Joshua @ 66
“If we’re taking lessons from them, then, could that have been our mistake? Initially allying ourselves with the largely Tajik Northern Alliance instead of a pro-American Pashtun militia?”
This is a very important issue, but one that is not easy to resolve. What would “allying ourselves with the pro-American Pashtun militia” mean? After all, it was the Pashtun who were sheltering Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, refusing to turn them over after our ultimatum. Apart from the Taliban, the Pashtun had no central command. What would we do? Ally ourselves with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Pashtun?

The Pashtun may be more numerous than the northern tribes, but they’re also more fragmented, and many of those fragments are and were hostile to us. The Northern armies, however, had formed a coherent command and at the time of our military intervention, the Northern Forces were clearly superior. So we basically had no alternative than to form an alliance with the Northern armies.

Between comments 66 and 101 there are some very good comments on the tribal situation. I note especially Seth’s reference @ 68 to Nazif Shahrani and Robert Canfield’s “Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan: Anthropological Perspectives.” One must be careful here, because external forces can either fragment a hierarchy, or can bring it together. For example, the 19th century American conquest of the West decided that Indian people must have “chiefs,” whether that was in their tradition or not. You had to have chiefs, because without chiefs you could not negotiate treaties with leaders who could sign on the dotted line. The Navajo, on the other hand, had no such tradition. But our government kept insisting that they put forward such “chiefs” that we could negotiate with. This helped push the Navajo into developing some kind of hierarchy where there had been no hierarchy before. Hierarchies can also be smashed by decimating the leaders who develop hierarchical authority, fragmenting a developing hierarchical society into bits and pieces. Over the millenia, both strategies have been used in Afghanistan. For example, we’re trying to make Hamid Karzai into the chief of chiefs in Afghanistan, but he has frequently been derided as nothing more than the mayor of Kabul. We undercut him by coddling leaders such as General Dostum. Compare, for example, the treatment of Dostum vs. the treatment of Serbian General Ratko Mladić.

But what is mostly missing from this discussion is the fact that unemployment in Pashtun areas is roughly 40%, resulting in “$10 Tabies” who fight against us for $10 a day because they can’t find work. If we’d just stop bombing them, and instead provide money for jobs building hospitals, schools, roads and other infrastructure, we could deprive the Taliban of much of its fighting force. Bomb-dropping drones won’t do it.

Bob in HI

First, the book title: Afghanistan was not the graveyard of the British, Soviet and presumably American Empires. It is a country that was not too difficult to conquer, but impossible to govern. These three empires did not die because of their involvement in Afghanistan, but the involvement of all three in Afghanistan failed for similar reasons.

From this point of view, to point to the “Persians, Sassavids, Khorasans, Ghaznavids, Timurids, [and] Moghuls” as imperial success stories in Afghanistan is a shallow catalog. The issue is not how long these empires lasted, but how long their effective conquest of Afghanistan lasted, and how much of Afghanistan remained under their control. For most of these empires, control of “Afghanistan” (or whatever they called it) would only have meant
(a) the control of 1 or 2 administrative centers, and
(b) the control of the main roads to and from these administrative centers.
And even then, the important question is how long did this control last? Ten years? or a hundred years? There were many ten year wonders, and very few that lasted effectively for 100.

For most of those empires, travel to and between the administrative centers would have required a caravan armed for protection against bandits and hostile tribes. Measures of successful imperial control would include
(a) how many towns were under the control of, and paid tribute/taxes to, the empire;
(b) How often caravans traveled between the major administrative centers;
(c) what size protection force was needed by the caravans.

To bring this down to the present, Afghanistan is still pretty much a collection of feudal principalities centered at places like Herat, Kabul, and Kandahar. The central government has to negotiate with the regional principalities in order to govern, and cannot impose its will on them.

American interest in the Afghan Project will decline because it is too expensive in money and lives to sustain. We would do better to invest in hospitals, schools and jobs than in bombs, bombers and tanks.

But I guess I should really go back and read the next 80 comments and the book.

Bob in HI

Thanks again every one!

Seth

Nonetheless, there are illustrative examples from Afghanistan. I have met several times with Governor Wahidi from Konar Province, for instance, who has come to the United States and toured the midwest farm belt. He brought back a range of technological developments to implement on vegetable and fruit farms in Konar, which have been quite useful. Consequently, a range of provinces in eastern Afghanistan that used to have a poppy problem have begun to get over the hump. And they’ve replaced fruit and vegetables (including wheat) for popppy.

However, it’s difficult to see how Afghanistan’s economy will ever be self-sustaining, at least in the near- to mid-term. As Barney Rubin notes in “The Fragmentation of Afghanistan,” the country has unfortunately been a rentier state. I’m afraid it will remain one for a while.