Afghanistan Thread

I'm sure Akhundzada's considering it.

https://8am.media/eng/as-pashtun-affiliates-occupy-uzbek-lands-top-uzbek-commander-leaves-taliban-ranks/

As expected, more Uzbeks leave the Taliban in revolt over detaining other Uzbeks.

So much for "we're all on the same team here", it seems.

This is really an extension of what those jihadis were saying in those interviews earlier. The war kept these groups together for a united cause, but now that that is over and done with, old animosities between themselves start showing up again.

Washington Post: Divorced and remarried, these Afghan women are outlaws under Taliban rule. Taliban law requires divorces to have the husband's consent, which voids countless divorces from under the US-backed Islamic Republic and put many Afghan women in danger — including those whose subsequent marriages are now invalided and put them at risk of adultery charges. Some women have reported taking calls from their ex-husbands, threatening to out them to the Taliban. The Taliban legal code also requires multiple witnesses for married women to claim domestic abuse to law enforcement (making it all but impossible), and many local aid groups and shelters have been shuttered since the fall of the Islamic Republic.

Torpekai Amarkhel, a former journalist for SBS's Pashto-language service, died while waiting for her Australian refugee visa to be processed. After being abandoned by her UN employers during the Taliban takeover and getting no response from Australian immigration services, she decided to set off to Turkey, whereupon she boarded a fishing boat headed to Europe with 200 other Afghan, Syrian and Iraqi refugees. The boat capsized off the coast of Italy with the known losses of 72 lives, among them Amarkhel and four of her relatives.

https://8am.media/eng/taliban-forcefully-displace-hazara-inhabitants-of-a-village-in-sar-e-pul-reports/

Taliban fighters took over a Hazara village in Sar-e-pul and took the villagers to pack up and leave.

https://8am.media/eng/taliban-shut-down-womens-voice-radio-station-in-badakhshan/

Radio Sedaye Banovan (Women’s Voice Radio) was closed by Taliban orders. RSB is mainly used to report on anything concerning Afghan women.

https://twitter.com/AmuTelevision/status/1640561995081478144

Amu TV (like most news networks that specialize in Afghanistan) mention the arrest of Matiullah Wesa, who's a known advocate for Afghan girls to go to school.

NRF/other anti-Taliban resistance forces have started anti-Taliban offensives. NRF posted via Twitter (c/o Ali Nazary) that they stormed Pul-e Charkhi to target Taliban fighters.

https://twitter.com/alinazary/status/1641123937554952194

It's a roller coaster that I'm checking claims that the Taliban took out ex-special forces commandos turned anti-Taliban officers in the Afghanistan Freedom Front.

https://8am.media/eng/afghan-women-stand-up-against-taliban-oppression-womens-justice-movement-of-afghanistan-launches-its-activities-in-herat-province/

Afghan women living in Herat have started a campaign there against the Taliban ban on women working/studying.

Edited by Ominae on Apr 14th 2023 at 1:05:25 AM

Journalist Obeidullah Baheer wrote a profile of Matiullah Wesa for the national, highlighting the many years of work he did campaigning for wider education across rural areas of the country and the injustice of his arrest by the regime.

VOA: Top UN Official Proposes Meeting to Discuss Recognition of Taliban. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed announced the plan on Monday, arguing that isolation is only strengthening the Taliban regime and that holding them accountable on their human rights promises will require leveraging their desire for recognition.

UN ready for ‘heartbreaking’ decision to pull out of Afghanistan

I recently read an article about the Taliban that I found extremely interesting. The Taliban Were Afghanistan’s Real Modernizers

It's very insightful and not too long but to summarize it describes how the Taliban were not in-fact just medieval savages with no strengths as an organization. Their beliefs are of course reactionary and vile but the article convincingly argues that those traits are not mutually exclusive with being effective modernizers. It notes how unlike the kleptocratic Kabul government the Taliban were able to supplant and suppress the Tribal power structures that have long dominated Afghanistan and that their ideological-organization conformity gave them unheard of cohesion as a group. These attributes together allowed them to thoroughly outcompete and crush the Kabul government.

This matches what else I've read about the Taliban, contrary to the wishful-thinking driven cope that has dominated the Western discussions about their capability to govern there is every reason to believe that they'll be up to the task. The Taliban unfortunately are not incompetent, they've managed to make an organization that is as regressive as it is capable.

I'd really recommend David B. Edwards' Caravan of Martyrs, the book cited at the beginning of the article, for its in-depth look at how the Soviet war uprooted Afghan cultural norms and institutions. Barnett R. Rubin's The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, though a bit dated, also offers a fairly detailed view of the pre-war relationship between the Barakzai monarchy and regional elites.

Yeah I've heard of them, they're definitely on my reading list

Granted how capable they are is another story, they won in part because how disaster kabul goverment was in part and it seen taliban is having issue trying to mantain the whole thing united.

There is posibility they will go down as everyone else before then.

@Fourthspartan 56: The main issue with the Taliban becoming a functional state is that Afghanistan, geographically-speaking, is really bad terrain for state-building. Hence the Graveyard of Empires.

Though Afghanistan was a stable part of many empires long before the British, Soviets and the US. It is really mostly only the westerners (and the Soviets) that had a serious issue with state building in Afghanistan. Most muslim and pre muslim empires were very successful there if i recall so in that sense the Taliban do have slight chance of succeeding for better or worse.

Edited by xyzt on Apr 22nd 2023 at 7:31:16 PM

I'd also recommend Taliban by Ahmed Rashid, it's a little more topical than the other books mentioned but if you can find the 1st edition published just months before 9/11 it's pretty prophetic. Does a pretty good job introducing/explaining the different ethnic and political factions and touches on the different topics through 20th century Afghanistan that led to the Taliban's eventual rise.

Edited by carbon-mantis on Apr 22nd 2023 at 10:37:50 AM

Yeah the Graveyard of Empires thing is an idea created by the US to explain its failings. Alexander the Great succeeded and just ran out of steam a bit further east, many empires after that did fine for extended periods of time, the British succeeded in the goals they had and weren’t particularly interested in conquest.

The Soviets and USA both failed by largely because they were only able to control Afghanistan and couldn’t properly reach into the neighbouring areas of Pakistan.

There’s probably a solid lesson that trying to control Afghanistan without the connected areas of Pakistan is a bad idea, but “Graveyard of Empires” is just an excuse for USA failure.

I've heard this revisionism before but it's rather obvious wishful thinking. It takes competence to capitalize on the mistakes of an opponent. The Taliban won because they managed to effectively subvert the majority of the country and then quickly capitalize on the coalition withdrawal.

The Kabul government's incompetence and hyper-corruption made things easier but the evidence is conclusive. The Taliban is a cohesive and generally competent organization.

Probably bears remembering that Afghanistan didn't stay the same in all that time, and past definitions of "control" were often looser than the one our modern states employ. Alexander didn't go up to every village to teach the locals how to do socialism or liberal democracy or whatever; he just knocked on major cities like Kapisi and Balkh and told the rulers that they were paying taxes to him instead of Darayavaush now. Nader Shah didn't particularly care about getting every last Pashtun to pay their personal income taxes; he just told the Ghilzai khans that he's marching out to pillage his enemies' cities and asked who wanted in.

Afghanistan is still geographically fragmented today, but its problems are absolutely a product of the modern world. Its rural reactionary reflexes (especially in the southern Pashtun belt where social structures are at their most "tribal") come from a century of the central state marching in with guns and telling people to report for taxes and conscription by the head. The deep resentment between many communities was built up by the way these centralising rulers' policies favoured one group over the other — especially in wartime, when local land and personal disputes could put villages on opposing sides of the battle-line. The boom in illicit industries — gemstones from Panjshir, opium from Helmand, timber from Kunar, looted antiques from just about everywhere — is fuelled by well-off consumers in distant countries. It's just a touch crude to blame the country's problems on ancient tribalism, after a half-century of war decimated village leaderships and travelling mullahs, gutted out traditional institutions and replaced them with a foreign-backed warlord class.

I don't think the Taliban are going to get unseated by regional opposition from IS-K or the NRF in the near term. But war exhaustion can only bring a country to a halt; it couldn't get it to start moving again. If they're going to turn Afghanistan into a functioning state, then they'll need to come up with something that the past century of rulers failed to offer: a fair deal that works for everyone in the country.

So far, they're not exactly offering that. Their leadership is still overwhelmingly Pashtuns from Loy Kandahar; their reactionary core faction opts for keeping women at home over having a running economy; they respond to insurgencies in Nangarhar and Panjshir by rounding up locals at gunpoint rather than working with power brokers like Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah (ironically repeating the US's mistake in rejecting Taliban leaders' surrender in 2002).

Petty crimes and warlordism might be down from the Republic years, but that alone doesn't fix the extreme poverty that still grips the country. Like, yeah — folks in former battlefields Sangin and Waygal are probably relieved that they're not being constantly bombarded and searched by scary men with guns, and the draconian text of Taliban law might neither be a deal-breaker nor strictly enforced in those parts. But is that feeling shared by female teachers in Kunduz? Or Hazara mayors in Daykundi? Each part of society that gets left out of the settlement is a crack in the state's foundation; if they don't lead to open revolt in the future, then at least they'll make it harder to fix the country's deep-rooted poverty, isolation and communal feuds.

If the current government wants the machineries of state to function beyond a crude baseline of law enforcement, it'll need to start giving non-Taliban voices a seat at the table and treat the female half of the country as full members of society. And the same pride that kept the Taliban together throughout 20 years of war is now keeping their reactionary core from making that compromise.

Though wouldnt the islamization of Afghanistan achieved by the Ghaznavid and Ghurid dynasty over their rule through patronization of religious institutions there be a case of the state more actively influencing and successfully changing the tribal cultures in Afghanistan? Way more change than the Afghan tribals would ever let any other ruler in the future get away with.

So were cases like with king Amanullah's ouster by the tribals more due to opposition to his attempt to introduce genuine progressive western style reforms like mass education, improving women's rights etc or due to him trying to change the tribal army recruitment policy from qadam (where tribal elders pick who to send from within their tribes) to nufus (the army directly recruitment without consulting with a tribal body)? I had read halfway through David B. Edward's Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad where he states that the Pashtun tribes had a strongly traditionalist outlook and Amanullah's reforms were way too over ambitious goals that his people were not ready or prepared to accept. But he also states later that the Safi tribe rebelled due to the change in military recruitment policy for them.

Edited by xyzt on Apr 22nd 2023 at 1:40:05 PM

I have no idea what the ethnic and religious makeup of the countryside looked like at that point, or whether the people there had a tribal structure anything like today's Pashtun belt. Islam had been a major presence in the region for centuries, though. Kabul, Kandahar and other major southern cities were held by Hindu monarchies in the previous centuries, but their power and influence were already badly upset by waves of Arab (and then Persian Muslim) invasions over those centuries. The conversion or displacement of urban Hindu elites started long before our timeframe.

Mahmud Ghaznavi was basically a foreigner. His father Sabuktigin was a Turkic slave soldier employed by Samanid dynasty, whose seat of power was in Samarkand, waaay to the north. His constituency would've been fellow Turkic military elites first, Persian urbanites second; the centre of gravity for his empire lied in the Persianised north of modern Afghanistan, and the final conversion of the southern Hindu cities probably took a little longer. Never mind the countryside, which still had pockets of paganism and animism as late as the late 19th century; point is, the change didn't happen overnight. It started with the constituencies close to the ruling power and then gradually radiated outwards.

I'm not too well-read on the Ghurids, but my understanding is that they were a Persian dynasty from the north of the country, whose main power bases were also the Persian-speaking cities to the north that used to be part of the Samanid sphere. If there's any literature out there on how these folks actually interacted with the non-Muslim tribal societies in the south, I'd definitely like to hear it.

That said, it's also worth remembering that "tribal" does not necessarily mean "rural" or "remote". Many tribal groups constituted the ruling power in major cities, or else had kinship ties to the kings and aristocrats who ruled them. Even in the 20th century, you could see it with the way the Barakzai monarchy awarded favours to the elites of their tribal kins round Kandahar — in form of commissions on local infrastructure projects or fancy car dealerships in Kabul — while struggling to assert itself over "tribal" societies they had no kinship ties to, like the Pasha'is in the east and the Balochis in the south. The modern times also brought a lot of rural migrant labour to the cities, which lets both sides influence each other more and is slowly making obsolescent the old tribal vs urban, nang vs qalang dichotomy.

It's both, because both involved the central state muscling its way into the countryside and trying to force people to change their ways under the threat of violence. The cultural reforms obviously upset patriarchal sensibilities, and not just in the "tribal" Pashtun south: the Saqqawis who briefly overthrew the monarchy were led by Tajik fighters just north of Kabul.

And the state attempts to forgo old "feudal" systems of taxation and conscription were not only more intrusive — it also offended the honour of local tribal leaders by ignoring their traditional roles in society. Governance is a give-and-take affair. The old monarchy relied on Ghilzai chieftains to provide most of their conscripts, in return for the perks offered by such influence over the army. When Daoud Khan demanded that the Safis in the east also offer their sons — all their sons — to the army, he had no such deal to offer them; the only thing he had was the threat of violence, which of course led to rebellion.

Modern states run on knowing numbers, on knowing where the people and resources are and having the means to monitor them and make them do what the state wants. They need the people and land to be legible, and that process often involves a lot of violence.

That's why remote tribes aren't necessarily happy when the state builds them roads and telephone lines: you think blah blah infrastructure blah blah economic development, they think you just want to march the army in faster and shake them down more efficiently. And while modern Afghan states could occasionally strike out at the countryside with great ferocity, they struggle to hold up the spectre of state force consistently — partly because of the harsh geography, partly because the central rulers lacked goodwill outside their little ethnic/elite cliques, and partly because the new, state-anointed local elites they appointed to wield state force were often so brutal and corrupt that the locals saw no point in obeying the state either way.

If you want the countryside to pay taxes and follow state laws, then ultimately you'll need a deal to convince them that it's worth the trouble. Which, for better or worse, sometimes means negotiating local elites and customs whose interests don't necessarily align with good state governance.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Apr 22nd 2023 at 3:52:56 AM

The thing with previous empires controlling Afghanistan is that - as eagleoftheninth said - they never really tried to build what we'd call a modern state there, they just controlled the major cities and the trade routes and collected some tribute from the villages.

Building a modern state requires infrastructure, which is really hard and expensive in Afghanistan's terrain. You gotta build roads across mountains if you wanna be able to get troops (not to mention supplies and aid) up to the villages. You've got to move said troops up there and station them there reliably to protect the schools, because the schools are how you teach not just useful skills, but civics - you know, the curriculum where you teach kids that they're part of a bigger nation and not just their own tribe (religion helps with that, but it doesn't seem to be enough). And so on. The memetic difficulty of digging the Taliban out of the caves is a sideshow.

Could America have done it? Maybe...if they'd been willing to spend trillions of dollars over a generation to make it possible. The Taliban don't have trillions of dollars.

Kloop.kg interviewed a Pamir Kyrgyz family who resettled from Afghanistan to Naryn, Kyrgyzstan five years ago. Since then, their children have been severely bullied at school for being "Afghans", which soured the family's relationship with the local community who blamed them for their children's "bad behaviour", to the extent where they're looking to move back to Afghanistan despite the current situation.

A few thousand ethnic Kyrgyz people live in the remote Wakhan Corridor in the northeast of the country, living a largely pastoral-nomadic lifestyle with sparse access to healthcare and education. About 5,000 fled to Pakistan during the war in the '80s, most of whom were eventually resettled by the Turkish government to Van Province in Turkey.

More Kyrgyz folks have sought to relocate to Kyrgyzstan after the Taliban takeover, thanks in no small part to the resulting wave of school closures affecting their children (not just the state-mandated ones of girls' schools and coeds, but also through a lack of funding and staff for boys' ones). The Kyrgyz government is struggling to find ways to bring them into the country, though, and evidently they're also having trouble integrating current "returnees" into the wider society.

Scientific American: A Rare Glimpse into Afghanistan’s Spectacular, Vanishing Forests. People usually think of Afghanistan as a pretty arid place, but the northeastern regions (particularly Kunar and Nuristan) are rather famously lush with vegetation. During the war in the '80s, timber and woodcraft brought a lot of revenue to resistance fighters in the region, particularly from rich Gulf Arab buyers who were eager to pay premium prices for the "jihad wood". For the Soviets, the forests were the fabled nests of the "black storks" — the mythical foreign mercenaries and special forces to whom they'd attributed the skill and ferocity of the local mujahideen fighters (mostly belonging to branches of Hizb-i Islami).

Kunar and Nuristan were relatively untouched by the civil war in the '90s: the big mujahideen commanders mostly fought over Kabul and other major cities to the south, so their presence was minimal (other than a stretch of the Pech Valley held by Hekmatyar's right-hand man, Kashmir Khan). The Taliban never quite got up there, either: things stayed relatively quiet until 2002, when the US and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan set about on pursuing bin Laden and Zarqawi, who'd fled their latest hideout in lower Nangarhar.

After a decades of intensive logging, the Karzai government received reports from UN functionaries (including future president Ashraf Ghani) that the northeastern forests had been stripped bare. These reports were probably overblown. In his book The Hardest Place, journalist Wesley S. Morgan, who embedded in the area for years and developed extensive local connections, wrote:

Nevertheless, Karzai ordered an immediate ban on all logging in Afghanistan. A whole economic sector that countless people had relied on over the past few decades (at substantial environmental costs) suddenly became illegal overnight. How do you enforce a logging ban in Afghanistan, of all places? You don't. But the ban meant that anyone could now be harmonised — a fact that local tyrants and corrupt government officials exploited to blackmail their neighbours and seize the timber industry for themselves.

All the while, US forces trickled into the region, acting on the tip that bin Laden, Zarqawi and Hekmatyar had holed up in the Nuristan highlands on their way to cross the Pakistani border (Fazelminallah Qazizai's book Night Letters describes this episode through interviews with Hizb members). Caught between the locals' distrust and malicious tips, US troops in the region found themselves in an escalating cycle of violence. The point of no return came in June 2005, when a botched operation to capture a minor militant leader in the side valley of Shuryak ended up in a double ambush that killed 19 US special operations troops.

The incident shocked the US public and brought in a massive expansion of US military presence into the Pech Valley region, reaching into hitherto untouched parts of the Waygal and Korengal Valleys. The Taliban, in turn, channelled resources towards local militias antagonised by the US presence. At its peak, the fighting in the Pech Valley region accounted for more Coalition air strikes than the rest of Afghanistan put together. On two bloody occasions (Wanat, 2008, and Kamdesh, 2009), Taliban fighters managed to exploit the natural cover offered by vegetations and vertical terrain to nearly overrun isolated US outposts in lower Nuristan.

US forces finally left the valley after a last round of raids on Taliban encampments in 2011, leaving behind a small Afghan military presence in the major cities while Taliban forces controlled the rest of the region (although drone operations under JSOC would continue until the final withdrawal in 2021). Left unchallenged, the Taliban now called in their favours. They subjected the communities they'd supported to harsh rules and extractive taxes, which took the level of logging activity across the northeast above what it had seen over the previous decades. A decade on, the Taliban are in power — but the locals' poverty remained, while the forests that once sustained them are turning into barren wastelands.

Weeks after seizing Kabul, the Taliban announced a ban on the timber trade, as well as the formation of a new paramilitary unit to combat it. Their motivation probably wasn't just ecological — in the years after the US departure, IS-K fighters had set up a base in the Nangarhar highlands, taking a cut out of the timber trade just like generations of armed groups before them. Nonetheless, without many alternatives in place, a blanket ban is probably going to make it even more difficult for struggling locals to put food on the table.

And in the meantime, the ecological costs are making themselves known. In July 2021, the Kamdesh district of Nuristan was hit by massive flash floods that pulled entire barren hills into mudslides. Around 260 people died, with large swathes of farmlands and fruit orchards annihilated alongside. Another round of flash floods swept the entire country in the summer of 2022, killing hundreds more. Afghanistan is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change; the majority of the population is already concentrated along narrow river valleys and canal zones that make up a minority of the land area. Over-forestation and desertification will only bring more pressure in the future.