Afghanistan’s collapse was all but inevitable it seems, largely because of two underlying factors: ignorance on the part of Americans and widespread corruption in the Afghan government. Some would add a third factor, namely the duplicity of Pakistan in its support of the Taliban, but I will leave that aside for now. I draw these conclusions from my reading of the work of anthropologists and other scholars who have extensive experience studying Afghan society.
In 2015 Indiana University anthropologist M. Nazif Shahrani wrote an article with this pessimistic subtitle “Karzai-style Thugocracy or Taliban Theocracy?” Quoting U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, among other American officials, Shahrani wrote that we made the decision to cooperate with warlords despite their lack of support from the local Afghans, mainly because these “thugs” were useful in combat against the Taliban. They were, but only for a limited time.
Here are some excerpts from Shahrani’s article:
‘‘The U.S. initial support of warlords, reliance on logistics contracting…and the deluge of military and aid spending which overwhelmed the absorptive capacity of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA) created an environment that fostered corruption…
‘‘The necessary preconditions for
combating corruption did not exist due to delayed understanding of the
nature of Afghan corruption, decreasing levels of
physical security…, lack of political will on the part of both the
international community and [the Afghan government],
and lack of
effective popular pressure against corruption.”
(p. 284)
Later, in the same article, Shahrani predicts a Taliban victory - six years before it actually took place. Here’s what he wrote:
“The
Taliban...have intensified their fight because they think they can overrun the chronically corrupt, ethnically divided, and morally bankrupt
thugocracy the U.S. has left behind. Sadly, Afghanistan is likely to fall
victim, once again, to the Taliban - or ISIS style
theocracy—men with loaded guns, sharpened knives and explosives
strapped on their
chests, ready to butcher and die for total victory.”
(p. 297-98)
The trust-destroying effects of official corruption was made worse by the failure of American or NATO officials to understand and accommodate locally established systems of justice in rural communities. The legal cases that most concerned the Afghans were about property boundaries and legitimate rights of inheritance. And, while Afghan villagers traditionally relied on clan elders and other community leaders to adjudicate their disputes, the American-backed government set up formal courts reflecting western ideas of what a proper judiciary should look like. Distrust of the government weakened these courts and so did their failure to pay attention to the villagers’ needs. Here are some observations by anthropologist Noah Coburn*, who has spent much of the past two decades living in Afghanistan:
“…in the small Afghan town in which I spent time conducting research between 2006 and 2008…, there was little demand among town residents for a formal judicial presence, particularly in the form of a court or local prosecutor. For the most part, small-scale disputes were resolved through local councils of elders…and for larger cases, people would head to one of the courts in the larger town down the road.”
But the American-backed officials ignored the traditional system of justice that the Afghans had always relied on. American efforts were directed at drug trafficking and prosecuting major crimes which were barely relevant to most Afghans. They seemed to have no interest in or understanding of how Afghan villagers traditionally handled disputes
The Taliban, of course, knew how to respond to the disputes that the locals cared about and, though not everyone admired their harsh version of justice, they at least were providing the judicial services that the locals demanded. Their integration into local communities and the lack of such integration on the part of the corrupt urban government was the Talibans’ ticket to success.
The fall of the Afghan government has been shockingly sudden, even though many have seen it coming for years. There is great tragedy in the American and Afghan lives that have been lost on this mishandled mission and in the horrors that many Afghans will now face under Taliban rule. The women of Afghanistan are particularly vulnerable to Taliban religious fanaticism. We can only hope at this point that the abuses they suffer will not be as cruel as our worst fears lead us to expect.
* Noah’s latest book: Under Contract: The Invisible Workers of America’s Global War
