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."
The other two books are edited and written, respectively, by Antonio Giustozzi, a research fellow at the London School of Economics who has spent several decades working in Afghanistan. In Decoding the New Taliban: Insights From the Afghan Field, Giustozzi compiles essays from journalists, former government officials, aid workers, and academics to examine the nature of the insurgency. Some chapters offer refreshing new insights, especially those that deal with Helmand Province, in the country's south; Uruzgan, in the center; and the problems of eastern Afghanistan. Others, such as the chapter on Kandahar, contribute little to what has already been published. In Empires of Mud, Giustozzi assesses the dynamics of warlordism. The book focuses on Abdul Rashid Dostum in the north, Ismail Khan in the west, and Ahmad Shah Massoud in the Panjshir Valley.
All three books provide a nuanced micro-level view of the country. More important, they offer a chilling prognosis for those who believe that the solution to stabilizing Afghanistan will come only from the top down -- by building strong central government institutions. Although creating a strong centralized state, assuming it ever happens, may help ensure long-term stability, it is not sufficient in Afghanistan. The current top-down state-building and counterinsurgency efforts must take place alongside bottom-up programs, such as reaching out to legitimate local leaders to enlist them in providing security and services at the village and district levels. Otherwise, the Afghan government will lose the war.
THE CENTER WILL NOT HOLD
Experts on state building and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan fall into two competing camps. The first believes that Afghanistan will never be stable and secure without a powerful central government capable of providing services to Afghans in all corners of the country. The other insists that Afghanistan is, and always has been, a quintessentially decentralized society, making it necessary to build local institutions to create security and stability.
Since the Bonn agreement of December 2001 -- which established an interim government and a commission to draft a new constitution -- international efforts in Afghanistan have unfortunately focused on initiatives directed by the central government to establish security and stability. On the political front, the focus has been supporting the government of Hamid Karzai and strengthening institutions in Kabul. On the security front, the international community has built up the Afghan National Police and the Afghan National Army as bulwarks against the Taliban and other insurgent groups. Yet this effort has been unsuccessful: there are too few national security forces to protect the population, the police are legendary for their corruption and incompetence, and many rural communities do not want a strong central government presence. On the development front, the focus has been improving the central government's ability to deliver services to the population, including through such institutions as the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development. These top-down strategies reflect the conventional wisdom among many policymakers and academics, but this consensus view is misinformed.
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