Zheng Fei, School of International Affairs and Public Administration, Shanghai University of Political Science and Law
One
It has been almost two months since the United States has withdrawn from Afghanistan. There is a kind of rhetoric about why the United States failed in the world, Chinese world, saying that the United States is too idealistic, engaging in useless state-building in a tribal world, appointing an empty scholar as president, but not using those local leaders and warlords. Those people may be brutal and corrupt, but in a pre-modern society, they were the best tool for orderly resistance to the Taliban. Personally, I think that this kind of statement is inevitably self-righteous, and there is a suspicion of underestimating the heroes of the world.
First of all, this is clearly not true. In Afghanistan, the United States is actually quite focused on cooperating with these people. Of course, there are some twists and turns in it.
In 2008, the United States created the post of Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), and since 2016, his department has written a series of reports on lessons learned. The 2016 report, Corruption in Conflict, reads: "The U.S. government faces a profound dilemma [after entering Afghanistan]: Should the United States support political compromise with warlords to reduce the risk of armed rebellion, or should it exclude warlords from the government, which, once they enter, could interfere with the emergence of a legitimate, functioning state?" ”
The United States chose the former because Bush's neoconservative administration, despite its mission to forcibly promote democracy and freedom, was quite realistic when it was put into practice. When Karzai formed his government in 2001, at least twenty of the thirty-two governors were warlords and strongmen. The United States supported these appointments (John F. Sopko, Corruption in Conflict: Lessons from the US Experience in Afghanistan, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction [SIGAR], Arlington United States, 2016, p.17）。 The report acknowledges that "this is partly due to the Bush administration's aversion to 'nation-building' ... A senior U.S. official said U.S. agencies don't want to help and abet corruption, but national security is a higher priority. He recalled that in pursuit of U.S. counterterrorism goals, the United States was willing to work with notorious power brokers" (p.21).
Corruption in Conflict
An article in the New Yorker ("Another Afghan Woman") tells a story that can be seen as one of the corroborating testimonies to the report — in Helmand Province, a warlord named Amir-Dado is carrying out a reign of terror and arresting innocent people in order to obtain a Bounty from the United States. In March 2003, Dardor masquerade as rebels orchestrated an attack on American soldiers to prove their worth to the Americans. The U.S. military maintained cooperation with Dado in the end, because they believed that what Dado was doing was "a tried and tested solution to control the rebellious Pashtuns." In his book Warlord Survival, the American scholar Romain Malejacq quoted an American diplomat as saying, "These militiamen ... It is the only force against chaos and lawlessness. ”
By 2004, things had changed, when the Taliban were in a dormant period and the warlords were making a lot of noise. Therefore, the Bush administration's intention is to channel resources to the Kabul government on the one hand to strengthen state authority, and on the other hand, to redeem the warlords and strongmen for their territorial control. Corruption in Conflict notes that the United States had hoped to trade government positions for the disbandment of private armies by these warlords. The result was that the warlords ostensibly acceded to the request, but "largely maintained their military might." ...... Many warlords have established private security companies to maintain their militias. U.S. and NATO forces then hired these companies." The report states that in 2005, the National Assembly of Afghanistan included "forty warlords, twenty-four members of criminal organizations, seventeen drug traffickers and nineteen accused of war crimes and serious human rights violations" (p. 18).
At that time, some kind of parallel power was actually formed. These warlords and strongmen serve in the political, economic and judicial sectors on the one hand, and on the other hand, they actually retain private armies (perhaps not as many as before). Their presence has created appalling corruption, local extortion and crime, and has severely weakened the legitimacy of the government. So the report goes on to say: "Many experts and U.S. officials acknowledge that this early and sustained support for the warlords will ultimately undermine long-term peace and stability in Afghanistan." By supporting the legitimacy of warlords politically and financially, the United States has helped to nurture a group of iron-fisted figures at the local and national levels whose own power networks are in conflict with the Afghan state. ”（p.19）
These warlords and strongmen have their own interests to pursue. One U.S. official declared that his team had "been being manipulated by afghans." For example, in some places, prominent figures and warlords actually have more or less cooperative relations with the Taliban, either to raise themselves or to pay protection fees. In some cases, "private security contractors" (i.e., warlords) transfer a portion of their contracts directly to the rebels, equivalent to a partnership in the business of security (John F. Sopko, What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction [SIGAR], Arlington United States, 2021, p.76）。
By 2006, the Taliban were making a comeback in southern Afghanistan. By 2009, the Obama administration, assessing counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, argued that it should change course and implement the so-called "hearts and minds" strategy to build the country in order to deprive the Taliban of the social space on which they depend. In a way, this means "cutting the domain". But that plan did not become a reality.
First of all, because Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who reigned from 2001 to 2014, is a local strongman, he has resisted the us demand for order consolidation. Second, because the Obama administration is limited by domestic political pressures, it is actually pinning its hopes on short-term troop increases and investments to save the situation. In August 2021, SIGAR published a report, "What We Need to Learn," which, in review of Obama's intentions, put it this way: "At the same time, he limited the increase to eighteen months, when it would either succeed enough to scale back or fail to justify the withdrawal of those resources." (p.30) This short-term plan proved to be self-destructive, and the United States Government did not actually have the time and energy to solve the warlord problem. In particular, the report notes that by 2011, when Obama had lost confidence in a brief period of peace in Afghanistan, he "once again began to see irregular militia forces as a potential stopgap solution to the country's security problems" (p. 68). In other words, rely again on local warlords.
In the 2014 Afghan election, Ashraf Ghani, a former anthropologist, World Bank technologist and former Afghan finance minister, became president of Afghanistan, and his first vice president was the Uzbek warlord Dustam. In his book Warlord Survival, Maleyak describes the survival mechanism of the Afghan warlords. "In Afghanistan, very skilled people deliberately create chaos, fear and unpredictability to increase demand for those who can bring political stability," he said. "Dostum is undoubtedly the best of them, and he is known for his lack of political loyalty. A local police chief declared: "The reality is that, for the time being, General Dostum has more power than the (northern) government. He has more sovereignty. ”
What We Need to Learn
So, at least historically, it is certainly not right to say that the U.S. failure in Afghanistan was caused by too idealistic and unsweezed hands.
Two
Here, I am not saying that the united States failed in Afghanistan because it colluded with warlords and strongmen, lost the hearts and minds of the people, or that its counterinsurgency strategy was wrong.
In the past, most countries responded to rebellions in the same way — terror, that is, by suppressing them by the most brutal means, indiscriminately striking at those involved in the rebellion, whether actively or passively involved, in order to discourage any thoughts and actions of resistance. In ancient times, this could have been indiscriminate slaughter. In modern times, this could mean mass incarceration and other acts of terror. Historical records show that when Jerusalem was captured by the Roman legions, the Jewish temples were reduced to rubble, and the streets were so massed with corpses that they could not see the ground. In Tacitus' writings, a Tribal Chief of Britain said that the Romans' method of repression was "they created a desert and then called it peace." During the French Revolution, a report of the Republic in 1793 read: "My hooves crushed children and slaughtered women... There will be no more rebellions. Instead of leaving a single prisoner, I eliminated them all. Napoleon wrote to his general urging him to intensify the suppression of the local rebellion, saying: "Burn down some farms and some large villages in Morbihan, kill chickens and scare monkeys." Only by making the war terrible would the inhabitants themselves rally against the robbers and eventually feel that their indifference was extremely expensive for them. ”
This indiscriminate repression is motivated both by the need for intimidation (intimidation is a form of intimidation, the expectation that the "innocent" will actively help the authorities in fear and at the same time to make the "guilty" throw a rat), but also by insufficient information: violence is indiscriminate when the selection criteria are crude. Insurgents are multi-tasking, eliminating the Presence of the State in areas under their control and establishing information networks or administrative bodies based on grass-roots units (e.g. villages) to gather effective information. By contrast, the repressive side does not always do this, either because of the weak basic power of the state or out of suspicion that they do not have access to effective information to identify the rebels and others involved in the incident. In many repressions, the suppressors are blind giants, using total repression to disguise/compensate for their information weakness.
With the advent of the era of nationality and democracy, and as the various ethnic groups of the world gradually acquire certain characteristics of modern society (developed communication, increased social ties, increased number of property and intellectual populations, etc.), this ancient practice began to slowly lose its effectiveness. Large-scale indiscriminate/comprehensive repression is inevitably constrained by internal and external public opinion, and there is a risk of triggering a counterattack from the nationalist consciousness of the other side. During the Revolution, although France effectively suppressed the Vendée rebellion, it returned to Spain and Haiti. Although the Soviet Union was able to uproot the Tatars in Crimea, Russia suffered several setbacks in Chechnya. Many observers agree that in many cases indiscriminate repression is ineffective or counterproductive. Otto Heilbrunn, a prominent civil war researcher, said, "There is no measure more self-defeating than collective punishment." Guerrilla warfare researcher Max Boot, after analyzing the analysis of the four hundred and forty-three guerrilla warfare that have taken place in modern times, has proposed twelve guidelines, one of which is that "very few counter-guerrilla warfare can succeed by creating widespread terror, at least not on foreign territory." Stathis N. Kalyvas, another leader in civil war research, notes: "Indiscriminate violence is often counterproductive unless there is a particular disparity in power between the two sides of a conflict." ”
Here I am not saying that total repression has lost all its effects, but that its limitations are becoming more and more apparent under modern conditions.
In addition to total repression, the United States in Afghanistan actually has two options: attacking the heart, or coercion.
The first counterinsurgency approach centers on governance. David Galula, a French soldier with extensive counterinsurgency experience, wrote his book Counterinsurgency War: Theory and Practice (1964), which has been hailed as the bible of counterinsurgency warfare. In the book, he proposes four iron laws for counterinsurgency action, the first of which is that gaining popular support is the primary goal of counterinsurgency. In the 1960s and 1970s, sir Robert Thompson and General Frank Kitson, among others, summed up Britain's post-World War II approach to repression as a "counter-insurgency approach with British characteristics". Two of the key points are that politics should take precedence over the military and win "people's hearts and minds."
In 2006, the U.S. military published an anti-insurgency manual, which began on the first page:
Political power is at the heart of rebellion and the suppression of rebellion, and the goal of both sides is to make the people accept their legitimate rule or authority ... The long-term success of counterinsurgency depends on people managing their own affairs and agreeing to the government's rule. ...... The objective of counter-insurgency action is to enable a State or regime to provide security and the rule of law in order to provide social services and economic development. ...... The armed forces cannot succeed in counterinsurgency alone.
The handbook emphasizes that "legitimacy is the main objective of [counter-insurgency action]", while the indicators of legitimacy are a safe, just and equitable leadership selection process, a high degree of popular participation in or support for the political process, low corruption, a certain level of political, economic and social development, and a high degree of recognition of the regime by major social institutions. "Political factors occupy a primacy in the rebel movement ... Military operations must be guided by political objectives. "In short, providing a legitimate governance framework for the population and enlisting their spontaneous support is at the heart of counterinsurgency action."
Some scholars have pointed out that such counter-insurgency prescriptions derive both from historical lessons (the Vietnam War, the Algerian War, etc.) and from the Orthodox Western notion that governments must provide good governance in exchange for popular cooperation. The party suppressing the rebellion must provide political, economic and social reforms to meet the needs of the population and gain popular support; In addition, the prescription has two premises: that poor governance provides the conditions for rebellion, and that people are not religious or ethnically inclined, and whoever can provide them with better and more public goods will support them.
But the above prescription is flawed. First, the rise of rebellion is not necessarily a matter of popular dissatisfaction, but may be triggered by other conditions; second, the people's identity may be locked and not changed by the increase in welfare; third, it is extremely difficult to carry out political, social and economic reforms at the same time as counterinsurgency, whether the government itself is willing to change is a big question, and reform is likely to offend the interests of multiple local elite groups at the same time, thus driving fish, and their energy cannot be ignored; finally, the process of democratization is started at the same time as counterinsurgency. It is likely to contribute to the insurgency by contributing to the political violence, conflict and instability that characterized the period of democratization.
The second method of counterinsurgency is much darker. For example, Professor Jacqueline Hazelton of the U.S. Naval War College believes that when counterinsurgency, priority should be given to restoring order, and the order of reform should aspire to the back row, and counterinsurgency operations should not be viewed with an idealistic eye. This means that counter-insurgency operations will shift from focusing on the public needs of the population to focusing on the special needs of local/ethnic elites (and this even includes those on the rebel side), understanding/accommodating their political, social and economic needs, and obtaining their support by cooperating with them (usually bribing them) in order to control the population.
Britain waged almost two counterinsurgency campaigns in the 1950s – in Malaya and Kenya, respectively. In both battles, the suppressors placed civilians behind barbed wire. One improved governance (Malaya) and the other did not (Kenya). In both cases, however, the suppressors won. This shows that efforts to win the hearts and minds of the people through political reform or economic development are irrelevant, and that the key to successful counterinsurgency is not to win the hearts and minds of the people, but to establish physical control over the people through various means. In other words, coercion takes precedence over improved governance.
But to be honest, this approach is also flawed: first, bargaining between repressors and local/ethnic elites is a complex process that cannot be bought by the government if it wants, and local/ethnic elites do not unreservedly support counterinsurgency actions;
The above counterinsurgency strategies and their respective advantages and disadvantages are things that have been thoroughly studied by the two circles of american politics and science in the past two decades. What the United States is doing in Afghanistan is certainly not a silly sweet, but a conscious choice. We, as outsiders, are not clear about the constraints they face. To be honest, if you are not in Lushan, you don't know the true face of Lushan.
Editor-in-Charge: Ding Xiongfei
Proofreader: Shi Gong