Blood, ideas and Afghanistan

Eleventh in a series

Writer Robert Kaplan should pass the policy word to Ambassador Thomas Simons. At issue are our conceptions of Afghanistan. True conception in war and peace is as important as in sexual reproduction: Without it, there can be no happy outcome. To win this war (and the peace process, hopefully, to follow), we must conceive of Afghanistan as it really, truly is.

In a serious, constructive New York Times editorial of Oct. 24, Ambassador Simons (our man in Islamabad 1996-98) argues that whatever post-Taliban government should be organized along other than ethnic lines: “Ethnic loyalties will still be important, but they cannot define the new system.” And “Those loyalties can and should be subsumed in government structures that encourage a sense of nationhood beyond kinship.”

Hopeful words from an emissary of the American melting pot. True, ethnicity should not be the whole story. And it won’t be when – that niggling word “when” – the Taliban are routed or wither away or negotiate some sort of future for their “moderates.” Not the whole story … but, for better or worse, most of it. Say a hefty and inescapable 75 percent. Whatever happens on the battlefield, ethnicity will account for a solid three-quarters of the final disposition.

Enter Robert Kaplan.

Kaplan’s books are now deservedly well known, but I met him before fame and influence. The year 1988 found me in Peshawar, Pakistan, with a Fulbright. Our consulate had put my name on the should-visit list for journalists, and one day Bob Kaplan pitched up. He traveled light back then: just a daypack, no matter how far from home, and as few preconceptions as humanly possible. Other journalists tried to impress each other and me with their new knowledge. Kaplan asked questions which at first seemed childishly basic but then, at second or third inspection, challenged some of my own long-held assumptions.

Over the years he’s developed some dictums of his own. Here’s one: “Blood,” says Robert Kaplan, “is thicker than ideas.”

Such is the case in much of our post-Cold War world. After a century of isms, the grandchildren of fascists and communists and even democratic parliamentarians care less about political ideology than about ethnic identity. Thus, four decades after their victory over colonialism, Tutsis and Hutus massacre each other in Rwanda. Thus multi-ethnic Yugoslavia, once a pillar of non-aligned socialism, is now a fading memory obscured by gut feelings of Balkan nationalities. Thus Spain, a model of political reconciliation after the death of Franco, is bedeviled anew by Basque separatism.

And thus, perhaps more than anywhere else on earth, Afghanistan. It’s always been that way – ethnic to the core – except for the two recent ideological experiments which have gone so tragically wrong: First the far-left Communist period (1978-1992), then the hard-right Islamist reaction (1992-present) which crystallized into the Taliban. Before he was betrayed and executed, Abdul Haq described the Taliban exactly: “like a piece of crystal, hard but brittle. To break it you have to know where to hit it.”

These ideologies failed precisely because they tried to override ethnic identity. The Communists pretended that ethnic nationalities didn’t exist … and then split among themselves over tribal lines (the Durrani Pushtun Parcham party vs. the Ghilzai Pushtun Khalk party). The Islamists failed first when northern ethnic groups (the stuff of today’s Northern Alliance) tried to lord it over the Pushtuns down South. The Taliban Islamists will ultimately fail not because of their even more extreme religious ideology but because their ethnic base consists so narrowly of hard-nosed Pushtun expansionists … trying to lord it over multi-ethnic Kabul and the non-Pushtun North.

Lesson: “Blood is thicker than ideas” despite what Afghan leaders tell U.S. diplomats. Every Afghan leader – every single one – plays the ethnic card with the home folks who constitute his base … and then represents himself to outsiders (and potential patrons) as a man whose movement has transcended ethnicity. Taken together, such claims have an illusory effect. Not every U.S. diplomat believes that illusion, but some do.

Noting correctly that Kabul-based infrastructure had eroded ethnicity somewhat in the days of Zahir Shah, Ambassador Simons then goes analytically astray: “The decades of war have pounded away at the country’s tribal structures even further.” First a semantic quibble, small but important. All tribalism is ethnic, but not all ethnicity is tribal. Only the Pushtun South is still truly “tribal” in the sense of residentially coherent, patrilineally exclusive khels or tribes. The North, by contrast, has not been “tribal” for the past century. It is still, however, intensely “ethnic.” The two Northern Alliance politicians whom Simons cites as “detribalized” were never themselves tribalized in the first place. They do remain ethnic (Tajik) in identity, certainly to all other Afghans and privately in their own minds.

Second, the war years seemed at first to blur ethnicity, but Afghanistan’s net result has been otherwise. I recall the supra-ethnic euphoria of those early jihad days when Uzbek and Pushtuns would express newfound camaraderie … especially if they happened to be unarmed at the time. It lasted just as long as there was a common enemy. Once the Soviets were defeated, ethnic harmony fell into discord. And the subsequent years of catastrophe and deprivation, while throwing different ethnic groups together willy-nilly, have reinforced (not eroded) the sense that only one’s own people can be counted on.

It’s always been that way in a place where one’s own group – not some central government – provides the basic necessities: physical security, education for the young, food for the hungry and care for the old. Yes, there were police and schools in pre-war Afghanistan, but the police were a town phenomenon and the schools were pathetically ill equipped in personnel and materials. Despite Zahir Shah’s well-intentioned reforms, “government” remained something to avoid.

I learned as much only after shifting from embassy diplomacy to mud hut anthropology. Villagers, I gradually realized, regarded government as all take and no give. Government took their young men (into the army) and their money (in the form of “taxes” which went into local official pockets rather than back to Kabul). Government gave little in return. Hence the reliance on immediate family and extended ethnic group.

It’s still that way in the villages. To a large extent, it’s that way in Peshawar, even among the many capable and dedicated Afghans working for the U.N. and various nongovernment organizations (NGOs). More than one ex-pat NGO director has noted – or, worse, failed to note – the debilitating ethnic divisions among his Afghan employees. It’s even that way among our excellent Afghan staffers at the Voice of America in Washington, DC: At least in private, Pashto service folks tend to have one take on events, and Persian service people another.

In matters of governance and ethnicity – as in so much else – the best hope for a post-Taliban Afghanistan is some sort of status quo ante. Maybe you can’t go back in this life, but most Afghans wish that you could. Go back to the time of Zahir Shah and his necessarily relaxed government. “Necessarily” relaxed because it was so weak compared with most modern governments. Even so, it was much better than nothing … and infinitely better than anything Afghanistan has had since. Bring back the king as Figurehead of State, a Persianized Pushtun and the only Afghan with supra-ethnic appeal.

But first that niggling matter of the Taliban. Small, real possibility: We could lose this war.

Hard, key fact: To win the war – and, now started, we must win it – we have to understand Afghan ethnicities and acknowledge their importance. And then we must wage war (and peace) accordingly: one overall strategy but different tactics for different ethnic groups and regions.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world.