Afghanistan is Not Iraq

U.S. and Afghan parliament seek to recreate 'Sons of Iraq' in Afghanistan

Since recognizing that routing the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001 did not actually mean their disappearance from the Afghan / Pakistan landscape, the U.S. and its NATO allies have been seeking new ways of bringing a measure of stability to the country. Current plans include a troop surge, which will begin in January, and considerations that include talking to the Taliban and arming tribes to fight the Taliban.

This last idea, although drafted in Afghanistan's parliament, has been imported from Iraq where Sunni tribal leaders battling foreign Al Qaida in some provinces chose to join forces with the American military, which armed and paid them. Whether the Shi'a government will successfully incorporate those members into the government once the Americans are no longer there, and who will pay the fighters' wages now remain open questions.

The application of such an idea in Afghanistan would seem almost perversely inattentive to history. The Taliban came to power in part because Afghans were exhausted by a civil war among competing leaders of subnational groupings, fighting for power following the 1989 Soviet withdrawal. The heads of these rival groups, like the Taliban, have not vaporized simply because there is currently a semblance of central government. Most American military, even at high levels, readily admit that they do not understand Afghan social organization and identity, which is based on a matrix of ethnic, tribal, political, family and territorial affiliations, and can be fluid. American analyses routinely label the Afghan social-political landscape "complex and baffling." Equally complicating is that the insurgent phenomenon called "Taliban" is no longer composed of a unified group. According to Jean MacKenzie of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, the disparate factions and individuals that have "diversified" the Afghan insurgency are united by their rejection of the central government and foreign occupation.

The U.S.has turned to the Afghans themselves, who do understand the landscape. But members of the parliament, even as they draw up plans, repeatedly return to the point that arming local leaders capable of putting pressure on violent insurgents means fueling warlordism, as a recent Council on Foreign Relations report indicates.

General Nur-al Haq Olumi, a member of parliament from Kandahar Province, told the Kabul-based daily Payman, according to a translation by the BBC, that distributing guns in the south while simultaneously supporting national efforts to disband and disarm militias was contradictory and potentially destructive. The Afghan paper Hasht-e Sobh, also translated by the BBC, underscored the point in an editorial: "The fact that these forces may become new warlords is not mere speculation. It is an irrefutable truth." Others fear that by arming Pashtun tribes, rivalries could be reignited; they point to unresolved conflict between the Hazara minority and nomads in central Afghanistan as a possible source of friction. Aware of the risks, Karzai has relocated warlords to stem regional violence.

Several years of reconstructing counterinsurgency theory for 21st century use, the U.S. military has focused on the cultural specificity of insurgency's context. But planning, on the American side, appears to be one-size-fits-all.

_{Photo: Chris Hondros/Getty Images. Meeting of Afghan warlords and tribal heads in Peshawar, October 2001}