It Takes the Villages
Bringing Change From Below in Afghanistan
Article Summary and Author Biography
Current efforts to stabilize Afghanistan are based on a misunderstanding of the country's culture and social structure. As three new books show, defeating the Taliban will require local, bottom-up efforts -- beginning with a deep understanding of tribal and subtribal politics.
SETH G. JONES is a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation and the author of In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan. In 2009, he served as a Plans Officer and Adviser to the Commanding General of U.S. Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan.
Columbia University Press
2010
320 pp.
9780231700801
$35.00
Columbia University Press
2010
360 pp.
9781849040266
$29.95
Columbia University Press
2009
420 pp.
9780231701129
$40.00
Reading List
An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on Afghan politics.
Reading List
An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on fighting insurgencies.
Snapshot
To succeed in Afghanistan, the international community must tackle corruption, make aid more effective, improve cooperation with the Afghan government, pursue a regional solution to the conflict, and commit to long-term reconstruction.
I met Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, twice in 2009 and was quickly drawn to his unassuming demeanor and erudition. His jet-black beard and round spectacles gave him the aura of a soft-spoken professor, not a battle-hardened guerrilla fighter who had first tasted war at the age of 15. Zaeef told me about his childhood in southern Afghanistan, the Soviet invasion, his life with the Taliban, and the three years he spent in prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. What was particularly striking was his contempt for the United States and what he regarded as its myopic understanding of Afghanistan. "How long has America been in Afghanistan?" Zaeef asked rhetorically. "And how much do Americans know about Afghanistan and its people? Do they understand its culture, its tribes, and its population? I am afraid they know very little."
Zaeef is largely correct. In fact, U.S. Major General Michael Flynn, deputy chief of staff for intelligence in Afghanistan, echoed this point in early 2010: "Eight years into the war in Afghanistan," Flynn wrote in a poignant unclassified paper, "the vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade."
Three new books provide important insights into that environment. The first is Zaeef's own My Life With the Taliban, which serves as a counternarrative to much of what has been written about Afghanistan since 1979. It offers a rare glimpse into the mind of a senior Taliban leader who remains sympathetic to the movement. "I pray to almighty Allah," he writes, "that I will be buried beside my heroes, brothers and friends in the Taliban cemetery."
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