The Once and Future Civil War in Afghanistan
The author of this article provides some very useful background info describing events in Afghanistan over the past 30 years, and explains why we’re probably not looking at things from the correct perspective. Be sure you read the source article as it has some very good links for further reading.
There is talk of civil war in the mountains of Khost, the fields of the Helmand River Valley, and on the streets of Kabul. With 2014 looming, Afghans, journalists, diplomats, and military officers alike are wondering what the future holds for this troubled country straddling the Hindu Kush.
We often act and talk as if Afghan history began on 9/11, but our reaction to al Qaeda’s attacks was an intervention in a long-standing and still-unresolved civil war.Will there be civil war or not? In a recent report I co-authored with Scott Bates for the Center for National Policy, we pointed to civil war and the related problem of security force fragmentation as two of the biggest risks Afghanistan faces. Dexter Filkins penned a persuasive essay in the New Yorker full of vivid details about the factional and ethnic rivalries within the Afghan National Army (ANA) and among its glut of militias. One of his interview subjects memorably remarked:
This country will be divided into twenty-five or thirty fiefdoms, each with its own government. Mir Alam will take Kunduz. Atta will take Mazar-e-Sharif. Dostum will take Sheberghan. The Karzais will take Kandahar. The Haqqanis will take Paktika. If these things don’t happen, you can burn my bones when I die.
Another journalist, Robert Dreyfuss, insists that such dire predictions are foolhardy. Citing Afghanistan’s former Ambassador to France and Canada, Omar Samad, he argues that Afghans will look into the abyss, lean back, and compromise.
However, people on both sides of this debate are missing the forest for the trees. This misperception begins with our collective failure to take Afghanistan’s history seriously.
We often act and talk as if Afghan history began on 9/11, but our reaction to al Qaeda’s attacks was an intervention in a long-standing and still-unresolved civil war. […]
Here, the author describes six phases of the civil war that’s been raging continuously for the past three decades, with the seventh phase being the current “return to rebellion, with the Taliban, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami, and Jalaluddin Haqqani’s network battling the American-supported regime.” He continues:
So the question of whether or not Afghanistan will devolve into civil war after 2014 is the wrong one. The civil war will, of course, only continue. The question is, what will the next phase look like and how can we shape it for the better?
The greatest risk and most likely outcome is the fragmentation of the Afghan National Security Forces. The biggest danger is posed by the divisions within the Afghan National Police (ANP) and the Afghan Local Police (ALP) destabilizing the larger security force institutions. Most of the personnel in both of these forces are deployed in or near their home districts.
And like politics, all civil war is local. […]
What a quagmire. Remind me: What is it again that we hope to accomplish by staying there that no other foreign intervention has successfully managed to do…?