Read time: 12 minutes
In the first part of this series, I tried to establish that, despite much of what we hear, and in full awareness of the oppression and violence of Taliban rule, good guys and bad guys are an illusion in Afghanistan. It’s truly pick-your-poison - an equation far too complicated to arrive at any clear answers.
Now, through cultural and historical context, we’ll clear up some perception problems around tribal dynamics in Afghanistan. But first, let’s delve into the red tape and graft rippling out from D.C. We’ll start where these stories always do: the Pentagon.
The budget at the Defense Department has something in common with Afghanistan: it’s impenetrable. One after another, auditors go in to bring order to it and come out humiliated and perplexed. According to Matt Taibbi’s 2019 article for Rolling Stone:
At the tail end of last year, the Department of Defense finally completed an audit. At a cost of $400 million, some 1,200 auditors charged into the jungle of military finance, but returned in defeat. They were unable to pass the Pentagon or flunk it. They could only offer no opinion, explaining the military’s empire of hundreds of acronymic accounting silos was too illogical to penetrate.
For at least 25 years, auditors have not been able to make sense of what the Defense Department is doing with its money. Taibbi points out many problems. For example:
None of its services — Navy, Air Force, Army, Marine Corps — use the same system to record transactions or monitor inventory. Each service has its own operations and management budget, its own payroll system, its own R&D budget and so on. It’s an empire of disconnected budgets, or “fiefdoms,” as one Senate staffer calls them.
Within this patchwork of disconnected ‘fiefdoms’, where communication is either less than forthcoming, misleading, or altogether absent, many of the players, from those with authority to those on the periphery, are kneedeep in blackmail and bribery.
Despite repeated proposals over the years from a few concerned members of Congress, any bills that even contemplate withholding funding from the Pentagon
run smack into a bipartisan batch of refuseniks who’ve been gorging on defense-sector campaign contributions, thanks to their status on committees like Armed Services or Appropriations.
We often ask if the ends justify the means. We should instead assume that the means will determine the ends.
When Afghans meet rich foreigners wielding cash to ensure certain outcomes, they know that behind those riches is a poverty of awareness about their history and culture that is ripe for exploitation. In an article for The Independent, Patrick Cockburn follows the D.C. corruption downstream, all the way to Afghanistan.
The vast sums of money available because of US expenditure produced a kleptocratic elite. The US has spent $144bn on development and reconstruction, but some 54 per cent of Afghans live below the poverty line, with earnings of less than $1.90 a day.
An Afghan friend who had once worked for United States Agency for International Development (USAID) explained to me some of the mechanics of how corruption was able to flourish. He said that American aid officials in Kabul thought it too dangerous for them personally to visit projects they were financing. Instead, they stayed in their heavily defended offices and relied on photographs and videos to show them the progress of the projects they were paying for.
On occasion, they would send an Afghan employee like my friend to see for himself what was happening on the ground. On a visit to Kandahar to monitor the building of a vegetable-packing plant, he discovered that a local company akin to a film studio would, for a fee, take convincing pictures of work in progress. Using extras and a suitable backdrop, they were able to show employees in a shed busily sorting carrots and potatoes, though no such facility existed.
You see, this isn’t the Afghans’ first rodeo. Foreign invaders, like Pentagon auditors, enter with high morale and leave with it broken. Morale, however, is not the only thing at stake in this particular fiefdom. Much more has been lost.
In a recent article for UnHerd, William Dalrymple sees the current situation through a prism of history, drawing uncanny parallels to another failed invasion of Afghanistan by Britain 170 years ago:
The same group rivalries and the same battles were fought out in the same places 170 years later under the guise of new banners, new beliefs and new political orchestrators. The same cities were occupied by troops speaking the same languages, and they were attacked again from the same high passes. In both cases, the invaders thought they could walk in, perform regime change, and be out in a couple of years. Ultimately, in both cases they were unable to prevent themselves being pulled into a much wider, bloodier conflict.
For Afghans, these parallels are no mere coincidence. Theirs is a lineage of destiny that tribal leaders harness to galvanize through honor and shame. Dalrymple explains:
Take the puppet ruler — Shah Shuja ul-Mulk — the British tried to install in 1839. He was from the same Popalzai sub-tribe as Hamid Karzai. His bitterest opponents? The Ghilzais, who today are the mainstay of the Taliban’s forces. Taliban leader Mullah Omar was the chief of the Hotaki Ghilzai, just like Mohammad Shah Khan, the warrior who supervised the destruction of the British army in 1841. These parallels were largely invisible to Westerners, but frequently pointed out by the Taliban: “Everyone knows how Karzai was brought to Kabul and how he was seated on the defenceless throne of Shah Shuja,” they announced in a press release soon after he came to power.
We in the West may have forgotten the details of this history that did so much to mould the Afghans’ hatred of foreign rule, but Afghans never did. In particular Shah Shuja remains a symbol of quisling treachery in Afghanistan: in 2001, the Taliban asked their young men, ‘Do you want to be remembered as a son of Shah Shuja or as a son of Dost Mohammad?’ As he rose to power, Mullah Omar deliberately modelled himself on the deposed Emir, Dost Mohammad, and like him removed the Holy Cloak of the Prophet Mohammad from its shrine in Kandahar and wrapped himself in it, declaring himself like his model Amir al-Muminin, the Leader of the Faithful, a deliberate and direct re-enactment of the events of First Afghan War, whose resonance was immediately understood by all Afghans.
Once the foreign invaders are driven out and their puppet government is overrun, tribal power dynamics reassemble themselves, often with less bloodshed or resistance than one might expect.
In an article for Politico, Anatol Lieven describes a practice, opaque to outsiders, of negotiating arrangements “in which opposing factions agree not to fight, or even to trade soldiers in exchange for safe passage.”
Afghanistan has a tradition to which the Taliban have adhered closely — and which helps explain the speed of their success. The Taliban will summon an enemy garrison to surrender, either at once or after the first assaults. If it does so, the men can either join the besiegers or return home with their personal weapons. To kill them would be seen as shameful. On the other hand, a garrison that fought it out could expect no quarter, a very strong incentive to surrender in good time.
U.S. military and intelligence services have ignored this dynamic, choosing instead “to paint an optimistic picture of American efforts to build a strong, loyal Afghan army.” Lieven again:
Afghan society has been described to me as a “permanent conversation.” Alliances shift, and people, families and tribes make rational calculations based on the risk they face. This is not to suggest that Afghans who made such decisions are to blame for doing what they felt to be in their self-interest. The point is that America’s commanders and officials either completely failed to understand these aspects of Afghan reality or failed to report them honestly to U.S. administrations, Congress and the general public.
After 20 years, the difference between failed understanding and dishonest reporting up the chain is a matter of hubristic degree. As the U.S. hobbled toward the finish line, Afghan soldiers - lacking supplies and often unpaid, and bereft without American support - could feel the winds changing, and turned with them.
Patrick Cockburn explains:
The political triumph of the Taliban came about because Afghans with power – military commanders, civilian officials, tribal leaders, local warlords – decided that the US had done a deal with the Taliban and they would be wise to follow suit as quickly as possible. They saw president Donald Trump make concession after concession in negotiations with the Taliban in Qatar without the Afghan government getting anything in return. Biden confirmed this approach when, for domestic political reasons, he decided to grandstand in announcing a complete US pull out.
In Part Three, we’ll peel back another layer and separate honest mistakes from deliberate deceit.