Brian M Downing
The United States is withdrawing troops from Afghanistan though the recent agreement with President Hamid Karzai indicates that the US will retain a significant presence, civilian and military, for many years to come. It is unclear how many Western troops will remain but the level will certainly be far lower than the roughly 80,000 there today. This will mean of course that responsibility for security will shift largely onto the shoulders of the Afghan National Army (ANA).
The ANA will be charged with countering the Taliban and other insurgent groups, which are chiefly in the south and east. Evaluations of their competence vary considerably. This is unsurprising as assessments are based on anecdotes or official reports, neither of which is reliable as each is prone to seeing what supports pre-existing views on the war or established institutional objectives.
It is important to assess the ANA not in terms of the armies of the world but in the context of its expected role in the war in the south and east. It is not expected to take on the insurgents in conventional engagements between sizable forces. Nor is it expected to use counterinsurgency techniques to win over popular support, welcome though that would be. The ANA has the more manageable task of simply continuing the stalemate against them. And quite possibly, the Afghan army will be able to arrange truces with the insurgents which may lead to a broader settlement.
The ANA
The US has been trying to rebuild an army in the country after several years of leaving the project in the hands of private contractors. It has been, needless to say, an uphill struggle, though obviously not owing to a lack of martial spirit in the populace as Afghan history more than suggests. Nor has the effort suffered from lack of opposition to the Taliban, who are widely despised for intolerance, oppression, and even for their poor record in developing the country while in power (1996-2001).
Similarly, though largely lost amid the triumphant narratives and ensuing chaos after the Russians left in 1989, there was no shortage of domestic opposition to the mujahideen forces, who were widely seen as hidebound traditionalists and unwitting pawns of foreign powers. The Afghan army, against all expectations, held its own for many years after 1989 and was never defeated by the mujahideen.
The army’s collapse in the mid-1990s came only after the Soviet Union itself collapsed and aid to Afghanistan suddenly ended. A similar standoff is likely after US and International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) troops withdraw, but a similar end to foreign aid is not. US and other Western aid will continue, as will aid from Russia, India, Iran and nearby Central Asian republics.
Nonetheless, there are serious problems inside the ANA. Afghans do not like to serve extensive periods away from their home districts, not under the old kings of decades past, not under communist presidents, and not under Karzai today. This has led to high desertion rates of 10% to 15% that have been only partially redressed by geographic rotations of army units and extended leaves every six months or so.
A more disabling and less soluble problem stems from deep ethnic tensions and mistrust within the army, from the high command in Kabul to a rifle company on a remote outpost in the south. Afghanistan fielded armies in many conflicts prior to the Soviet war, but wars were limited and national integration of various peoples did not take place, as it did, say, in the US during the world wars, when most immigrant peoples served and in so doing became integrated into the US mainstream. The war against the Soviet forces was a national effort of sorts, but mujahideen groups were organized along ethnic and regional lines, with only limited political significance.
The Afghan forces that ousted the Taliban in 2001-02 were predominantly from the north, with the Tajiks foremost among them. Seeing themselves as national liberators – with considerable justification – the Tajik commanders allotted themselves the majority of key posts in the defense ministry and the emerging ANA.
Though seen as just desserts to some,this irritated the Pashtuns, who see themselves as the largest ethnic group and the country’s natural leaders, political and military. President Karzai, a Pashtun of the Popalzai tribe, ousted scores of Tajik officers and replaced them with fellow Pashtuns. Many Tajiks see this as a purge that has harmed the army and country alike. [1]
Tajiks, however, remain over-represented in the rank and file and resentment towards their Pashtun officers is rife. Many are seen as unqualified political appointees and unit cohesion and efficacy have suffered. ANA forces in training camps give no signs of the spontaneous confidence and crispness of good soldiers. Instead, there is a clear “staged” quality to their appearance, as though instructed to look smart for the cameras and dignitaries, and complying as best they can before relaxing after the show.
ANA troops are lackluster in the field as well. Insurgent attacks do not lead to rapid responses. “No! We don’t go after them,” an ANA officer said after one attack. “That would be dangerous!” [2] Nor are patrols sent out to keep insurgents off balance in accordance with counterinsurgency doctrines and common sense as well. Responses to a sister unit that comes under attack are similarly disappointing. Few units want to go out on an operation without the assurance of immediate help if needed.
In recent months it has become appallingly clear that insurgents are able to convince some ANA soldiers to attack their fellow ANA soldiers and International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops as well. The shooters are almost always Pashtun; the victims almost always aren’t. Ethnic mistrust has become intense, chiefly between Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns of course.
In many regions ANA forces have made informal agreements with insurgents not to attack each other. These local truces are not as problematic as it might seem. ISAF forces were known to do the same, and earlier, many mujahideen commanders forged truces with their Russian adversaries.
Even the famed mujahideen commander Ahmed Shah Massoud made truces with the Russians, some rather lengthy. Late in the conflict, Russian generals wanted to grant regional autonomy to his Tajiks in return for an enduring truce. Unfortunately, the arrangement was vetoed by Moscow and Kabul. [3]
A severe deficiency in the eyes of most American observers, these agreements reflect war-weariness stemming from over 30 years of intermittent warfare. More importantly, they reflect Afghan norms about limiting warfare. As will be seen shortly, these truces may be helpful in bringing about a meaningful settlement.
Alternative forces
General David Petraeus, during his tenure in charge of the US effort, pressed for the creation of tribal militias, armed and paid by the US. Karzai opposed them as conducive to a new generation of warlords and banditry, but Petraeus was able to win out. These militias, or arbakai, the US held, would mobilize Pashtun tribal levies against the Taliban and avoid the problems of ethnic mistrust and taking young men away from their home districts.
It was further hoped that the militias, resonant as they were with the venerable lashkars of Pashtun history, would strengthen tribal structures – a critical if underappreciated part of the war effort. The Taliban draw support in regions with weak tribal structures, as part of their attraction is a new form of organization and a unifying ideology to replace the social formations shattered by so much war.
Unfortunately, the US plan did not work out. Tied to outsiders by pay, equipment, and training, the arbakai were resented as external intrusions and to the extent they functioned, they further weakened tribal structures. Furthermore, Karzai’s concern of the arbakai furthering lawlessness was unfortunately borne out.
It would of course make at least some sense to organize the ANA along ethnic lines, with Tajik units, Uzbek units, Pashtun units, etc. Each of those peoples fought long and hard against the Russians, in part owing to ethnic homogeneity and kinship ties that aided cohesion and efficacy.
In US thinking at least, there is the idea of a national army bringing about political unity. But Karzai would rightly see such units as leading less to national unity than to further fragmentation. Besides, Tajik and Uzbek units operating in the insurgent south would aggravate ethnic mistrust there. The insurgents already see, with only a little justification, the Kabul government as under the sway of northerners.
Some positive though not entirely untroubling dynamics are underway inside the ANA. Racked by ethnic mistrust, units are undergoing quiet informal regroupings. Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns are formally integrated into the same battalion on organizational charts, but informally, non-Pashtuns are operating according to separate horizontal and vertical networks that place more trust in fellow Tajiks or Uzbeks.
Colonel Durrani, a Pashtun, may be the battalion commander, but most Tajik soldiers know he is an inept political appointee. It’s best to listen to fellow Tajik Major Massoud. Furthermore, command structures leading to Kabul have parallel ones leading to ethnic commanders in the north – some of them from the old days of the Russian war.
It’s a matter of survival amid insurgency and political failure, one that may prove useful in case Karzai falls or makes too generous a settlement with the Taliban. Put another way, a Tajik network pervades the ANA, damaging its unity yet paradoxically strengthening it for the impending campaigns without a large US/ISAF presence.
Stalemate, enclaves and attrition
As successful as the Taliban have been in spreading throughout the Pashtun south and east, there are dozens of Pashtun tribes and clans that opposed the Taliban’s rise in the nineties, resisted them when they were in power, and continue to fight them today. They recall the Taliban not only for their harsh hand but also for their failure to rebuild the economy and their concentration of power in a Pashtun clique based in Kandahar. They may one day have to acquiesce to Taliban domination of the south and east, but today they form a credible armed opposition, albeit scattered about the south and east.
The US and ISAF have established heavily-defended enclaves in a few parts of the south that are being handed over to the ANA. Perhaps the most significant enclave is the one surrounding Kandahar, which is the Taliban’s heartland. It is an embarrassment to them – one that invites foolhardy attacks beyond the routine assassinations of officials and compliant elders.
In recent years the Taliban have not chosen large-scale assaults on the Pashtun or ISAF enclaves, not even the irksome one around their old homes. Such assaults were attempted elsewhere in 2007 but led nowhere. The Taliban have demonstrated little ability to conduct large-unit, conventional attacks without suffering heavy casualties that accomplish nothing.
Taliban-directed assassinations prevent consolidation inside the enclaves but do not cause disintegration, regain territory, or end embarrassment. Officials killed by the Taliban are replaced just as the Taliban commanders killed by drones are.
Inside the enclaves, ANA troops enjoy decided advantages. Bunkers offer tremendous help against incoming fire; arrays of razor wire and Claymore mines offer the same against assault. Machine guns, mortars, night-vision devices, and small drone aircraft that cover trails and mountainsides will also greatly help ANA troops.
Behind the ANA, perhaps stationed in the north, will be US airpower and reaction teams. Indeed, the US is greatly expanding its numbers of special forces teams, many of them to this purpose. The north are non-Pashtun lands where the insurgency has achieved little traction, where the Taliban are despised as Pakistani dupes and Deobandi zealots, and where there is considerable regional support for fighting the Taliban indefinitely, either through supporting the ANA or northern militias.
Here then is the nature of the stalemate: the Taliban cannot decisively defeat the enclaves of ANA and Pashtun tribes, and neither can the ANA and allied tribes decisively defeat the Taliban. This standoff may lead to opportunities.
Insurgent desertions and separate peaces
The ongoing withdrawal of US and ISAF forces from the south and east will shift attention onto the ANA. It will indeed be a decisive moment in the long war, though for more reasons than simply the ANA’s performance. Insurgent forces may face extraordinary problems and traditional Afghan peacemaking may come to the fore.
Most insurgent fighters are not interested in a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan or in Deobandi creeds, let alone in the geopolitical goals of the Pakistani generals that support them. They fight to rid their districts of foreign occupiers, and after a long and convoluted and misunderstood war, the Western forces are set to oblige them. Many will see the withdrawal as a victory; their mission accomplished, many will go home.
Insurgent forces will face desertions that might make ANA desertions seem light. Such was the case when the Russian army pulled out of Afghanistan in the late eighties, leaving district after district in the hands of the Afghan army to face the experienced and seemingly invincible mujahideen bands.
The results were not disastrous for the Russian allies, as was widely assumed. Mujahideen commanders quarreled and fighting broke out between many of them, leading many to seek protection from the Afghan army and to ally with the Russian-backed and previously reviled Kabul government. [4]
It would appear that the Taliban are too unified to follow the same destructive path of their mujahideen predecessors, but unity based on a common enemy can be short-lived. Within the Taliban forces ranging across the country are many older leaders tired of war and eager to settle. But there are many younger and more ambitious commanders who were rapidly promoted after their predecessors were killed in drone strikes or night raids.
They are not part of the old Kandahar clique that conquered and governed much of the country and they are thought to be more impetuous than their superiors in the Taliban high council in Pakistan. That council is already thought to have liquidated one troublesome firebrand, Mullah Dadullah, by surreptitiously making his whereabouts known to the US, who promptly eliminated him from the Taliban command structure.
The Haqqani network is an important part of the insurgency and one only partially integrated into the Taliban command. Led by an old mujahideen commander thought to be the cat’s paw of the Pakistani generals, the Haqqanis almost certainly have different goals than the Taliban leaders. They are thought to be acting in recent months to disrupt any talks between the Taliban and the US.
A third insurgent group, Hizb-e-Islami, is seldom discussed anymore, owing to its modest numbers and dearth of spectacular successes. Its leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, may be counted as one of the more ambitious and ruthless figures in the country. During the Russian war he fought other mujahideen groups almost as often as he fought the invaders.
Afterwards, his artillery fired pitiless barrages onto Kabul. In contrast to the young Taliban commanders and the Haqqani leaders, Hekmatyar’s ambitions might make him more willing to settle with Kabul, perhaps in exchange for high office in his native Kunduz province, a Pashtun region in the north thought to hold hydrocarbon wealth.
The ANA’s propensity to make local truces with insurgents has been already noted, as have similar truces made by ISAF units and even the most fabled mujahideen commanders. These truces may well proliferate following the ISAF withdrawal from the south and east as insurgent bands, weakened by desertion, face a frail but well-armed ANA and also their old Pashtun tribal foes, both in fortified enclaves and both backed by American airpower and money.
There is what might be called an “Afghan way of war,” which includes a set of norms governing how war is fought and how it is brought to an end. To outsiders, these rules of parley and reconciliation are opaque, perplexing, and even treacherous. American advisors remember well how they looked on in helpless dismay back in 2001 as northern forces negotiated local settlements that allowed Taliban forces to escape into Pakistan.
But this way of war – and peace – has helped limit mayhem in a highly heterogeneous country where ethnic groups and even tribes and clans have fought intermittently then brokered peace agreements, at least some of which were enduring.
This is not a dry lesson in anthropology meeting warfare. Local truces, one after another, in district after district, can constitute important and portentous confidence-building measures. They can lead to a segmented peace process leading to an enduring power-sharing agreement – one that will ultimately entail sharing developmental aid from outside and revenue from the country’s mineralogical wealth. Their usefulness and perhaps even their wisdom may become more apparent, even to outsiders, as the ANA and insurgent bands face each other in the upcoming years.
Notes
1. See Amrullah Saleh, “Ending the politicisation of Afghan security forces,” al-Jazeera, April 19 2012. The author, a Tajik unceremoniously removed from head of intelligence and replaced by a Pashtun of Karzai’s choosing, is careful to avoid mentioning any ethnic group, though he is unmistakably decrying the ouster of Tajiks.
2. Quoted in Lieuternent Colonel Daniel L Davis, Truth, lies and Afghanistan: How military leaders have let us down. Armed Forces Journal February 2012. The author’s harsh view of US policies and the ANA clashes with established institutional objectives.
3. Artemy M Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 146-47; Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-1989 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 285.
4. Antonio Giustozzi, War, Politics and Society in Afghanistan, 1978-1992 (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2000), pp. 186-97.