While most Afghanistan observers are looking to major operations in Marjah and Kandahar for signs of how President Obama's new counterinsurgency strategy is progressing, it is perhaps in the north that one should be looking to get a true sense of the war. Long neglected by both the media and coalition forces, there are new signs that the insurgency is spreading to these previously peaceful areas. The past few weeks have seen the murder of 10 medical aid workers in the northeastern province of Badahkshan, a largely quiet area until recently. The release of the Wikileaks data revealed a consistently growing number of attacks in the northern provinces. A recent UN report also showed an increasing number of civilian casualties throughout the country. While this is in itself unsurprising, the regional distribution of the deaths has been notable: While the south saw a 43 percent rise in civilian deaths, the southeast saw a 24 percent increase, and there was a massive 136 percent surge in the northeast. Afghan scholar Sippi Azarbaijani-Moghaddam further confirms this trend, citing sources who claimed the Taliban began to shift their strategic focus to the north at the end of 2006.
The spread of the insurgency to the north poses a conceptual paradox though: The Taliban are widely depicted as a Pashtun movement, yet these new fronts in the war are predominantly non-Pashtun areas. Contrary to the dominant perception, emerging evidence suggests the Taliban is not simply a Pashtun nationalist movement but something more pragmatic and flexible. Despite—or perhaps because of—its simplicity, the assumption that ethnicity or tribe determines one’s orientation in the conflict is false.
In their initial form, the Taliban were a primarily Pashtun movement arising from Pashtun areas. Their ethnic origins, however, didn’t prevent them from spreading across a diverse range of areas and allying with a number of non-Pashtun groups—even Shi’ite Hazaras in a few cases. The leadership of the early Taliban was also at times populated with Uzbeks and Tajiks.
After their removal from power, the Taliban have shown an even more refined ability to adapt. As various scholars have noted, with their ousting in 2001 the Taliban underwent a major shift in strategy, including a newfound appreciation for the media and propaganda, and an expanded knowledge of guerrilla tactics borrowed from Iraqi insurgents and other foreign advisors.
The question that arises from the new trends in the north is what can be inferred about this neo-Taliban? Organizationally, the pragmatism and flexibility of the Taliban structure should not be a surprise. Their command and control system is noted for the significant degree of autonomy given to local commanders. The Quetta Shura, headed by Mullah Omar, has had its greatest impact on day-to-day fighting through its financing of operations, rather than through its operational guidance. The result is that local commanders are free to buy, negotiate and fight for alliances at their own initiative, creating a shifting and often disparate set of actors.
The result of this loose command and control structure means that penetration into the northern provinces is easier than many think. The guiding principle for aligning with the Taliban has never been a desire for Pashtun nationalism—a motivation which appeals to relatively few. Rather, collaboration with the Taliban is a complex mix of seeking order, security, redress for grievances, elite greed and power struggles—factors which are not limited to the southern provinces.
In terms of ethnicity, the evidence from the north suggests that far from being a rigidly ideological movement, in fact, the Taliban are quite adept at employing local grievances for their own purposes. This is particularly the case from 2007 onwards, as Antonio Giustozzi has recently reported, with the Taliban making a number of inroads from Badghis to Badakhshan.
The importance of tribes therefore appears to lie less in their ethnic character—Pashtun or non-Pashtun—and more in their capacity to provide a preexisting network of personal relations through which mobilization can occur. Who a tribe or village or local authority allies with is determined less by rigid identity formations and more by local history and context. The crucial religious networks, in turn, operate as a trans-tribal network that brings together numerous madrasa students from all over. Again, ethnicity matters less here than the religious orientation of individuals.
The open question surrounding all this increased activity in the north is simply, what is the strategic rationale behind it? A number of explanations have been cited for this northern expansion, including a desire to spread out the insurgency and subsequently, coalition forces, and a desire to provide support to similar Islamist groups in Central Asia. With supply lines predominantly originating in Pakistani territories however, the difficulty in providing resources for their own struggle, let alone for other Central Asian states, makes the latter seem unlikely. The former strategy, as an attempt to develop national distribution in preparation for the withdrawal of the coalition forces, appears more in line with the evidence.
In achieving this goal, the Taliban has typically followed a three-stage process to control an area. First, a propaganda party is sent out to sway local opinions, establish contacts and intimidate officials. Second, small armed-groups move in or are mobilized from the nearby population, initiating a stage of intimidation and violence against local security forces. Finally, if successful in the previous stages, the Taliban begins to setup a functional administration of courts, taxes and governors.
If this model holds for the northern provinces as well, the increased number of attacks suggest that the Taliban has already shifted to the second stage. As Gilles Dorronsoro has noted, the north has recently seen increased sophistication in attacks as well, including coordinated attacks against police posts. Such sophistication suggests that the Taliban may be well entrenched already, and seeking to expand even further into the north.
The spread into the north raises important questions about the future of the conflict. With the International Security Assistance Forces’ (ISAF) attention turned to the south, one risk is that the current coalition strategy is repeating the early mistakes of the war. At that time, the insurgency was sidelined and proper government structures could be established relatively easily, yet the coalition forces looked the other way (westward, to Iraq) and ignored the opportunity. Similarly, a one-sided focus on the south today leaves the north open to mobilization that will make it increasingly difficult to stabilize in the future.
This is particularly alarming due to the presence of a number of dormant mujahideen (Muslim fighters) and warlord networks in the north. Their allying with the Taliban may help them expel coalition forces, but at the long-term risk of strengthening armed groups and producing numerous decentralized commanders in a tension-filled environment.
This leads to the major danger in ignoring the north. With coalition forces looking to begin a drawdown in 2011, attention must be given to the future of Afghanistan. The rising levels of violence in the north are already signaling the increased organization of armed groups in these areas. In addition, the disproportionate resources (both in terms of aid and political power) dispensed to the south and the east is capable of furthering resentment in the ignored areas. The key threat is that while the Taliban may succeed in mobilizing disparate groups to fight against coalition forces, their very reliance on decentralized organization for this success will make it impossible to control that network afterwards. The fragile web of Taliban affiliates already bends and fractures frequently, exposing the limits of centralized governance in the present day. As Abdulkader Sinno has argued, this type of fragility among the mujahideen was one of the primary reasons why the Najibullah regime was able to survive (to everyone’s surprise) three years after the Soviet withdrawal, and one of the primary reasons why the Taliban were able to sweep to power in 1996. Yet, this post-Soviet period also saw a full-blown civil war, which should be foremost in the minds of any policymaker. With a number of armed groups mobilized and with none of them strong enough to maintain centralized power, the conditions for a similar catastrophe may already be emerging.
Nick Srnicek - Independent researcher based in London. He has written for a number of publications and is a co-editor of The Speculative Turn (Re.press, 2010).
