forces began to reap the
whirlwind in an organized insurgency which continues to this day.
Policy Implications
The policy implications of this analysis are simple. I have argued that the chief reason COIN
cannot succeed in Afghanistan is because the territory itself has been Balkanized by successive
exogenous shocks into micro states, whose citizens each depend on and value their own valley
or province more than what has for them become an abstract concept: Afghanistan.
If I am right, then in order for Afghanistan to become a state – and here the aim is modest:
not a democratic or free-trading state, but a functional state – then it must develop a corpus of
administrators loyal to that larger entity. How can this happen?
If the state-formation literature is correct, then one of three things will make Afghanistan a
state. Either it will be threatened from without in a way which causes its disparate micro states
to seek common cause, or it will be conquered from without, and public servants will be
imposed by the victors. A third option is for one of the warlords to get strong enough to force
the others into a subordinate confederation; and then that confederation lasts at least twenty
years. Karzai is already strong enough to do rule a confederal system, but the system over
which he might preside will not be strong enough to survive the Taliban so long as the Taliban
have the tacit support of Pakistan.
As to the other options, given the lack of resources and will sufficient to mount a twenty-year
occupation with over half a million service personnel, and given the escalating costs of the
negative externalities likely to flow from an imagined Afghanistan, those likely to suffer such
costs might consider a new approach: offering formal diplomatic recognition to the largest and
most powerful of the country’s warlords as newly-independent states.
These micro states already possess peoples loyal to their leaders, and leaders with staffs
capable of governing (at least providing security). ISAF countries which have an interest in
promoting non-criminal economic development and stability, could then devote their resources to
a single micro state as a reward for reform, causing the others to consider either competing for
similar support, or falling to the Taliban.
At its best, this option makes it possible for the peoples of Afghanistan to devote their own
energies to the creation of a super-provincial political authority, and to giving it sufficient
resources to permit it to function as a real state (a confederal system). At its worst, the
initiative could not make things worse, since de facto, Afghanistan’s identities and politics are
already Balkanized; with each sub-entity competing to appear supportive of ISAF and of
government in Kabul only so long as it is actively threatened by the Taliban, and only so long
as it can gain cash, weapons, and security for its criminal enterprises.