anthropology

NAZIF M SHAHRAN

In Focus: September 11, 2001

War, Factionalism, and the State in Afghanistan

ABSTRACT Since September 11, 2001, the explanations offered to account for the rise of a foreign-led terrorist network on Afghan

soil have variously focused on the political vacuum opened up by the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989, interfer-

ence by foreign powers in Afghanistan's internal affairs, the failure of Afghanistan to produce a "strong state" because of ethnic fac-

tionalism, and an internal moral incoherence inherent to Afghan culture. I argue that none of these explanations is entirely satisfactory

in itself. To understand the situation in Afghanistan, we must recognize that its political and military chaos is not an isolated or unique

phenomenon, and at the same time acknowledge the particular social and political dynamics of Afghanistan's history that have set the

parameters for current events. I show that communal conflicts in Afghanistan are part of a much wider affliction common to many

postcolonial states and multinational societies, and that Afghanistan's current situation can only be understood by focusing on its

failed attempts at nation-state building within the broader geopolitical circumstance of foreign manipulation and proxy wars that have

given rise to particular forms of ethnic division. [Keywords: Afghanistan, nation-building, ethnic factionalism, warfare, the State]

AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

FOLLOWING THE TRAGIC ATTACKS in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, people in the United States, shocked and in disbe- lief, wondered who had committed such acts and why. When U.S. government authorities cautiously revealed the identities of the alleged perpetrators to be members of the al-Qaeda terrorist network, believed to be led by the Saudi Arabian national Osama bin Laden, with headquarters in Taliban-held Afghanistan, everyone wanted to know the facts about the Taliban: Where did they come from? What internal and external forces created and supported them? What brand of Islam were they brandishing? What was the relationship between the al-Qaeda terrorists and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan?

Those of us concerned with the long-term study of the more than two-decades-long conflict in Afghanistan were not at all surprised by the links between the alleged perpe- trators of these horrors on U.S. soil and those who had been waging terrorist wars for the previous five years against a large segment of the Muslim peoples of Afghani- stan. Indeed, we were appalled by the lack of international concern prior to September 11 for the plight of the victims of Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorist wars in many parts of Af- ghanistan (see Maley 1998; Rashid 2000; and Shahrani

1998, 2000a, 2000b). Contrary to the assumptions of the advocates of the "clashes of civilizations" thesis that would blame all of Afghan "culture" for what had happened, we knew that the inhabitants of the western, central, and northern parts of Muslim Afghanistan who did not belong to the ethnic-linguistic and sectarian community of the Taliban, as well as all Afghan women and girls, had them- selves been the targets of a systematic and sustained terror campaign in the name of Islam by the extremist Taliban movement and their international terrorist allies since 1995.

Although the answers to even the most basic ques- tions about the Taliban were largely unknown before Sep- tember 11, it was not long before even more complicated ones were raised: Why and how did Afghanistan become the safe heaven for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups? What explained the meteoric rise of the Taliban as an ex- tremist Muslim militia movement in post-Soviet Afghani- stan? Why and how did the mujahiiieen fighters in Afghan- istan fail so miserably to form a workable national governance structure after successfully fighting the former Soviet occu- pation forces and their puppet communist regimes? How had the long-established, ideologically organized muja- hideen parties lost their political significance, giving way to intense intercommunal proxy wars fought by coalitions of tribal, regional, and ethnolinguistic-sectarian forces, fi- nanced and managed by foreign powers? What in the history

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of Afghanistan and its political culture provided the space for the rise of such an extremely harsh and violent mili- tant movement at the dawn of the 21st century? Was this an expected manifestation of recognizable historical pat- terns in the country? or was it an aberration and a product of novel circumstances of post-jihad Afghanistan?

FROM HOLY WAR TO HOLY TERROR

One way to begin to answer some of these questions is to focus on the transition in Afghanistan from military suc- cesses following the Soviet withdrawal to political disas- ters, or as Olivier Roy has put it, "From Holy War to Civil War" (1995). The explanations offered have focused on the role of outside forces especially following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989; the effects of med- dling by outside powers (both governmental and nongov- ernmental) in a fragile multinational state; and the presence of deeply contradictory moral codes within the Afghan political culture.

International security experts, Zalmay Khalilzad and Daniel Byman,1 provide an example of the first type of ex- planation. They assert that,

As the United States departed [after the withdrawal of So- viet Red Army from Afghanistan], a vicious civil war spread throughout the country. Once the Soviet-backed regime fell, war, anarchy and fragmentation followed. The conflict became increasingly one of ethnic and sectar- ian groups, particularly Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and the Shiah Hazaras. . . . The war also became a proxy war be- tween Iran and Pakistan, with each power backing differ- ent factions. [Khalilzad and Byman 2000:67; also see Khalilzad et al. 1999]2

The role of outside powers and foreign forces in the fac- tional wars of the post-jihad period (1992 to the present) is undeniable and fully documented (Maley 1998; Rashid 2000).

Afghan leaders also look to external factors for an ex- planation for Afghanistan's current crisis (with, I hasten to say, considerable justification). They blame foreign con- spiracies against Afghanistan for the country's internal po- litical chaos. This explanation suggests that foreign pow- ers (governments both near and far and, more recently, multinational corporations such as Unocal of California, Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia, and Bridas of Argentina) have tried to undermine the gains of a militarily successful ji- had and Islamic revolution, and have interfered directly in the country's internal affairs in order to further their own policy goals in the region by financing and managing proxy wars.

Other international relations and regional security ex- perts (e.g., Goodson 2001; Rubin 1995) explain the chaos in Afghanistan by invoking the notion of a "weak/failed state syndrome." According to Goodson, for example, Afghani- stan

is an extremely weak state, almost the archetypal o n e , m a d e all t h e weaker by . . years of war. [It] . . . is t h e axle o n which several regions swivel [especially t h e relatively weak post-Soviet Central Asian Muslim states]. [ I t ] . . . also

borders on or is influenced by several [competing] re- gional powers [some of t h e m with nuclear capabilities such as Russia, China, India, and Pakistan, as well as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey]. Finally, Afghanistan has been the on-again, off-again recipient of superpower and inter- national attention and manipulation, which has contrib- uted t o its weakening. [2001:12]

For Goodson, states that have failed to build strong centralized government with capabilities "to penetrate so- ciety, regulate social relationships, extract resources, and appropriate or use resources" are weak states that pose seri- ous threats to the international order in the new millen- nium (Migdal 1988:4, in Goodson 2001:11). Certain un- changing "political, social, economic, demographic, and even geographic" (Goodson 2001:11) factors in such soci- eties are implicated in hampering attempts to build strong and stable centralized state institutions. In Afghanistan, one such factor is said to be the existence of many quarrel- some ethnic, tribal, and religious-sectarian communities that occupy rough mountainous terrain, jealously guard- ing their communal autonomy. These fragmentary con- stituencies of a weak state are allegedly prone to resorting to violence for resolving interpersonal and intercommu- nal problems.3 They are also thought to be susceptible to manipulations by meddling outside powers, which may account for the ultimate failure of the weak Afghan state.

A final, and more novel, explanation for the predica- ment of the peoples of Afghanistan is offered by David Edwards (1996). He suggests a cultural thesis in which Af- ghanistan's political chaos is seen to derive "less from divi- sions between ethnic and religious-sectarian groups or from the ambitions of particular individuals than they do from the moral incoherence of Afghanistan itself" (1996:3). According to Edwards, this moral incoherence is the prod- uct of the conjunction of three contradictory and incom- patible moral systems or codes that undergird Afghan po- litical culture: the ultraindividualistic codes of honor (natig), the universalist moral system of Islam, and the codes of monarchical state rule.

None of these explanations is entirely satisfactory in itself. To understand the current situation in Afghanistan, we must at once recognize that its political and military chaos is not an isolated or unique phenomenon, and at the same time acknowledge the particular social and po- litical dynamics of Afghanistan's history that have set the parameters for current events. This involves recognizing that internal communal conflicts in Afghanistan are part of a much wider affliction common to many postcolonial (and now post-Soviet) states and multinational societies, especially smaller and poorer ones, which have found themselves in a geostrategic location within the post-Soviet, unipolar New World Order. Thus, Afghanistan's current, complicated situation can only be understood by focusing on its failed attempts at nation-state building within the broader geopolitical circumstance of foreign manipulation and proxy wars that have given rise to particular forms of ethnic factionalism.

Shahrani • War, Factionalism, and the State in Afghanistan 717

NATION-STATE BUILDING AND SOCIAL FRAGMENTATION

The failure of Afghan governments to achieve their goal of building a strong, sovereign, centralized, and unified nation- state is generally justified and explained by government officials and researchers alike by pointing to intrinsic fac- tors such as the conflictual and fragmentary character of Afghan society. The country's difficult topography, eth- nolinguistic and religious-sectarian cleavages, and tribal loyalties are all cited as contributing factors. From this per- spective, the problems of state building are safely severed from the larger economic and political context of which they are a part, and Afghan citizens themselves are blamed for their troubles.

The geophysical characteristics of Afghanistan and the sociocultural and social structural heterogeneity of Af- ghan society have played some part in affecting the proc- esses of state building in the country. However, the trans- formations of existing sociocultural pluralism into articulated forms of social structural fragmentation along ethnic, religious-sectarian, regional, and tribal parame- ters, I argue here, can be understood as calculated re- sponses to the imposition of an utterly inappropriate model of a "modern" nation-state governance structure with its discriminatory policies and practices in Afghani- stan. As we will see, it was the incessantly centralizing state policies and practices of internal colonialism, gener- ally aided and abetted by old colonialist powers, which produced a cumulatively negative impact on state-build- ing efforts in Afghanistan.

SOCIAL IDENTITY AND GOVERNANCE

Ethnicity and kinship, which are expressed linguistically through the same terms, qawm (people, tribe, commu- nity), wulus (nation, tribe, relatives), and tyfah (clan, tribe, group), represent the same or similar ideological frame- works in Afghanistan. Together with Islam, they provide the most fundamental bases for individuals and collective identities and loyalties, and they are the most persistent and pervasive potential bases for the organization of social formations, for the mobilization of social action, and for the regulation of social interaction among individuals and between social groups. As generalized social organizational principles, Islam, ethnicity, and kinship have been equally available to individuals and collectivities in Afghan soci- ety at large, as well as to those who have controlled the central government powers. They have been applied and manipulated not only to further common or similar col- lective national goals, but also to pursue separate, often di- vergent, and sometimes conflicting and contradictory aims by individuals, groups, and state institutions (for fur- ther details see Shahrani 1986, 1998).

Ethnic, kinship, and religious ideologies, like other so- cial organizational principles, are filled with internal am- biguities, contradictions, limitations, and conflicts. There- fore, the use of these principles by individuals, organized

pluralities, and governments for instrumental purposes has often resulted in unforeseen consequences. However, social organizational principles, whether based on ethnic- ity, kinship, religion, or any other sources of social iden- tity, are not in themselves causal in the actual organiza- tion of social relations. Rather, individuals, organized social pluralities, and governments apply such principles according to the specific political, economic, and histori- cal contexts in which they find themselves. It is within the context of the operations of real economic and politi- cal forces, both internal and external to the particular soci- ety, that the value of particular ethnic, kinship or religious identities, loyalties, and ideologies, and their efficacy in organizing social relations, mobilizing for a cause, as well as their relation to the state, can be studied. It is also within the changing historical contexts of the political economy of both the state and society that the nature of relations between the ongoing formation and reformation of ethnic, tribal, and religious-sectarian groupings in the country, and the formation and transformation of the government power structures at the center, can be exam- ined and understood (also see Shahrani 1986, 1998, 2000a, 2000b).

The relationship of social identity to changing power relations and attempts at state-building in Afghanistan must therefore be examined in relationship to its structure of governance and its political ecology—that is, the rela- tionships of Afghanistan's political economy and political culture to its broader national and regional history. First, it is necessary to identify the major sociocultural princi- ples that provide cultural ideas and norms for conceptual- izing and ordering identities and informing politics of dif- ference between social groupings that articulate the relations of domination, as well as resistance, between so- cial groups and communities, as I have done elsewhere (see Shahrani 1998, 2000a, 2000b). Second, it is essential to assess the history of the modern state in Afghanistan and its relationship to its heterogeneous communities of citizens during the last one hundred years as I do below, focusing on the period of Mohammadzai/Durrani dynastic rule preceding Soviet intervention, the decade of the jihad struggle against communism and Soviet occupation (see also Roy 1990; Shahrani and Canfield 1984), and the on- going postcommunist and post-jihad struggle for control of state power.

HETEROGENEOUS COMMUNITIES AND THE STATE

At first glance, the problems in Afghanistan might seem to have begun with the communist coup in 1978, which ig- nited the war that has continued for 24 years. That was not, however, the beginning of the problem, which actu- ally extends back to the creation of the first modern state under the name "Afghanistan" more than a century ago. The foundation of the modern state of Afghanistan was laid when Britain invaded Afghanistan from the Indian subcontinent in 1879 for the second time in 40 years. The

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British could not adequately control the country because of a prolonged, bloody civil war underway over royal suc- cession. Britain had lost many fighters during its wars of conquest and was faced with stiff resistance by many warring groups headed by competing princelings of the Muhammadzai/Durrani ruling clan of the Pashtun tribes, groups that had been fighting each other for the Kabul throne for some time. The British picked Abdur Rahman, one of the princelings, and pronounced him "King of the Afghans. They provided him with weapons and money to be used to create a buffer state between czarist Russia and British India.

The borders of Afghanistan—drawn by Britain and czarist Russia during the onset of this "Great Game" in Central Asia in the closing decades of 19th century—were gerrymandered to split members of ethnic groups between or among different neighboring states. Along the northern frontiers, for example, the peoples of Turkistan, the Turkic- and Ta]ik-speaking Muslim Central Asians such as the Uzbek, Turkmen, Kazak, Kirghiz and Tajiks, were divided. A large area of southern Turkistan between the Hindu Kush mountains and Amu Darya (Oxus River) was includ- ed within the borders of the new buffer state of Afghani- stan, which existed until 1967 when the government in Kabul eliminated the province of Turkistan by means of an administrative "reform/ replacing it with a number of newly named smaller provinces: Balkh, Jawzjan, Saman- gan, and Faryab. This politically motivated administrative fiat by the Pashtun-dominated Afghan government in the 1960s paralleled Joseph Stalin's policy of National Delimi- tation. In 1924 Turkistan was replaced with five language- based Central Asian Soviet Socialist Republics: Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Fur- ther east in western China, Sharqi Turkistan—a large terri- tory occupied by the Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghur, Kazak, and Kirghiz peoples—became officially known in China as Xinjiang province. Thus, as a result of the crea- tion and re-creation of national frontiers that began with the drawing of boundaries of Afghanistan in the 1880s, the larger identity and territorial reality of Turkistan was wiped clean from the face of the world map.

On the western frontier, the Farsiwan, a Persian-speaking people who speak the same dialect as people in eastern Iran, were located on both sides of the Iran-Afghanistan borders. The area to the south and southeast populated by the Baluch population was divided among three countries: Afghanistan, Iran, and British India (now Pakistan). The Pashtun/Nathans (the Afghans) were divided by the Durand Line on the eastern borders, leaving most of the Pashtun/ Pathans on the British-India side, which, after the parti- tion, became part of Pakistan. The Durand Line, Afghani- stan's eastern frontiers with Pakistan, was drawn by the British to effectively divide the Pashtun between two sepa- rate states. The predominantly Mongol-looking, Persian- speaking, Shi'i Hazara became the only large community that was contained wholly within the boundaries of Af-

ghanistan because of their location in the central high- lands around Bamyan.

The demarcation of these borders as part of the Great Game by Britain during the reign of Emir Abdur Rahman (1880-1901), laid the foundation for the troubled status of Afghanistan as a modern nation-state. Backed by Britain, Emir Abdur Rahman terrorized the people within these freshly marked borders. He and his Muhammadzai/Dur- rani Pashtun clan hailed from Kandahar, the recent spiri- tual headquarter of the Taliban, as well as the home of Hamid Karzai, the leader of the current U.S.-installed In- terim Administration in Afghanistan. The Pashtun in this southwestern area of Afghanistan belong to different tribes than those living further east along the borders with Pakistan. After decimating the leadership of the eastern Ghilzai Pashtun tribes whom he did not trust, Emir Abdur Rahman moved against the Hazaras in the center of the country. The Hazaras resisted Abdur Rahman's conquest (as they also recently opposed the Taliban invasions) of their territory and, as a result, were subjected to extremely harsh punishments: entire villages were massacred, people were skinned alive, and women and children were en- slaved. A particularly gruesome form of torture perpe- trated against the Hazara people was to form a rim of dough around the shaven heads of men so that boiling oil could be poured on them to fry their brains. Stories of such atrocities remain a permanent part of public memo- ries in this area of the country and are still in circulation (see Mousavi 1997).

Emir Abdur Rahman employed violence and torture in his rampages of conquest and subjugation of all of the peoples within his designated domain. In the east, where the inhabitants were not Muslims (Kafiristan), he forcibly converted them and renamed the area Nooristan (Land of Light). The same brutalities were used in subjugating Uzbek, Turkmen, Tajik, and other ethnic communities in the northern region. Throughout the entire country dur- ing the 21 years of his reign, people were brutally terror- ized into submission. Emir Abdur Rahman created a rela- tively strong centralized state through the use of such tactics, by advocating a conservative and xenophobic interpreta- tion of Islamic ideology, and by the liberal use of foreign money and weapons. Indeed, Emir Abdur Rahman—nick- named by his British colonial masters, the "Iron Emir" for his cruel two-decade-long rule—laid the foundation for an ill-suited centralized state structure that lasted for most of the 20th century.

The Iron Emir was intensely suspicious of his citizens, especially of those Pashtun who did not belong to his own clan or tribe and the non-Pashtun groups in the center and northern regions of the country. In order to insure his sovereignty over the non-Pashtun peoples in the north and central regions of the country, Emir Abdur Rahman mobilized large groups of Durrani Pashtun nomads from the south to occupy large areas of pastureland in central Afghanistan belonging to Hazaras (see Ferdinand 1962; Kakai 1979; Mousavi 2000). He also resettled tens of thousands

Shahrani • War, Factionalism, and the State in Afghanistan 719

of Pashtun tribesmen from the south in the strategic parts of Afghan Turkistan along the borders with Central Asian Khanates under czarist Russian control (Tapper 1973). By doing so, he laid the ground for the enforcement of cen- tury-long policies that were nothing but a crude form of internal colonialism run by the ruling clique in Afghani- stan.

This system of governance lasted until the 1960s when a very small window of opportunity for democratic experimentation opened up as a result of constitutional changes (1964-73). It was during this brief period that some freedom of the press and rudimentary forms of po- litical activity were allowed. Under pressures from the for- mer U.S.S.R., the government did not object to the forma- tion of Afghanistan's Communist Party (Khalq, in 1965), although it strongly opposed the Islamist youth move- ments. By 1973, King Zahir Shah (r. 1933-73) was over- thrown by his own paternal cousin and brother-in-law, prince Muhammad Daoud, with help from the leftist mili- tary officers belonging to the Parcham faction of the Com- munist Party. Five years later, in 1978, the communists killed Muhammad Daoud and massacred his entire family. They also installed a communist regime and, in 1979, faced with overwhelming popular resistance, they "in- vited" the Soviets to invade the country, beginning Af- ghanistan's 24-year-long war.

Long-simmering communal tensions rose to the sur- face after the collapse of the autocratic monarchic state and were further aggravated because of the prolonged proxy wars, leading to the creation of the Taliban and their regime's brutal policies of ethnic cleansing directed against the Hazara, Uzbek, Farsiwan, and Tajik popula- tions in western, central, and northern Afghanistan. The intercommunal wars that had spiraled out of control since the mujahideen military victory in April 1992 are in fact the virulent manifestations of the century-long policies of internal colonialism carried out by Pashtun-dominated governments, supported in large measures by decades of Cold War politics in the region.

During the anti-Soviet and anti-Communist struggles of 1978-92, communities everywhere across Afghanistan organized themselves militarily to defend their own terri- tories. They also created civilian structures at the local level to provide basic health and educational services with the help of international NGOs, as well as for the admini- stration of justice. By 1989, with financial and military help from the United States and some Muslim countries, Afghans serving as the foot soldiers of this proxy war man- aged to defeat the Red Army, forcing the Soviets to with- draw their troops from Afghanistan in April 1989. But the communist regime they left behind in Kabul lingered until 1992. In the meantime, Pakistan and Iran encouraged their respective client Afghan political parties to fight not only the communist regime and the Soviets but also amongst themselves. The ethnic dimension of Afghan conflict was purposefully heightened and manipulated by

Afghanistan's neighbors: Pakistan, the former Soviet Un- ion, and Iran.

The United States reportedly had invested some three billion dollars in the anti-Soviet war and then, after the Soviet defeat and troop withdrawal in 1989, simply aban- doned Afghanistan. When America walked away, it left be- hind a country that was shattered economically, politi- cally, and in every other conceivable sense, and left to the mercy of its quarrelsome neighbors. In 1992, when the communist regime in Kabul finally fell, Pakistan quickly cobbled together a so-called broad-based government of the mujahideen in which the only party they did not fa- vor, the one headed by a non-Pashtun, Burhanuddin Rab- bani, managed to take control of Kabul. Feeling slighted by the "usurpation" of power by the non-Pashtun groups from the rightful Pashtun rulers, Pakistan urged Hekmatyar, the leader of Hizb-i Islami (Islamic party), to take control of the capital from the Tajiks militarily, resulting in the bombardment of Kabul for two years and in unimaginable crimes between 1992 and 1994. The resistance against Hekmatyar's onslaught in Kabul was fierce given the Shia Hazaras' powerful presence in some major areas of the city. The Uzbek forces of Abdur Rashid Dustom that had played a critical role in the collapse of the communist re- gime and mujahideen takeover of Kabul by the Tajik forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud, all fought together initially to re- sist Hekmatyar. Alliances of forces shifted repeatedly and the interethnic factional fighting in and around Kabul grew worse. Lacking any alternative vision of governance, the leading contenders in these struggles envisioned, if successful, the same system of government dating back to Abdur Rahman: a centralized state in which the ruling fac- tion could impose itself on the rest of the unwilling com- munities in the country with help from their close kins- men and friends and support by a foreign sponsor.

Two years of warfare by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar against Kabul could not secure the prize that his Pakistani spon- sors wished for him to win. And, at that point, the country had, more or less, been divided into five or six different semi-independent regions. In the western region, the Per- sian-speaking Farsiwan communities had created an alli- ance under Ismail Khan with the city of Herat as its center. Ismail Khan had disarmed its own population, enforced a legal system, and began to reopen schools. General Abdul Rashid Dostam, who is vilified as a Northern Alliance war- lord by his Pakistani detractors in the media, in fact, had managed to unify several provinces in northwestern re- gion, where he had also brought peace and order. In the area under his control, centered around the city of Mazar-i Sharif and predominantly inhabited by Uzbeks, the condi- tions for the local population improved: They had local autonomy and thriving commercial ties with the newly independent Central Asian republics. Schools and univer- sities functioned and radio, television, and print media enjoyed considerable freedom and support. The north- eastern parts of the country, together with mountain valleys just north of Kabul such as Kohistan, Kohdaman, Panjsher,

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and Tagaw wa Nijraw, were ruled by the Shura-i Nazzar (Northern Council) under the command of the late Ah- mad Shah Massoud. These areas were more or less peace- ful. In the center, the Hazara Shias controlled their own territory and sectarian community with virtual autonomy. In the east, the Pashtuns had created a coalition of several provinces under Shura-i Mashreqi (Eastern Council), peacefully running their own affairs.

By late 1994, factional fighting was mostly limited to the national capitol, Kabul, and to Kandahar, a predomi- nantly Pashtun tribal area where chaos reigned. Not sur- prisingly, in 1994 it was in Kandahar that Mullah Moham- med Omar emerged along with a group of ex-mujahideen fighters who challenged some of the most notorious of the local warlords. Initially, he succeeded in attracting consid- erable popular support in and around the city of Kandahar for bringing a semblance of order to that unruly city.

By 1995, a plan by a consortium of oil companies, in- cluding Unocal and Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia, was under- way to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan from Turkmenistan to the Pakistani seaports of Gwadar. Immediately, Pakistan saw the potential usefulness of the newly rising Pashtun force in Kandahar and adopted Mul- lah Omar's small movement, naming it "Taliban," the movement of seminary students. Pakistan offered them money, weapons, and logistical support and wanted them to secure a corridor for Pakistan so that Unocal and its partners could build the Turkmenistan-Pakistan oil/gas pipeline across western parts of Afghanistan. Early in 1995, the Taliban secured the allegiance of local Pashtun com- manders, mostly through bribes, all across the southern and southeastern Pashtun belt approaching Kabul. Then in the autumn of 1995 they attacked the forces of Ismael Khan in western Afghanistan. Because the population of Herat had been disarmed by its own leaders, the area quickly fell to the Taliban and Ismael Khan took refuge in Iran. But the capture of Herat by Pakistani forces for the Taliban did not end the war. Emboldened by their easy victory, the Taliban and their Pakistani patrons proceeded to take the rest of the country by force, pursuing a policy of total war. During this period of Taliban conquest, large- scale massacres of civilians occurred as the peoples of northern and central Afghanistan defended their territo- ries against the Taliban and their Pakistani allies. The de- fenders argued that when the war against the Soviet Un- ion was fought, no Pashtun had come from any other part of Afghanistan to help liberate the territories inhabited by the Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Hazaras. These territories were de- fended by their local inhabitants who had liberated them- selves from Soviet occupation forces and Afghan commu- nists, even though non-Pashtun Afghans had joined their Pashtun compatriots in southern Afghanistan to liberate Pashtun areas. Non-Pashtun peoples of Afghanistan put up stiff resistance to the Pashtun army led by the Taliban, who were supported by the government of Pakistan, which planned to conquer their territories and resubjugate them to a form of internal colonialism.

In 1995, Osama bin Laden, who had initially come to Afghanistan in 1981 to fight in the jihad against the So- viet invaders, returned to Afghanistan. Enraged by the Gulf War, bin Laden became a vocal opponent of the U.S.- led coalition war within Saudi Arabia, organizing antiwar demonstrations resulting in his exile from Saudi Arabia to Sudan. In 1995, ISI, the Pakistani Intelligence Service, brokered a deal to move bin Laden and his entourage from Sudan to Pakistan and into Afghanistan, an act that laid the foundation for a Taliban-bin Laden alliance. Bin Laden financed the Taliban's war against their non-Pashtun ene- mies, with his al Qaeda militants fighting alongside Tali- ban forces, and supported the training of other disgruntled Muslim militant groups from virtually anywhere around the world.

TERRORISM AND MODERN NATION-STATE: SOME CONCLUSIONS

There is no doubt that Afghanistan exemplified a weak and fragile modern nation-state prone to failure. When challenged by a leftist coup d'etat and later invaded by the former Soviet Union, the frail state apparatus collapsed and the country was turned into an arena for proxy wars, eventually becoming a safe heaven for global terrorism. The failure of Afghan governments to build a viable state structure was because of, in large part, the inappropriate model of the state adopted and implemented by its leader- ship at the end of the 19th century. The prospects for building an effective governance structure was further weakened by two additional factors: the inability of Af- ghan governments to find or create adequate, reliable, and renewable domestic sources of state revenue and the dis- criminatory and abusive policies and practices of its gov- ernment leaders toward ethnic and tribal "minorities" during the last hundred years. More specifically, collapse of the Afghan state apparatus was not the function of an inherent aversion to central authority on the part of the people of Afghanistan because of the diversity of extant tribes and ethnic groups, or extreme individualism, as are often suggested. Indeed, I have argued here that the trans- formation of tribal structures and ethnic differences into social fragmented groups along ethnic, linguistic, and sec- tarian cleavages was the direct consequence of the policies of centralizing governments.

The art of governance and of state-building in Af- ghanistan became immobilized and trapped within an in- ordinately "rigid framework of the problem and institu- tion of sovereignty,"4 rather than the development of the "govemmentalization of the state,' as Michel Foucault might put it (1991:98-104, emphasis added). As a result, an or- ganic relationship between the state and its subjects/citi- zens based on their just and equitable treatment did not exist.

There is no need, however, to lament the failure and collapse of the old state structures in Afghanistan. A me- chanical relationship between the state and its citizens

Shahrani • War, Factionalism, and the State in Afghanistan 721

based on an expanding, corrupt, and nepotistic bureauc- racy must fail. Now that the Taliban have been dislodged, and the old inappropriate state structures shattered, what are the prospects for Afghanistan? They will be stronger if attention is focused on how a multiethnic society should be governed, rather than who should govern it. This is especially important to note given Partha Chatterjee's analysis suggesting that the political miseries in Afghani- stan stem "not in our inability to think out new forms of the modern community [or identity] but in our surrender to the old forms of the modern state" (1993:11, emphasis added). A similar view has led Guehenno to suggest that instead of accepting the nation-state "as a political form that is self evident, a kind of natural culmination of all so- cieties" (1995:2), we must problematize and question the appropriateness and adequacy of the forms of postcolonial states,5 critically examining them to determine whether such state structures are part of the problem in breeding communal violence, conflicts in multiethnic societies, and international terrorism. If the old forms of nation- state are shown to be part of the problem, we must ask why we continue to consider such institutional forms to be a part of the solution for alleviating the crises in Af- ghanistan.

Because the majority of ethnic groups in Afghanistan live in relatively compact communities in rural areas, to be successful a government structure must allow for local self-government. At the village, district, urban wards, and provincial levels, people must have the right either to elect or to hire their own community administrators, and, wherever feasible, adjacent provinces should be encour- aged to create common regional administrative units. What is called for is a very different kind of governance structure than the old sovereignty-driven centralized sys- tem of misrule that has characterized the history of Af- ghanistan since 1880. Afghanistan needs to create a loosely structured federal government that is decentral- ized and adapted to the local and national conditions in post-Taliban Afghanistan (for more details, see Shahrani 1998, 2001a, 2001b, 2002).

The United States has the opportunity to set a new precedent for combating the conditions that give rise to terrorism worldwide by aiding in this effort. This daunting task can be accomplished by doing two things. First, now that the people of Afghanistan are freed from being terror- ized by the Taliban and their global terrorist partners, they must be assisted in establishing an appropriate national governance structure that should not only facilitate the national reconstruction and reconciliation of their bat- tered society but must also avoid returning to the utterly inappropriate previous system of centralized misrule. Sec- ond, the United States must take the lead in mobilizing sustained and long-term international reconstruction as- sistance for Afghanistan. By means of these integrated and coordinated international efforts in Afghanistan, the in- ternational community may be able to begin to address one of the root causes of global terrorism. It should be ob-

vious that the strategies of waging war against global ter- rorism, no matter how militarily effective, will not solve Afghanistan's problems and will not solve our national se- curity concerns here in the United States. The question re- mains: Is the United States leadership willing to conduct its foreign policy differently to find out what the outcome might be? Afghanistan can be a very important test case, if done right.

NAZIF M. SHAHRANI Anthropology Department, Indiana Uni- versity, Bloomington, IN 47105-7100

NOTES 1. Zal (Zalmay) Khalilzad, an Afghan American, formerly working for the RAND Corporation, is currently a member of President George W. Bush's National Security team and the Special Envoy of the President for Afghanistan. His role as the principal architect of U.S. policies toward Afghanistan since September 11, 2001, cannot be underestimated.

2. Hence, these authors advocated for the return of the United States in the region and resumption of its presumed responsibili- ties to help bring peace. Not surprisingly, after the events of Sep- tember 11, 2001, and the start of the war on terrorism campaign, the United States has returned to Afghanistan in full force.

3. One of the frequently cited facts introduced to prove the vio- lent nature of Afghan society is that during the 20th century, seven out of 12 political leaders of the country met violent deaths (Habibullah 1, Habibullah II, Nadir Shah, Daoud, Taraki, Amin. and Najibullah), while Amanullah, Zahir Shah, Rabbani, and Mullah Omar, four of the survivors, were violently deposed, and Karmal was sent into exile. This fact, however, tells more about the nature of political succession in the country and the violent nature of the Afghan state than it does about the peoples of Afghanistan.

4. Significantly, as Foucault points out, the goal of the sovereign was "not so much to increase the wealth of the country as to allow the ruler to accumulate wealth, build up his treasury and create an army with which he could carry out his policies" (1991:98).

5. A critical assessment of the old forms of the modern nation- state and their continued relevance as effective political institu- tions, especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, is necessary. This is particularly so in view of the fact that in Europe—the origi- nal birthplace of this "ephemeral political form"—the nation-state is losing much of its historic purpose in the face of increasing con- solidation of such states within the European Union (see Chand- hoke 1995; Guehenno 1995).

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