Not much of a choice: Taliban or Warlords

Josh Shahryar, an Afghan journalist and human rights activist, writes for the blog Enduring America and occasionally for Huffington Post. He also has his own blog. In this essay, Shahryar echos other articles we have posted on Stop Afghan War and the views of other critics of US policy. His central thesis is the Afghan people are caught between repressive forces, the Taliban and the warlords, with the US supporting the latter. In Shahryar's view, the Taliban are often viewed as the lesser of evils by Afghans. He provides some historical background as well.

Bob

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Josh Shahyrar, "Afghanistan Primer: The US, The Warlords, and The Death Dance," on Enuring America, Dec. 4, 2009

http://enduringamerica.com/2009/12/04/josh-shahryars-afghanistan-primer-the-us-the

Posted by Scott Lucas in Afghanistan

Welcome to Enduring America. If you find this post useful, please consider subscribing to our RSS feed. After my rather scathing criticism of President Barack Obama’s troop surge plan for Afghanistan yesterday, I received many questions from readers on Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail about the realities of the situation. This is the first of three articles trying to offer some answers.

Obama gets away with one thing and one thing only in his approach: he is not the person who has made the wrong choices since the Afghan Invasion of 2001. The first step in the War on Terror was perhaps one of the most misguided and poorly planned of President Bush’s policies. Here is a summary: remove Taliban, institute democracy, then capture bin Laden, and then maybe get out?

The biggest blunder the US made, contrary to common belief, was not over the second step of democracy promotion but over the first one of regime change. Instead of using its superior military to fight the enemy, the US sought help from Afghan warlords who controlled less than 5% of Afghanistan’s territory and had been all but vanquished by the Taliban. This might have helped the US oust the Kabul Government, but it handed the country back to the Afghan warlords who may have committed some of the most heinous crimes against humanity.

Rewind history to the early 1990s.

After the ouster of the communist government of Afghanistan, these same warlords, then known as mujahideen and hailed the world over as freedom fighters, took over Afghanistan. For the next several years, the population was abused to the point where more than eight million Afghans were forced to leave the country. The rest remained at the mercy of men who ruled them with such brutality that just reading about it brings a shudder.

Hezbe Wahdat, one of the main groups led by a ruthless warlord named Ustad Abdul Ali Mazari, were notorious for their death dance. Stationed in Western Kabul, Mazari’s men, who were composed of the Hazara ethnic minority, would catch anyone who belonged to the Pashtun group and slaughter them without hesitation.

The death dance would proceed with a man being held down by several Hazara fighters. He would be decapitated and hot oil would be poured over his neck. This would make the body wildly jerk around.

Another group from the north, composed of the Uzbek minority, would place captured fighters and bystanders inside shipping containers, take them to the desert, and then fire hundreds of rounds. The lucky prisoners would be struck and die. Those who did not were left in the desert to die of starvation or thirst.

In the south, the Pashtun-led groups were notorious for sexually abusing young boys. This reached a point where commanders would openly marry boys as young as 12 in official ceremonies attended by their cronies. The situation was so dangerous for pre-teen and early-teen boys that they were kept at home until they grew beards

In this climate of fear, the Taliban entered the scene. Backed up by Pakistan militarily and by the Gulf states financially from 1994, they were able to take over the entire country within a few short years. Their forces were not much superior to their opponents; however, they used people’s hatred for the warlords to gain control of the country. At the time of the US invasion, they held all but one of 32 provinces of Afghanistan, ruling almost 95% of the territory and the population.

People always ask me how Taliban with their stone-age laws were able to rule Afghanistan for almost six years. The answer is simple: stone-age laws are better than no laws at all. They gave people something they had yearned for years –– safety and security.

Previously, you would be robbed in daylight in front and inside your house. With the Taliban in power, you could haul sacks full of money from one side of the country to the other without hiding the fact that you were transporting cash. And except for targeting the Hazara minority, about 10% of the country’s population, they treated people far more mercifully than the warlords did.

Now the same groups of militias who committed the crimes of the 1990s form the majority of Afghan governors, provincial administrators, security chiefs, and army commanders, as well as the overwhelming majority of senators and representatives to the Afghan bicameral legislature. And they are only able to do so because of the US.

This is why the US invasion was a disaster from the very beginning. The US could have taken over Afghanistan without resorting to help from the much hated warlords, winning the hearts of Afghans. Instead, removing the regime that had brought peace of mind to many, Washington brought back the terror that had haunted them.

So, if the US strategy saved American lives at the start of the offensive, this conflict now takes American lives each week. Afghanistan now has both a Taliban, which not only exists but is enjoying success, and a corrupt and ineffective government.

The reason why the US cannot defeat the Taliban is not because they are powerful or America is weak but because the Taliban have the sympathy of a majority of the Afghanistan’s largely rural population. (The educated class, which makes up a small portion of the population, is simply hoping and praying that both the warlords and the Taliban could somehow miraculously cease to exist.)

The village-dwellers have two choices. They can either support the US military as it finds Taliban hideouts and brings the enemy to justice, then wait for the Americans to depart and leave them at the mercy of the warlords. Or they can continue to lie low and let the Taliban exist, hoping that when the US leaves, the Taliban will get rid of the warlords again.

The choice between a harsh Islamic regime that allows you to live a peaceful life if you lock your wives at home, grow beards, and pray five times a day or between a group of bandits who would pillage your property, rape your women and kill you is quite simple. The Afghans may be illiterate, but they’re not stupid.

If Obama and the US are serious, they still have plenty of time. They could do what the Taliban did and remove these criminals from the Afghan government. This would immediately win the hearts of Afghanistan’s people. If the US chooses otherwise, then it should not blame itself for failing to gain the support of the Afghans.