Afghanistan: The Use and Abuse of a Buffer State Part 1

Note: This is the first part of a two-part article. The second half will appear in the February 2009 issue of the GC Advocate.

I

I will begin with a story that I hope casts some light on why and how the US occupation of Afghanistan is failing.

I was with my friend and interpreter Ajmal Nakshbandi. We were on the Shomali Plain just north of Kabul, near Bagram airbase, interviewing a former mujahideen commander who had served with the legendary Ahmed Shah Masud. The old commander was now part of an underground paramilitary network of veteran Tajik mujahideen who were organizing for what they saw as the coming ethnic civil war of all against all others.

What hit me was his description of the foreign troops in his area. He called them Americans. But I had recently been embedded with Americans just to the north. I learned from them that this part of the valley was not under American watch. I asked the old commander if he was sure the troops were American or if they might be from another country. This is easy to discern, because each NATO force has different flags and insignia, and many have distinctively different vehicles. I was interested in where the troops were from, because there is much debate about the different tactics of each NATO force. The Americans are known to be aggressive; others, like the Dutch and British, are seen as more sophisticated with subtler, softer, more effective tactics; still others, like the Italians and Germans, seem to have no tactics at all, and just stay out of the way of the otherwise irritable, often violent locals. These subtle differences loom large in the imagination of internationals working in Afghanistan; from the NGO offices and cocktail parties of Kabul it can appear that the whole conflict hinges on tactics.

Annoyed at my question the old commander answered: “We see their vehicles driving around and we don’t know who they are. We just know they are foreign.”

I left the interview recalling Louis Dupree’s concept of “the mud curtain.” For decades Dupree was the leading area studies specialist on Afghanistan; by the “mud curtain” he referred to Afghanistan’s deep cultural divide between urban and rural society. The Afghan landscape, worked by the human hands, is hemmed in by the adobe walls that surround orchards and animal pens and form the defensive enclosures of family compounds, or Qalas. The “mud curtain” invokes these walls, the barrier between the enclosed families and everyone else on the other side. The idea aptly invokes the landscape created by the Afghan interpretation of purdah—the Muslim injunction to protect and shield women. The mud curtain is the built environment’s equivalent of the burqa. The old commander’s comments invoked the fact that from the other side of the mud curtain, the rural side, this foreign military occupation looks quite a lot like the last one. In other words, for the tribesmen who support the Taliban, and supported the mujahideen in times past, the US-led NATO occupation looks quite similar to the Soviet occupation.

Last time, the foreigners who drove around in armored vehicles called their project socialism and talked about economic rights. This time, the foreigners in armored vehicles call it democracy and talk about human rights. But from the other side of the mud curtain it all looks the same: some promise of material benefits like roads and schools and clinics, but attached to that are the foreign troops in armored vehicles, searching homes, entering the women’s quarters, taking prisoners, and urging the local landlord class who grow opium and tax the tenant farmers to change their ways.

And—quite offensive to old patriarchs like the commander—the foreigners and their allies in Kabul demand that girls and boys go to school together and encourage women to work outside the home, often alongside men to whom they are not related, their faces exposed! In general, the foreigners are seen as arrogant and scolding; demeaning “the culture” and “the religion.” In short, this occupation looks like cultural revolution from above, backed up by alien firepower. And that’s what the last occupation looked like. In both cases, the cultural mores of the deeply conservative, religious Afghan countryside were assaulted head on. The reaction then, as now, was widespread and bloody resistance.

Because rural Afghans, particularly the Pashtuns of the south, see their local tribal culture as largely synonymous with their religion, Islam, an assault on one is an assault on the other. And so, their local war lends itself to larger uses as one of many jihads, and thus as part of the Global War on Terror. Olivier Roy noted this political concatenation in his book, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan.

II

Why did the United States invade Afghanistan? One answer is: to defend itself, or maybe just to avenge the attacks of 9/11. But this, perhaps legitimate, casus belli begins to lose some of its integrity upon closer examination.

First of all, the terrorism of 9/11 was a classic case of “blow back.” The rise of al Qaeda and its later entrenchment in the Taliban’s “Emirate of Afghanistan” were the direct, if unintended, products of US covert operations. During the 1980s the United States and Saudi Arabia funneled about $8 billion through the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) to the seven main Afghan mujahideen parties fighting the Russians and Afghan communist government. Without this flow of US and Saudi money, coupled with on-the-ground Pakistani support, the war against the Soviets would have never been as bloody.

As part of this jihad pipeline of money arms and volunteers, the young Osama Bin Laden came to Afghanistan and set up his network of so-called “Arab Afghans,” which became al Qaeda. Then, after almost a decade of funding terrorism in Afghanistan, the United States walked away, and the victorious mujahideen set upon each other in a horrific civil war that destroyed half of Kabul. From that chaos emerged the Taliban. At first they were a Robin Hood-like militia, which despite many faults imposed a form of law and order on an otherwise viciously lawless land. By the late 1990s the Taliban controlled most of Afghanistan and gave sanctuary to Bin Laden, who had recently been chased from Sudan. In response to US troops stationed in Mecca and Medina, Bin Laden destroyed the twin towers.

The United States also helped to arm and fund Islamist political parties that later became part of regional terrorist networks and are now killing American soldiers. Hezb-i-Islami, led by Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, is the best (or worst) example of this. During the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, Hekmatyar was one of the US-Saudi-ISI pipeline’s favorite commanders. Today this powerful Pashtun leader from eastern Afghanistan is now more or less allied with the resurgent Taliban. American aid to the mujahideen, which was then followed by withdrawal from the region, played a role in creating the context of crisis and social breakdown that allowed those Islamic guerilla movements to metastasize into the Taliban, Hezb-i-Islami, and al Qaeda. That’s just a quick reminder of the deeper history of US involvement that was sometimes passive, sometimes active.

But there is a less attenuated, probably more pertinent critique of US failure in Afghanistan. If we look closely at how the Bush administration invaded, we learn much about why they invaded. Here are a few facts:

In February 2001, at one of Bush’s first cabinet meetings, “regime change” in Iraq was laid out as a goal.

In the first days after the 9/11 attacks, Paul Wolfowitz, then under secretary of defense, suggested skipping an invasion of Afghanistan (from which al Qaedalaunched its attacks) and going straight into Iraq. This proposal was seriously considered!

Just after the fall of the Taliban, Bush pledged $4 billion in reconstruction aid. But in February 2003—one year into the Afghan occupation and a month before the Iraq invasion—in what was described as “a stunning oversight,” Bush’s proposed federal budget forgot to include money for Afghan reconstitution.

After that, President Hamid Karzai came to Washington pleading to congress “Don’t forget us if Iraq happens.” Congress hastily penciled in $295 million, which was only $5 million less than the Bush administration requested the year before for “the promotion of marriage and strong families.” Only one year into the occupation, Afghanistan was already a distant memory or an annoying after thought. The fact that Wolfowitz actually suggested skipping Afghanistan reveals that country’s place in American politics. The suggestion horrified people like Richard A. Clarke, the president’s special advisor on counter terrorism, who reported the event in his 2004 memoir, Against All Enemies. Clarke also writes that the President demanded that he “go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. . . . Just look. I want to know any shred.”

In other words, Afghanistan is hostage to the administration’s Iraq mania, but the fantasy of skipping Afghanistan was shelved because invading Iraq without first hitting Afghanistan would have strained credibility; it would have been politically untenable; it would have been to blatantly ignore the reality of Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda. Without the “good war” in Afghanistan, “the coalition of the willing” would have been very small indeed.

Why the Iraq obsession? Pick your preferred package of combined reasons. Some sought to create a model pro-US Arab state (that’s not to be confused with creating a democracy). As we’ve seen from all the economic laws imposed by the occupation, the United States sought to create a radically free-market client state: a client state that would check the regional power of Iran. Transforming Iraq would wipe out the heart of Arab nationalism and improve Israel’s long-term position. Some believed all of this would transform the whole Middle East. And, crucially, the administration, populated by oilmen, sought to establish US control over the world’s main sources of oil. In the best case, they would control the oil industry; less optimally they would have broader participation in it. (The United States has pushed an oil law that would allow US petroleum firms full access to Iraqi oil, reaping potentially great power and profit, but Iraq’s Shiite government has resisted it.) Geostrategically, if the Americanmilitary plays the role of Middle Eastern petroleum gendarmerie, Washington has leverage over the states in the European Union and in Asia that are most dependent on that oil.

Here’s what Wolfowitz wrote in The National Interest, Spring 1994:

The United States and the entire industrialized world have an enormous stake in the security of the Persian Gulf, not primarily in order to save a few dollars per gallon of gasoline but rather because a hostile regime in control of those resources could wreak untold damage on the world’s economy. . . . Given this permanent stake in the security of the Persian Gulf, the Gulf War provided an opportunity to base security on a foundation of credible commitment by the United States and its coalition partners.

III

The Iraq war has many concomitant causes, propelled by distinct but mutually reinforcing economic and political interests. Among those interests are the following.

Private contractors, who are making out very well. Recall the Halliburton story. Cheney is the firm’s president. He buys a company called Dresser Industries. Unfortunately for him, the new acquisition came with $4 billion in outstanding liabilities due to asbestos law suits. Without its government contracts, Halliburton, which is now profitable, would be in the red.

Weapons manufacturers. For 2007, the US military budget was $532.8 billion. Typically, the US military budget is designed to hide the pork. But a study of the previous year’s budget, which was $445 billion, not including supplementals, found that this “war budget” wasn’t actually driven by the needs of the Iraq and Afghan wars. The budget included $79 billion for high-tech weapons that have little to do with Iraqi an Afghan counterinsurgency. Another $69 billion went to research and development. This is essentially free money for Lockheed Martin and the other great aerospace and military firms. The spectacle of the war in Iraq, and the legitimacy lent to it by Afghanistan, means that few in the political class question the military budget. In this analysis, US soldiers in the field appear as hostages.

Oil firms. The oil majors do not control Iraq’s oil and the Iraqi oil sector is in deep crisis, but companies like ExxonMobil have been, up until recently, doing fine due to high prices, a condition resulting to some extent from the crisis of the war. For three years running, ExxonMobil has cleared record profits: $39 billion in 2006, $36 billion in 2005, and $25 billion in 2004.

Neo-conservatives. Hard right elements of the political class are attached to the two wars for reasons of grand strategy. The early success of the Afghanistan invasion served as a media spectacle with which Donald Rumsfeld sought to justify the larger project of “military transformation.” The project of transformation is linked to the neoconservative project of reinvigorated American imperialism in the face of a rising China and India. Even before 9/11 there was much frenzied talk about the newest high-tech military methodologies of empire.

At the heart of the discussion was the question of replacing military labor—that is, soldiers and politically problematic US casualties—with technology, capital, or “dead labor.” These efforts to re-make the US military into a totally invincible superforce are known among defense geeks and pentagon apparatchiks as the “Revolution in Military Affairs” or simply “Transformation.” The reason to have an unbeatable military should be obvious: it seems to allow for continued world domination by the United States.

Rumsfeld’s theory of light, fast warfare was part of this, and the invasion of Afghanistan was used to justify this theory of “war made easy and cheap.” The easy Afghan victory was then used to sell the invasion of Iraq. But that theory of warfare meant very few troops in Afghanistan during the crucial honeymoon period when a new state was being established. During the first two years of the occupation there were only 9,000 US troops on the ground. The Pentagon’s “tooth to tail” ratio being what it is, that meant there was rarely more that a battalion (800 to 900 US soldiers) actually in the field at any one time. Ultimately, the early occupation was more accurately “a big manhunt.” (Recall that critics of the war had suggested that, instead of an invasion, an international police action—a manhunt for Osama—would have been acceptable.)

IV

So that is some of why they went in and why they went to Iraq. But how did they go in? The administration’s underlying desire to take Iraq also had negative impacts on the political process in Afghanistan. The rush to Iraq translated into a rushed Afghan political process.

The 2001 Bonn Process called for meeting a series of “milestones” on the path to building a new Afghan state. Most notably there was the loya jirga, creation of a new constitution, the presidential elections, and the parliamentary elections. But all of these deadlines were rushed—some were suspiciously timed to anticipated US electoral cycles in ways convenient to the GOP. For example, the much publicized presidential election was in October 2004, just before the US presidential elections.

Rushing the political reconstruction process misshaped the government of Afghanistan. The main problem was that the warlords of the Northern Alliance, many of the old mujahideen, were allowed to entrench themselves deep in the Afghan state. After using the Northern Alliance in the invasion, the United States had the opportunity to thank them for their services and dismiss them. A mystique surrounded US power in those early days; some have called it “the B-52 effect”: the warlords had seen such a shocking and awesome spectacle of violence unleashed from the sky that they were, by all accounts, cowed and ready for instructions.

Instead of being sent home to be mere landlord thugs, the United States invited the warlords into the government; this deeply dismayed the many capable, often politically progressive, Afghan exiles who had returned to help rebuild their country. (There are even several prominent former communists in the parliament, as well as liberals and technocrats, all of whom really want stability and development.) Creating a warlord government, however, was the quickest way to create short-term stability; and “success” in Afghanistan was the quickest way to Iraq.

With warlords running the government, a number of subsequent problems followed: corruption and drug dealing became part of the state’s activities and undermined development. Now, stunningly corrupt warlords—like Rashid Dostum, Abu Sayaff, and Mohammad Mohaqeq—bathe in the flow of drug lucre and aid money.

As a result, Afghanistan is totally dependent on foreign aid, opium poppy cultivation, and remittances sent home by the five million Afghans living abroad. Since late 2001 the international community has spent $8 billion dollars on emergency aid and reconstruction in Afghanistan. But corruption has absorbed much of that.

According to Jean Mazurelle, the World Bank director in Afghanistan, “the wastage of aid is sky-high: there is real looting going on, mainly by private enterprises. It is a scandal.” He has estimated that 35–40 percent of Afghan aid is “badly spent.”

Most of the incoming money is spent by donor nations, either through the United Nations, NGOs, or private firms; only about one-quarter of the money goes through the Afghan government. President Karzai has called for that amount to increase. But giving more money to the government of Afghanistan won’t help. The state is a ramshackle collection of 32 redundant and almost totally dysfunctional ministries that operate as little more than patronage, employment, and shakedown schemes. Wages are low, but the number of people employed is enormous. The Ministry of Communications has almost as many employees as the BBC—a massive polyglot, global operation. A big state sector would be fine if it worked, but in Afghanistan nothing gets done. At the Afghan national airline, Aryana (known among its customers as Scareyana), the latest chief decided to pay many of his employees not to come to work. It was a desperate attempt to keep the unqualified riffraff away from the jets.

In some areas police are said to buy their jobs, not because they so covet the paltry $50 to $100 a month salaries they receive, but for the opportunity to “tax” business and traffic at the district level.

And what of the official anti-corruption campaign? Alas its leader, Afghanistan’s chief anti-corruption officer, is Izzatullah Wasifi, who served nearly four years in a US prison for trying to sell $65,000 worth of heroin to an undercover agent in Las Vegas back in the 1980s. The Afghan government is so graft-ridden that there is actually inter-ministerial bribery. A friend of mine who worked at the Ministry of Women’s Affairs told me that his office had to bribe the Ministry of Transportation to get license plates for their vehicles.

In other words, the Afghan state is totally dysfunctional. It is essentially a hollow vessel, in which patrimonial patronage networks use nominally public goods as private resources. In the worst cases, the shell of a state houses violent, corrupt organized crime networks.

What little reconstruction is underway is almost always done directly by NGOs or by private companies contracted directly by donor nations. Afghanistan’s internal markets are so entirely dominated by Pakistan, Iran, and China that even two-thirds of all the wool used in weaving Afghan carpets is imported! War has decimated Afghan sheep herds that badly.

Stalled development leads to rising frustration, and this leads to continued instability and a growing insurgency. As for economic development, the Bush administration’s commitment to a new Afghanistan was insufficient and marked by the same type of foot dragging and corruption that has defined contracting in Iraq. Instead of Halliburton and Bechtel, in Afghanistan we have Louis Berger as the lead firm, getting the poorly monitored sweetheart projects and being accused of shoddy work. The chairman of Louis Berger, Derish M. Wolff, has close GOP ties and was appointed to the State Department’s industry advisory panel in December 2001.

To summarize: the administration rushed to Iraq, using Afghanistan as a trampoline, or as a type of “buffer story.” To make Afghanistan look like a success the political process was badly rushed. This allowed the warlord class to capture the state and then ransom the national economy and political situation. Thus Afghanistan once again plays a version of its traditional role as a buffer state. Recall that in the Great Game of the past, it was the place where Russia faced off against Britain; then it was where the United States faced off with the USSR. By the 1980s the socialist East and capitalist West clashed in Afghanistan with arms, but earlier they had tangled there via a “soft power” conflict of competing aid flows.

Now Afghanistan is again a “buffer state” but in an ideological sense, rather than a geographic one. It is the seemingly “legitimate” defensive war that politically buffers the illegitimate, clearly illegal one in Iraq. Afghanistan provides the legitimizing narrative, the buffer story, rather than a buffer geography.

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