Forgive my relentless focus on U.S. policy in Afghanistan. In a piece last month on some potential security strategies for Afghanistan, I mentioned the idea of creating “safe zones,” in which the Coalition troops and Afghan military and police units could establish effective order.
By creating safe zones in the cities, and even between some of the calmer ones (particularly up north), some measure of stability might be achieved, allowing more complex development to take place. This would include the drafting and training of policemen, among other efforts like anti-corruption, with the eventual goal of expanding the safe zones to encompass more and more territory.
Of course, enlisting Iran and Pakistan’s help would be crucial to the ultimate success of this strategy (diplomacy is its own long post). But while I thought I was being somewhat novel in applying this to Afghanistan, the idea in fact stretches back to French colonialism. It sounds ominous, but in Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies: Guerrillas and Their Opponents Since 1750 by I. F. W. Beckett (Google Books), there is some valuable historical context.
The French also recognized the need for a concerted military and political response to insurgency, although, in practice, they tended to continue to stress the primacy of military action…
The Bugeaud method [of stressing economic and political, rather than military, solutions to insurgency] was then refined further by the two great French exponents in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of what became known as tache d’huile (oil slick), Joseph-Simon Galliéni Louis-Hubert-Gonslave Lyautey… Tache d’huile rested on the idea that a dual military-political strategy would extend French control more effectively. Thus, as the French military advanced so French administrators were introduced immediately. Often, in fact, they were soldier-administrators with a dual role, systematically spreading French influence over the countryside. As described in a letter to Galliéni in November 1903, conquest would be achieved “not by mighty blows, but as a patch of oil spreads, through a step by step progression, playing alternatively on all local elements, utilizing the divisions between tribes and between their chiefs.
There, is, of course, a lot more there. But it shows that even the currently maligned “ink blot strategy” isn’t completely out of line—the French, afterall, managed stable rule over many tribal societies for decades. Even better, the objective in Afghanistan isn’t a colony, but merely a functioning country—a semantic difference at some stages, to be sure, but it avoids much of the messy decolonization that has plagued former colonies.
Rather than replicating the British kill-fest of Malaysia in the 1950’s (as many have recommended in Iraq), I think a modified Lyautey model would be far more effective in securing Afghanistan. But how to modify this strategy? Simply saying “oh we need to exploit and unite tribal tensions” is a cop out—as this outstanding piece on Pushtun culture in the Economist points out, even deciphering the various intricacies of tribal custom is a tremendous task.
Pushtunwali’s principles [the tribal system of ethics] have not changed in centuries–certainly not since they were recorded by Victorian ethnographers, middle-class soldiers and civil servants: players of the Great Game. Most lionised the fierce tribesmen, who periodically murdered them. Some even swallowed a delicious Pushtun claim to be descended from a lost tribe of Israel. But not all Westerners fell for the Pushtun. As a reporter for the DAILY TELEGRAPH, attached to the Malakand Field Force, Winston Churchill wrote: “Their system of ethics, which regards treachery and violence as virtues rather than vices, has produced a code of honour so strange and inconsistent that it is incomprehensible to a logical mind.”
There are infinite ways to slight a Pushtun’s nang [honor], but most involve zar, zan or zamin: gold, women or land. The search tactics of American troops in Afghanistan, five years after they invaded the country, tend to offend on all counts. By forcing entry into the mud-fortress home of a Pushtun, with its lofty buttresses and loopholes, they dishonour his property. By stomping through its female quarters, they dishonour his women. Worse, the search may end with the householder handcuffed and dragged off before his neighbours: his person disgraced. America and its allies face a complicated insurgency in Afghanistan, driven by many factors. But such tactics are among them.
The description of the process of using a jirga, too, is illuminating.
The code also contains many flexible means of preventing conflict through consensus and compromise. Chief among these is the jirga, of which each of Afghanistan’s main groups, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Pashai, Hazaras and Baloch, has its version. By one estimate, jirgas settle over 95% of Afghanistan’s disputes, civil and criminal. The figure for northern Pakistan is perhaps only slightly lower. This is not just because the regular courts are incompetent and corrupt (Afghanistan’s were recently reformed by Italy). It is because, given high levels of illiteracy, many Afghans and Pakistanis find it easier to understand unwritten customary law, in Pushtu called narkh. And, where authority is contested by a well-armed citizenry, the jirga’s verdicts, delivered with the warring parties’ consent, tend to be more enforceable than off-the-peg legal or Islamic judgments…
There are, of course, many more complexities, such as how political, jihadist Islam always unites the tribes in opposition to marauding outsiders. But knowing this kind of social structure also presents a key method of possibly quelling some of the competing warlords. I’m speaking of a hybridized system. Make the legal system consider local, small-scale jirga judgments to be legally binding (and strictly forbid revenge killings), with the possibility of a court battle on matters of national significance, and a critical way of accommodating Pushtunwali springs into being. Build up a legal system around the idea of the jirga, which is recognizable and respected by the parties involved, ease Pushtun society off targeted violence and into tribal arbitration.
It isn’t a western-style system of courts and laws, but why should that be forced on a culture that clearly isn’t receptive?
But from a broader perspective, there is still the issue of Lyautey’s method. It is actually the preferred method of the UN’s Office for Drugs and Crime. Though they are speaking of opium eradication efforts, the principle holds true: establish a viable, working political-economic system in a limited area first, then seek ways of expanding that operational political-economic system.
These safe zones may ultimately be the key to securing Afghanistan’s future. Along with some judicial reforms, of course.
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“By creating safe zones in the cities, and even between some of the calmer ones (particularly up north), some measure of stability might be achieved, allowing more complex development to take place.” — I thought it was already safe up in the north, central and western Afghanistan (except in some pockets of Pushtoon population). So this is a non-starter.
Also, why should the over all policy in Afghanistan be custom-tailored to the cultural peculiarities of one ethnic group concentrated in the south? Or did I miss a qualifier somewhere?
Ignoring of course the fact the Economist draws heavily on selected readings from Colonial agents. Afghans are represented not only as driven by a code of honor, but also as devious, given to thievery and untrustworthy.
In any case, I am not sure if a Victorian gentleman’s imagination is a good basis for policy. How about reading some actual ethnographic studies? The Danes have done extensive research as have the Russians and others. But of course the folks at Economist reach for the most easily accessible, no one likes hard work.
You been reading the news recently? A suicide bomb exploded by an U.S. envoy just outside of Jalalabad, and the subsequent gun sprays killed dozens of people. Just today a team of Taliban bomb makers were arrested outside Jalalabad. Similarly, not more than a few months ago there were major Taliban offensives and bombings in Farah and Herat. And during a firefight right outside Kabul, a misplaced bomb killed 9 members of a family… a week after a suicide bomb at Bagram airbase north of Kabul.
To say that North, Central, and Western Afghanistan are safe is to ignore reality — recent events.
When a single ethnicity makes up the plurality of a country, its concerns must be taken into account. The Economist article discusses Tajik social norms as well. The last major ethnic group – the Hazara – are not major sources of violence in the same way the Pushun are.
And the Economist’s facts were derived from interviews with actual Pushtuns and Tajiks living in Pakistan — the accounts of the British imperialists were thrown in for western context. The reporter was staying in Peshawar, for crying out loud. Very few westerners dare to travel out that way.
If you have some ethnographic studies you think I should read, I’m all ears. I’ll add the caveat that I have a built-in skepticism of ethnographic studies, in part because of my experience with the ethnographers at my alma mater, in part because many of the studies read like anti-Western revisionist histories with little insight into the actual society and customs of the cultures in question. In other words, I admit I am biased toward socio-political analyses of culture. Still, I’d be interested in these genius Danes and Russians, though I wonder how useful the Russian ethnographers were in the 80’s…
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