‘Go to Kunduz and die’

Fifteenth in a series

Why Kunduz? When Mazar-e-Sharif fell to the northern alliance, we were confidently told that Taliban collapse in the rest of the North was inevitable, only a matter of time. That’s still true, but note the delay in Kunduz. Taliban escapees and much harder-core Islamist ideologues from other countries have congregated there. Why that particular northern city? And how is this violent assembly an echo of the old Afghan saying, “Go to Kunduz and die”?

As usual in Afghanistan, you start with geography and move to ethnicity. Only then can you understand immediate politics and military maneuvers and (usually superficial) ideology. And it helps to have lived there – as I lived in Kunduz, for two years in the 1970s.

Topographically the area was a swamp until less than a century ago. Like the rest of northern Afghanistan, Kunduz had (and has) a continental climate: freezing in the winter, sweltering in the summer. Its watery surface, however, made conditions much worse, much less salubrious than in, say, Herat or Mazar or Taloqan – obscure northern Afghan place names now broadcast worldwide. Until the 1920s, Kunduz was synonymous with bone-eroding humidity.

“Miasmal” and “malarial” crop up, time and again, in 19th-century European accounts of Kunduz. Once the dampness got into your marrow, you couldn’t get it out. Even in the 1970s, long after most of the swamps had been drained and some of the humidity was gone, Afghans down south in Kabul would warn me, only half kidding: “Don’t go to Kunduz. You’ll die up there.”

As such, Kunduz was not prime real estate until well into the 20th century. Previously it marked a sparsely populated transition zone between two ethnicities: Uzbeks to the west and Tajiks to the east. Usually Kunduz was run by Uzbek khans, either in fealty to some more powerful Uzbek khanate such as Bokhara or, if the local warlord could swing it, as his own autonomous fiefdom.

(Such a man, for instance, was Mir Mohammed Murad Beg, the Uzbek tyrant who ruled Kunduz by guile and fear two hundred years ago. His name is still remembered for wily, thuggish opportunism. His thematically exact re-incarnation is Abdul Rashid Dostum, self-made Uzbek ruler of Mazar-e-Sharif and chronically unloyal member of the northern alliance.)

Note who was not in Kunduz until recently: Pashtuns. This most numerous of Afghan ethnic groups still dwelt almost exclusively south of the Hindu Kush.

Then two things happened over the past century. First, Kunduz was drained of its swamps and made not only habitable but agriculturally fertile. Now the slogan was, “Go to Kunduz and get rich.” Second, Pashtuns came in droves from the South – both by choice and by government order – and cornered the new riches. Other newcomers arrived as well and complicated an already unsettled ethnic hodge-podge.

Result: Kunduz is sociologically the most fluid region in northern Afghanistan, the place where roots run least deep. Its residents are said (by others, of course) to be transient, shallow, and untrustworthy. As one Afghan critic damningly put it, “The people of Kunduz have no lineages, no ancestries.” My two years there left with me with many Kunduzi friends whose ongoing contact I value today. My research is also full of loose ends, of people with contradictory pasts and people who suddenly disappear.

(Another illustrative mini-bio, this time of the vicious Islamist Resistance leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Born in Kunduz province to a low status immigrant group from the Pashtun South, he exemplifies how newcomers can rise in rootless Kunduz. Indeed, his lack of pedigree made him an ideal surrogate for Pakistan in the 1980s and early ’90s. A native Pashtun speaker but without any tribal or territorial base down South, Hekmatyar was thus dependent on his Pakistani sponsors.

Parvenues are not successful elsewhere in Afghanistan. The story is told of Hekmatyar’s presence at a Pashtun gathering in intensely tribal, traditional Kandahar. Normally a powerful orator, he was stopped in mid-sentence when an elder asked aloud who the speaker’s own elders were … and why they were not known in the Pashtun homeland.)

This history explains several things. First, how the Taliban, unwelcome everywhere else in the non-Pashtun North, were able to establish themselves so firmly over the past few years in largely Pashtun Kunduz. Second, why (Pashtun) Taliban escapees from recent defeats elsewhere in the North have chosen (Pashtun) Kunduz as a last stronghold. Third, why their foreign-born comrades – previously known as “Afghan Arabs,” but now recognized as having come from various, far-flung parts of the Muslim world – have also gone to Kunduz. Fourth, why the Pashtun Taliban in Kunduz are now surrendering in the realistic hope of forgiveness, even incorporation, by their local ethnic (Pashtun) brethren. Fifth, why the foreigners – the only true-believer ideologues in this bloody endgame – have been killing those Pashtun defectors.

Reason for No. 5? The foreigners have no where else to go. Their Pashtun Taliban allies can fade into the (Pashtun) Kunduz woodwork. The foreigners cannot, especially as they have started shooting Pashtuns (reportedly more than 400 last week) to keep them from running away. For the foreigners Kunduz is a last hope. Maybe God will somehow rescue them, somehow reverse the fortunes of their suddenly disastrous war. If not, martyrdom awaits. These Arabs (and Pakistanis and Chechens and Filipinos and Kashmiris and Uigars from western China) have come to Kunduz to die.

Afghans of all ethnic groups, including all but the hardest core Taliban Pashtun, will say, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” First greeted as fellow holy warriors in the 1980’s anti-Soviet war, these hyper-Islamist interlopers have long outstayed their Afghan welcome. They hijacked post-jihad Afghanistan as surely as others of their ilk hijacked four American planes on Sept. 11. Now they have nowhere to turn … except to their (distorted) Muslim promise of paradise.

As this column has said of other prospective developments, “Sooner the better.”

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