In small mountain villages on Taliban turf in eastern Afghanistan, Pashtun tribesmen took up arms to fight the insurgents this summer, fed up with their heavy-handed tactics of closing schools and threatening families whose sons had joined the Afghan Army.
“They wanted to make our children illiterate and miserable,” Malik Ghulam Rusal, a district elder, said about the Taliban. “We told them that if you want to wage jihad, go and fight the foreigners, not ordinary people. But they did not listen.”
What began as a ragtag uprising by rural woodcutters and shopkeepers in a few villages in Laghman Province expanded into something extraordinary: in just the past two months, the Taliban presence in the entire district, and then in a neighboring one, has been largely silenced. And in another eastern province, Ghazni, villagers ignited a similar movement to drive the Taliban away.
The uprisings, however, are far from a simple case of outrage growing into action. They spread quickly, but in considerable part because commanders from a rival militant faction, Hezb-i-Islami, saw a chance to gain ground against the Taliban, and because Afghan government officials saw the movement as a valuable opportunity to help local leaders organize against the insurgents.
For close watchers of Afghanistan’s complex factional landscape, the movement has become another case study of a classic Afghan problem that directly challenges the Western goal of a stable country after the 2014 troop withdrawal: a threat posed by an armed group is answered by arming another group, which in turn becomes a game piece to be fought over by larger forces.
“Now it’s a bit of a mess,” said one Western diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It started as an anti-Taliban type thing, then Hezb-i-Islami moved in, then the government and the N.D.S. got involved and there are lots of different players, and that makes the people who started the whole thing suspicious.”
The N.D.S. is the National Directorate of Security, the main Afghan spy agency.
At its heart, the uprising in the Laghman villages began not because of support for the government, or even because of hatred of the Taliban as a whole, but because the wrong Taliban had come to power: Locals like Ghulam Rusal say they resented the more extreme religious teachings and draconian enforcement by militants who had come from far-off provinces and from Pakistan.
Similar resentment factored in the uprising in Ghazni Province this summer. There, in an area that has been locked under Taliban control for at least three years, the uprising started when a couple of Taliban with roots in the local community split off from the others and began to form completely indigenous groups to oppose control by what they saw as foreign Taliban leaders. Now at least 40 villages in Ghazni’s Andar district have broken away from the mainstream Taliban, though small-scale shootings still occur at times, according to local commanders and residents.
Such local resentment presented fertile opportunities for both Hezb-i-Islami and government officials.
For Hezb-i-Islami, it was a continuation of an on-and-off battle with the Taliban for dominance. The group is part militant faction, part legitimate political party — one wing fights both the Afghan government and the Taliban, another takes part in the national government based in Kabul.
Though Hezb-i-Islami is rooted in a conservative Islamist worldview, it is seen as generally less rigid than the Taliban, allowing girls to attend school and permitting some other aspects of modern life. In any possible future reconciliation with the insurgency, the faction most likely to engage in a peace deal would be Hezb-i-Islami, former Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker said in a recent interview. In that light, both the Afghan government and the Americans are inclined to support the group’s fight against the Taliban.
In both Ghazni and Laghman, there is a long history of deep aversion to the Kabul government, as well as a sense of hurt: many feel abandoned by the government and only reluctantly turned to the Taliban. That is true even of Hezb-i-Islami fighters who live in those areas, said Abdul Jabar Shilgari, a former Parliament member from Ghazni who is a member of the Hezb-i-Islami party.
“The people there did not have any thought of coming over to the government, because they were fed up with the government,” Mr. Shilgari said. “But that was not a logical thought on their part — we knew they couldn’t stand up to the Taliban for long.”
Hezb-i-Islami activated former commanders and sent them into the fight with rifles and ammunition, and with orders to make more contacts and expand the effort, members of the group said.
For the government, it has been a chance to try to encourage local forces to organize against the Taliban.
In Laghman, the governor, Mohammed Iqbal Azizi, said the government had given mostly food and ammunition to the fighters, but only relatively small quantities of ammunition.
The man bearing the government’s standard in the Ghazni uprising is Asadullah Khalid, the minister of tribal and border affairs, a confidant of President Hamid Karzai’s, a Ghazni native as well as a former governor of the province. Although he is a charismatic, implacable foe of the Taliban, locals in Ghazni say they have mixed feelings about his involvement, and many see him as corrupt. He was dismissed in 2008 from his position as Kandahar governor after allegations of corruption and human-rights abuses.
“I am leading this in part because I am a son of Ghazni, and because I am a minister of tribal affairs and there are tribes living in Ghazni,” Mr. Khalid said during a recent interview in his Kabul office. “Ghazni and the south of Afghanistan are burning in the same fire — you cannot talk with the Taliban, you have to be their slave or fight with them.”
He has brought both government money and local allies into the Ghazni fight. But there has been controversy, too: at least three commanders and several local officials say that he has distributed large amounts of cash — perhaps as much as $200,000, they say — to just a few close allies, and very little has made it to individual fighters.
“We have heard many complaints from local uprising commanders that thousands of dollars have come from the minister of tribal and border affairs, but the commanders are only receiving 4,000 Pakistani rupees” — roughly $42 — “for each fighter,” said Sher Khan, the district governor of Andar in Ghazni Province.
Mr. Khalid denies those accusations. “I wish I had $200,000, but all we could do was help some of the martyrs’ families,” he said.
Locals also complained about the men Mr. Khalid had brought to run the uprising, who, while from Ghazni, were not part of the early days of fighting. They said that the National Directorate of Security was involved in supplying money and ammunition — and that suspicion has brought concerns that the United States, which helps support the N.D.S., may be getting involved, too.
American diplomats and NATO military officials have welcomed the developments in Laghman and Ghazni, although diplomats especially have been careful to keep their comments spare in part, it seems, to avoid raising hopes given all the uncertainties of local politics here.
“What I hope happens is that the local people will decide they have had enough and will act to get the Taliban out of their villages,” the new ambassador, James B. Cunningham, said at a recent news conference. “Whether that will happen or not, I don’t know, but hope that it would.”
Although locals may want to keep control of the movement, it is unlikely that the movement could spread without help from the government, local officials say, because the fighters have insufficient arms and resources to take on the Taliban for a sustained period.
Even given that, though, the officials are uneasy about the Afghan government’s growing involvement and worry aloud that it may drive people away rather than encourage more confidence.
“We are tired of the government’s corruption, and we are tired of the Taliban’s tortures,” said Juma Khan, 50, a commander from the Ghazni village of Omarzai, who takes exception to the commanders Mr. Khalid has backed.
“We don’t want anyone here, just leave us the way we are and let us fight for our people ourselves,” he said. “Now they are trying to change this into a national uprising and into a business and these corrupt officials are trying to make money from it, not to help the people.”
No comments:
Post a Comment