In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

CHAPTER NINE The Logic of Insurgency

ONE OF THE twentieth century’s most successful insurgents, the Chinese leader Mao Zedong, wrote that there is an inextricable link in insurgencies “between the people and the troops. The former may be likened to water and the latter to the fish who inhabit it.”¹ Insurgencies require a motivated leadership but, more important, they can only form amid a disillusioned population. Mao had both. He led China’s beleaguered peasants, who had been harshly oppressed by the feudal landowners, in a violent insurgency that toppled the government and Chiang Kai-shek’s National Revolutionary Army in 1949.

Mao’s experience was comparable to that of countless other insurgencies, virtually all featuring poorly trained and badly equipped guerrillas overwhelming a much more powerful opponent. In the American Revolutionary War, Francis Marion, better known as the “Swamp Fox,” organized a disheveled band of fighters in South Carolina against the British. Operating with great speed and elusiveness from inaccessible bases, and taking advantage of local hatred against the British, Marion’s troops struck isolated garrisons, convoys, and other targets in rapid succession. The British, unable to effectively counter Marion, complained that he fought neither “like a gentleman” nor “like a Christian.” His actions inspired the “Song of Marion’s Men,” by the American poet William Cullen Bryant, which hailed the geographical advantage held by the Americans:

Our fortress is the good greenwood,

Our tent the cypress-tree;

We know the forest round us,

As seamen know the sea.²

Bryant’s poem highlights a practice that Afghan insurgents would mimic several centuries later: the use of guerrilla tactics against a better-equipped conventional military. This chapter seeks to understand insurgencies at a systematic level in order to explain the situation in Afghanistan. Why do insurgencies begin? The first question to ask is: What exactly is an insurgency?

Understanding Insurgencies

An insurgency is a political-military campaign by nonstate actors who seek to overthrow a government or secede from a country through the use of unconventional—and sometimes conventional—military strategies.³ Insurgent actions also cover a range of unconventional tactics, from small-scale ambushes and raids to large-scale, lethal violence. ⁴ They usually involve four principal actors.

The first are insurgents, those hoping to overthrow the established national government or secede from it.⁵ In Afghanistan after the 2001 fall of the Taliban, key insurgent forces included the remnants of the Taliban, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami, the Haqqani network, al Qa’ida and other foreign fighters, criminal groups, and a host of Afghan and Pakistani tribal militias. The second is the local government, which includes the government’s security forces, the army and police, as well as key national and local political institutions. In states with weak central governments, such as Afghanistan, tribal militias may also serve these purposes. The third group consists of outside actors: external states and other nonstate entities, which might support either side. Outside actors can tip the balance of a war in favor of either insurgents or the government, but they can rarely win it for either side. There were two sets of external actors in Afghanistan. The United States, NATO forces, and the United Nations supported the Afghan government; the international jihadi network and some individuals from neighboring states—such as Pakistan and Iran—supported the insurgents.

Finally, the local population is the most important group; it is for their hearts and minds that the war is being fought in the first place. The support of the population is the sine qua non of victory in counterinsurgency warfare.⁶ As one study of the insurgency in El Salvador concluded: “The only territory you want to hold is the six inches between the ears of the campesino.”⁷ Each side needs money, logistics, recruits, intelligence, and other aid to achieve its objectives.⁸ Support is especially critical for insurgents, who must fight asymmetrically. Political scientist Daniel Byman writes,

Pity the would-be insurgent. He and his comrades are unknown to the population at large, and their true agenda has little popularity. Indeed, most countries around the world oppose their agenda. Many of the fighters are not experienced in warfare or clandestine operations, making them easy prey for the police and intelligence services. Their families are at the mercy of government security forces. The government they oppose, in contrast, is relatively rich, has thousands or even millions of administrators, policemen, and soldiers, and enjoys considerable legitimacy.⁹

If insurgents manage to separate the population from the government and external forces, however, and acquire its active or passive support, they are more likely to win the war. In the end, the exercise of political power depends on the tacit or explicit agreement of the population—or, at worst, on its submissiveness.¹⁰

While outside actors often play an important role, they rarely stay for the duration of the conflict, and the result of the war is almost always a function of the struggle between the local government and insurgents.¹¹ My analysis of insurgencies since 1945 shows that successful counterinsurgency campaigns last for an average of fourteen years, and unsuccessful ones last for an average of eleven years. Many also end in a draw, with neither side winning. Insurgencies can also be brutal, drawn-out affairs: more than a third of all insurgencies last more than twenty years, with the incumbent governments winning slightly more than twice as often as the insurgents.¹² Again, only a few of these conflicts are fought—and won or lost—by foreign armies. Most countries quickly tire of having their troops deployed abroad, as the Soviets did during their Afghan campaign. Moreover, most local populations view foreign armies as occupiers, which impedes success.¹³ A lead indigenous role, on the other hand, can provide a focus for national aspirations and show the population that they—and not foreign forces—control their destiny.

Research on past cases suggests that two factors correlate strongly with the beginning of an insurgency: weak governance and a well-articulated cause from insurgent leaders. Competent governments that can provide services to their population in a timely manner are rarely beset with insurgencies. But there are also uncontrollable factors: countries with low per-capita incomes are at a greater risk of insurgency. Geographical factors are important too. Mountainous terrain can have a compounding effect on the grievances of a restive population.¹⁴ David Galula, a French military officer and counterinsurgency expert, wrote that the ideal location for insurgents is a landlocked country with mountains along the borders, a dispersed rural population, and a primitive economy.¹⁵ If ever a country matched this description, it surely would be Afghanistan.

Governance Collapse

Weak and ineffective governance—the ability to establish law and order, effectively manage resources, and implement sound policies—is a necessary precondition for the rise of insurgencies.¹⁶ It creates a supply of disgruntled locals eager to find other ways of governing themselves. Political scientist Stathis Kalyvas explains:

Insurgency can best be understood as a process of competitive state building rather than simply an instance of collective action or social contention…. State building is the insurgent’s central goal and renders organized and sustained rebellion of the kind that takes places in civil wars fundamentally distinct from phenomena such as banditry, mafias, or social movements.¹⁷

If insurgents take advantage of weak governance and assume state-like functions, they can raise tax money, set up administrative structures, and begin to perform government functions.

In the Canipaco Valley of central Peru, for example, the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) guerrillas “assumed control and organized every aspect of the inhabitants’ daily life. Sendero undertook the administration of justice and played the role of a moralizing force. Shining Path settled marital conflicts, supervised the work of teachers, mediated the relationships between the comuneros and those authorities and state functionaries who were not obliged to quit, executed thieves who robbed livestock from the herders and even organized recreation.”¹⁸

In Vietnam, the Vietcong were able to establish a highly sophisticated five-level “shadow” administrative infrastructure run by close to 40,000 full-time employees by the end of 1968. “One of the striking conclusions from interviewing [Vietcong] defectors,” wrote Jeffrey Race in War Comes to Long An, “is the total absence of government movement in revolutionary areas for years at a time, except on occasional large-scale sweep operations which had little impact on the Party’s local apparatus.”¹⁹ According to another account, “peasants conscripted into the revolutionary organization became more than soldiers in a temporary fighting force; they potentially became subjects integrated into a new institution founding the basis for a nation-state.”²⁰ Even before Vietnam, in the Philippines during the 1950s, “one government was legal, but in these areas had little or no physical control. The insurgent government was illegal, but had partial or complete control and enforcement capability.”²¹

A key essence of weak governance, then, is enforcement. Following Max Weber, any government that cannot control a monopoly on physical force will be unable to force people to comply with the state’s laws.²² Since the Enlightenment, philosophers in the tradition of Hobbes and Kant have seen a link between strong and responsible governments with peace and order. Even Adam Smith, the English economist and philosopher famous for advocating a minimal government role and the invisible hand of the market, supported a strong and competent security force to establish domestic order.

So how does weak governance contribute to the outbreak of an insurgency? By definition, weak states cannot meet the basic needs of their population.²³ They cannot consolidate authority over all their territory and they often do not succeed in maintaining order within the territory they do control.²⁴ They fail to use state resources to promote security or serve the public interest.²⁵ Weak states lack sufficient bureaucratic and institutional structures to ensure the functioning of government. They often lack trained civil servants and thus can barely operate school systems, courts, welfare systems, and other essentials for social functioning.²⁶ It is not just that law and political institutions in these states are ineffective. It is that the faith in law and political institutions that underpins policing and order does not exist.²⁷ Without confidence in the rules of society, including the quality of contract enforcement, the police, and the courts, the general public will look to other organizations to provide structure and order.

Political scientists David Laitin and James Fearon, who examined all civil wars and insurgencies between 1945 and 1999, found that “financially, organizationally, and politically weak central governments render insurgency more feasible and attractive due to weak local policing or inept and corrupt counterinsurgency practices.”²⁸ Another study found that between 1816 and 1997, “effective bureaucratic and political systems reduced the rate of civil war activity.”²⁹

In many cases, weak governments have stemmed from the legacy of colonization, since most colonies of the post-World War II era were unprepared for independence when it arrived. The imperial powers put little thought or effort into establishing in their colonies domestic governance structures that could function on their own.³⁰ A few colonies, such as India and Sri Lanka, had been allowed a degree of self-government. But others, such as Somaliland, were little more than outposts. Somalia struggled with a weak state after its independence in 1960 and experienced several major insurgencies. The structural fragmentation of the Somali state was a relic of the circumstances of its independence, which required the unification of two separate colonial administrative structures. Each half of Somalia had its own judicial system, currency, administrative rules, taxation rates, accounting systems, and legal histories, which had to be unified into a single system.³¹ Somalia also faced a severe lack of resources. Scholar Patrick Brogan has written that Somalia confronted “a depressing future as a perpetually impoverished Third World country with very few natural resources, constantly burdened by drought and the refugees from Ethiopia.”³² Somalia’s security forces also lacked the capacity to contain conflict. Without a strong central state, the country reverted to its nineteenth-century condition—with no internationally recognized polity, no national administration exercising real authority, no formal legal system, no banking and insurance system, no police and public-security service, no electricity or piped-water system, and weak officials serving on a voluntary basis surrounded by violent bands of armed youths.³³

In the Philippines, the weak state under Ferdinand Marcos contributed to the insurgency beginning in 1972. The army was “rotten to the core” and rampantly corrupt.³⁴ Marcos himself was notorious for his graft. He dismantled the democratic structures bequeathed to the country by the United States and reduced an already-poor country to near-insolvency.³⁵ In Lebanon, a delicate sectarian balance led to the emergence of a weak state in the 1970s, which fueled competition among the three leading religious communities—the Maronites, Sunnis, and Shi’ites—triggering an insurgency that lasted from 1975 1991.³⁶

There are dozens of examples—from Bosnia and Georgia in Europe to Mozambique in Africa. In many cases, the states were so weak that they could not establish order in peripheral geographic areas. In each case, these gaps were filled by insurgents. In Cuba, Fidel Castro and his guerrillas used the Sierra Maestra Mountains as a base of support to train new recruits, rearm and regroup, and prepare for forays into the countryside.³⁷ Again, in Peru, Shining Path units formed in Ayacucho, a rural area that had historically received little government attention and control. In Ayacucho, a Peruvian newspaper editor said, “There are no liberated areas, only abandoned areas.”³⁸

In Congo, the insurgency that began in 1960 in Katanga Province was based on fundamental structural weaknesses inherited from Congo’s Belgian colonial legacy. To the degree that any state structure existed, it was “virtually improvis[ed] from scratch” and essentially a replica of the Belgian constitution that had been revised for the Congo only five months earlier.³⁹ The constitutional framework of the government collapsed less than three months after independence. When Angola became independent in 1975, it inherited a weak state structure that suffered from a lack of adequate governmental capacity, bureaucratic structures, and governmental experience. Nearly all of the skilled labor in the country was Portuguese, and 90 percent of the Portuguese fled the country before independence. This loss of skilled labor led to plummeting agricultural exports and the collapse of the service sector.⁴⁰ These structural weaknesses directly contributed to the rise of an insurgency.

The reverse is also true: strong governance can prevent insurgencies. There was a good possibility of an insurgency in Kenya in the 1980s because of intense ethnic antagonisms, electoral violence, and a coup attempt in August 1982. But the relative strength of the state helped avert major violence.⁴¹ Despite deep concerns about insurgencies arising in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were none. One factor was the rise of strong, though undemocratic, governments that were able to control their minority (and majority) populations.

Insurgent Motivations

If weak and ineffective governance served as a precondition, what motivated insurgent groups to fight? Some have argued that the ethnic grievances averted in some former Soviet republics were responsible for insurgent motivations. Ethnic ties, it is claimed, are stronger, more rigid, and more durable than the social ties in ordinary social or political groups.⁴² Consequently, ethnic combatants are more committed than other groups and less likely to make negotiated concessions. The Afghan insurgency seems to sustain the theory that ethnic violence is U-shaped. In other words, it is less likely to occur in highly homogeneous and highly heterogeneous countries and more likely in countries (such as Afghanistan) with an ethnic majority and numerous small ethnic minorities. ⁴³ In addition, hypernationalist rhetoric and real atrocities can harden identities to the point that cross-ethnic political appeals are unlikely to be made and even less likely to be heard. As a result, restoring civil politics in multiethnic states shattered by war is difficult because the war itself destroys the possibilities for cooperation.⁴⁴

Following the overthrow of the Taliban government in 2001, Afghanistan’s ethnic mix was approximately 50 percent Pashtun, with smaller percentages of Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and other ethnic groups.⁴⁵ Such diversity, this argument assumes, created competing ethnic power centers, even among Northern Alliance forces.⁴⁶ As early as 2001, the CIA had “detected serious rifts and competition between the Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks.” One assessment reported: “Afghanistan truly is a zero sum game. Anytime anyone advances all others consider this to be at their expense.”⁴⁷ Consequently, many have assumed that the insurgency was caused by interethnic grievances, especially among Afghanistan’s Pashtuns, who believed they were being marginalized by northern ethnic groups.⁴⁸ The United States and Afghan governments, according to Afghanistan expert Thomas H. Johnson, inevitably faced “an extremely difficult challenge of unifying a fragmented society and fostering the development of a national identity because each ethnic group [attempted] to gain a foothold in government often at the expense of other groups.” Since the “attempt at entering government is taken from an ethnic approach, rather than a national one, the fragmentation of society will continue until either one dominant ethnic group controls all of the governmental power or ethnic politics makes way for increased internal conflict.”⁴⁹

But there is little evidence to support this argument. The Taliban and its network were not motivated to fight because of ethnic concerns. Nor did the population support the Taliban and other groups because of ethnic ties. In fact, there were deep divisions among the Pashtun ethnic majority about the Taliban. The Taliban had support from a number of Pashtun Ghilzai tribes, as well as such Durrani tribes as the Nurzai and Ishaqzai in southern Afghanistan. But most Durrani Pashtuns did not support the Taliban, nor did a number of other eastern and southern Pashtun groups. Nor was ethnicity a major factor in how Afghans voted. Hamid Karzai won the 2004 presidential elections with support in Pashtun provinces as well as in non-Pashtun northern provinces such as Balkh and Kunduz.⁵⁰ In a 2004 Election Day survey during the presidential elections, only 2 percent of Afghans said they voted for a candidate based on ethnicity.⁵¹ In addition, public-opinion polls conducted in Afghanistan suggested that ethnic grievances were not a major concern of the Afghan population. An opinion poll conducted by the U.S. State Department, for example, found that most Hazaras, Pashtuns, Tajiks, and Uzbeks did not view ethnicity as a dividing factor. Instead, a large majority (85 percent) thought it was essential for Afghanistan to remain one nation. The data show that most Afghans did not see “their country headed toward an irresolvable ethnic clash” but rather endorsed a “unified, multi-ethnic state.”⁵² Other opinion polls found that most people identified themselves as Muslims and then Afghans, but rarely by ethnicity.⁵³

Even among disaffected Afghans most likely to support the Taliban, ethnicity does not seem to have been a major concern. In a 2004 public-opinion poll conducted by the Asia Foundation, for example, Afghans reported being most concerned about governance failures.⁵⁴ This finding was supported in later Asia Foundation polls.⁵⁵

Rather than exacerbating tensions, the Afghan government successfully balanced the country’s ethnic groups through representation in the national government. Even though Tajik and Uzbek military forces were the leaders in the victory over the Taliban in 2001, Afghan representatives at the December 2001 Bonn Conference chose Karzai, a Pashtun, as their interim leader. James Dobbins, the U.S. envoy at the Bonn Conference, recalled that negotiators made a concerted effort to compose “a balanced cabinet, balanced among political factions, ethnicities, and gender.”⁵⁶ Over the next several years, the U.S. government and President Karzai consciously worked to establish ethnic balance at the level of ministers and deputy ministers, who were ordered in turn to consider ethnic diversity when appointing governors and police chiefs.⁵⁷

Insurgent leaders were primarily motivated by religious ideology, rather than by ethnic grievances or profits from drugs or other commodities. An ideology is an organized collection of ideas—or, as the French Enlightenment philosopher Count Antoine Destutt de Tracy once noted, it is the “science of ideas.” For insurgents, an ideology provides a normative vision of how society should be structured, including its political system.⁵⁸

As has been noted, the Taliban were motivated by a radical interpretation of Sunni Islam derived from Deobandism. The leaders of most other insurgent groups—from the Haqqani network to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami, al Qa’ida, and Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammad—had strong religious motivations to fight. A Taliban field manual titled Military Teachings: For the Preparation of Mujahideen lucidly argued that “in a situation where infidels and their crooks are ruling the world, it is the prime duty of all the Muslims to take arms and crush those who are bent upon crushing the Muslims throughout the world…. This is the best time to take on the usurpers and occupants of our holy land.⁵⁹ Together, the leaders of these and other groups wanted to overthrow Hamid Karzai’s government and replace it with a regime that adopted their own extreme version of Sunni Islam.

In short, there was a supply of disgruntled locals because of the collapse of Afghan governance, and a demand for recruits by ideologically motivated insurgent leaders. This combination proved deadly for the beginning of Afghanistan’s insurgency. Over time, too little support to the government from the United States and its allies, and too much support to insurgents from outside states and the international jihadi community, contributed to these problems.

The Need for Effective Police

Each of these insurgencies, from the Philippines to Afghanistan, necessarily begs the question of who should have kept order in these countries in the first place. While military and paramilitary forces play a key role in maintaining safety and security for society, the police are perhaps the most critical component for ensuring the safety of the people. They are the government’s primary arm focused on internal-security matters. Unlike the military, the police usually have a permanent presence in cities, towns, and villages; a better understanding of the threat environment in these areas; and better intelligence. This, of course, makes them a direct target of insurgent forces, who often try to kill or infiltrate them.⁶⁰ Nevertheless, an effective police force is critical to establishing law and order. Government military forces may be able to penetrate and garrison an insurgent area and, if well sustained, may reduce guerrilla activity. But once the situation in an area becomes untenable for insurgents, they will simply transfer their activity to another area and the problem will remain unresolved.⁶¹ A viable indigenous police force with a permanent presence in urban and rural areas is a critical component of counterinsurgency.

Without a strong local police force, warlords and political entrepreneurs often flourish and finance their private militias through criminal activity, including trafficking in arms and drugs. Simple banditry—fueled by military desertion, the breakdown of social structures, and demobilization of government forces—may be endemic and crime will increase.⁶² In Afghanistan, too little outside support for the Afghan government and too much support for insurgents further undermined Afghan governance. This combination proved deadly for the onset—and continuation—of the insurgency. Among the first Afghan institutions to teeter, much like during the Soviet period, were the police and the other security services.