Ragtag Revolts in Parts of Afghanistan Repel Taliban
By ALISSA J. RUBIN and MATTHEW ROSENBERG
Mustafa Andaleb/Reuters
Captured Taliban insurgents and their weapons were shown in Ghazni Province in June.
While distrusting the government, many villagers have also come to
loathe the Taliban for their dictatorial cruelty and are fighting back.
Ragtag Revolts in Parts of Afghanistan Repel Taliban
Mustafa Andaleb/Reuters
Captured Taliban insurgents and their weapons were shown in Ghazni Province in June.
By ALISSA J. RUBIN and MATTHEW ROSENBERG
Published: August 25, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan — In small mountain villages on Taliban
turf in eastern Afghanistan, Pashtun tribesmen took up arms to fight
the insurgents this summer, fed up with their heavy-handed tactics of
closing schools and threatening families whose sons had joined the
Afghan Army.
The New York Times
Ghazni and Laghman provinces have fought for the Taliban.
“They wanted to make our children illiterate and miserable,” Malik
Ghulam Rusal, a district elder, said about the Taliban. “We told them
that if you want to wage jihad, go and fight the foreigners, not
ordinary people. But they did not listen.”
What began as a ragtag uprising by rural woodcutters and shopkeepers in a
few villages in Laghman Province expanded into something extraordinary:
in just the past two months, the Taliban presence in the entire
district, and then in a neighboring one, has been largely silenced. And
in another eastern province, Ghazni, villagers ignited a similar
movement to drive the Taliban away.
The uprisings, however, are far from a simple case of outrage growing
into action. They spread quickly, but in considerable part because
commanders from a rival militant faction, Hezb-i-Islami, saw a chance to
gain ground against the Taliban, and because Afghan government
officials saw the movement as a valuable opportunity to help local
leaders organize against the insurgents.
For close watchers of Afghanistan’s complex factional landscape, the
movement has become another case study of a classic Afghan problem that
directly challenges the Western goal of a stable country after the 2014
troop withdrawal: a threat posed by an armed group is answered by arming
another group, which in turn becomes a game piece to be fought over by
larger forces.
“Now it’s a bit of a mess,” said one Western diplomat, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity. “It started as an anti-Taliban type thing, then
Hezb-i-Islami moved in, then the government and the N.D.S. got involved
and there are lots of different players, and that makes the people who
started the whole thing suspicious.”
The N.D.S. is the National Directorate of Security, the main Afghan spy agency.
At its heart, the uprising in the Laghman villages began not because of
support for the government, or even because of hatred of the Taliban as a
whole, but because the wrong Taliban had come to power: Locals like
Ghulam Rusal say they resented the more extreme religious teachings and
draconian enforcement by militants who had come from far-off provinces
and from Pakistan.
Similar resentment factored in the uprising in Ghazni Province this
summer. There, in an area that has been locked under Taliban control for
at least three years, the uprising started when a couple of Taliban
with roots in the local community split off from the others and began to
form completely indigenous groups to oppose control by what they saw as
foreign Taliban leaders. Now at least 40 villages in Ghazni’s Andar
district have broken away from the mainstream Taliban, though
small-scale shootings still occur at times, according to local
commanders and residents.
Such local resentment presented fertile opportunities for both Hezb-i-Islami and government officials.
For Hezb-i-Islami, it was a continuation of an on-and-off battle with
the Taliban for dominance. The group is part militant faction, part
legitimate political party — one wing fights both the Afghan government
and the Taliban, another takes part in the national government based in
Kabul.
Though Hezb-i-Islami is rooted in a conservative Islamist worldview, it
is seen as generally less rigid than the Taliban, allowing girls to
attend school and permitting some other aspects of modern life. In any
possible future reconciliation with the insurgency, the faction most
likely to engage in a peace deal would be Hezb-i-Islami, former
Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker said in a recent interview. In that light,
both the Afghan government and the Americans are inclined to support the
group’s fight against the Taliban.
In both Ghazni and Laghman, there is a long history of deep aversion to
the Kabul government, as well as a sense of hurt: many feel abandoned by
the government and only reluctantly turned to the Taliban. That is true
even of Hezb-i-Islami fighters who live in those areas, said Abdul
Jabar Shilgari, a former Parliament member from Ghazni who is a member
of the Hezb-i-Islami party.
“The people there did not have any thought of coming over to the
government, because they were fed up with the government,” Mr. Shilgari
said. “But that was not a logical thought on their part — we knew they
couldn’t stand up to the Taliban for long.”
Hezb-i-Islami activated former commanders and sent them into the fight
with rifles and ammunition, and with orders to make more contacts and
expand the effort, members of the group said.
For the government, it has been a chance to try to encourage local forces to organize against the Taliban.
In Laghman, the governor, Mohammed Iqbal Azizi, said the government had
given mostly food and ammunition to the fighters, but only relatively
small quantities of ammunition.
The man bearing the government’s standard in the Ghazni uprising is
Asadullah Khalid, the minister of tribal and border affairs, a confidant
of President Hamid Karzai’s, a Ghazni native as well as a former
governor of the province. Although he is a charismatic, implacable foe
of the Taliban, locals in Ghazni say they have mixed feelings about his
involvement, and many see him as corrupt. He was dismissed in 2008 from
his position as Kandahar governor after allegations of corruption and
human-rights abuses.
“I am leading this in part because I am a son of Ghazni, and because I
am a minister of tribal affairs and there are tribes living in Ghazni,”
Mr. Khalid said during a recent interview in his Kabul office. “Ghazni
and the south of Afghanistan are burning in the same fire — you cannot
talk with the Taliban, you have to be their slave or fight with them.”
He has brought both government money and local allies into the Ghazni
fight. But there has been controversy, too: at least three commanders
and several local officials say that he has distributed large amounts of
cash — perhaps as much as $200,000, they say — to just a few close
allies, and very little has made it to individual fighters.
“We have heard many complaints from local uprising commanders that
thousands of dollars have come from the minister of tribal and border
affairs, but the commanders are only receiving 4,000 Pakistani rupees” —
roughly $42 — “for each fighter,” said Sher Khan, the district governor
of Andar in Ghazni Province.
Mr. Khalid denies those accusations. “I wish I had $200,000, but all we
could do was help some of the martyrs’ families,” he said.
Locals also complained about the men Mr. Khalid had brought to run the
uprising, who, while from Ghazni, were not part of the early days of
fighting. They said that the National Directorate of Security was
involved in supplying money and ammunition — and that suspicion has
brought concerns that the United States, which helps support the N.D.S.,
may be getting involved, too.
American diplomats and NATO military officials have welcomed the
developments in Laghman and Ghazni, although diplomats especially have
been careful to keep their comments spare in part, it seems, to avoid
raising hopes given all the uncertainties of local politics here.
“What I hope happens is that the local people will decide they have had
enough and will act to get the Taliban out of their villages,” the new
ambassador, James B. Cunningham, said at a recent news conference.
“Whether that will happen or not, I don’t know, but hope that it would.”
Although locals may want to keep control of the movement, it is unlikely
that the movement could spread without help from the government, local
officials say, because the fighters have insufficient arms and resources
to take on the Taliban for a sustained period.
Even given that, though, the officials are uneasy about the Afghan
government’s growing involvement and worry aloud that it may drive
people away rather than encourage more confidence.
“We are tired of the government’s corruption, and we are tired of the
Taliban’s tortures,” said Juma Khan, 50, a commander from the Ghazni
village of Omarzai, who takes exception to the commanders Mr. Khalid has
backed.
“We don’t want anyone here, just leave us the way we are and let us
fight for our people ourselves,” he said. “Now they are trying to change
this into a national uprising and into a business and these corrupt
officials are trying to make money from it, not to help the people.”
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