Good Vs. the Taliban - What Do We Really Know about The Afghan Conflict?

The NATO coalition that currently holds sway in the ravaged nation of Afghanistan is at war, for freedom and democracy of course, battling the terror represented by the terrible “black eyed Talibs” – the dreaded Taliban. This is the simplified, spoon fed version that all of us in Canada and the West are familiar with. There are two factions at play in that sad nation, the side that supports us, and the Taliban. Cut and dry, black and white, end of the story. And so when our brave war correspondents beam their reports across the globe to us in our living rooms, it is easy to maintain that belief – “Canadian soldier killed in a gun fight outside of Khandahar by Taliban insurgents” - and our eyes glaze over and we think to ourselves, “those damn Taliban,” before we finish our evening meal.
And that very belief reveals just how staggeringly little we know of this nation, that all of us can believe, from the common citizen up to the upper echelon of CSIS, that this is the case. Us, or the Taliban, choose your sides. The deeper, less obvious (and never reported) truth is so convoluted and dense, that it is not worth trying to wrap our minds around it – however, as a nation at war, is it not incumbent upon us to try and understand what we can about the people we are so carelessly killing in the name of justice and peace and freedom and democracy, and whatever other tired slogans we decide to hide behind as we indulge in the slaughter of a people?
Afghanistan is not a nation like we have in the West, a nation wherein the people define themselves by being of that nation. It is a nation of tribal allegiances. No Afghan identifies himself as, lets say, Ali of the Afghans; rather he is Ali, first and foremost a Muslim, and secondly he is of the Pashtuns, or the Aimaqs, the Tajiks, or the Hazara. Those are the four main tribal grouping in the nation, and it is to that tribe that the people define their identity. As such, there are tensions between the different tribes, at that very highest level. For example, the Taliban draw their ranks from primarily the Pashtun people. During their ascent to power, they waged an ethnic war against the Hazara, who were not only Shia Muslims, but also of a direct Mongolian descent, visible in their features, setting them apart. The Taliban wreaked a terrible vengeance upon them in 1998, and tried to eradicate as many of them as possible for those differences. The Hazara resisted, and fought back from the fastness of their central mountain homes. And when the American led invasion occurred, they largely supported them – this illiterate population had no idea what the World Trade Centre was, or had very little idea as to who George Bush was, all they knew was that the Americans were fighting their tribal adversaries, the Taliban. Do they trust or like the government of Karzai? The resounding No is overwhelming - why? A centralized government is not trusted by the people of the Hazara tribe, they would prefer their own government in their own portion of the country, thank you very much.
Similar stories can be found all over this shattered land. Ismail Khan, the governor of Herat, opposed the Taliban as well, but views the West with distain, as he himself is a Muhjahedin, a holy warrior, from his days of fighting the infidel Russians. American aid was helpful, but also a hindrance to him, as he sought to create a nearly autonomous state of his own on the western edge of Afghanistan. He is, for lack of a better word, a Warlord. And it is at this point that the tribal system, which governs the identities of the people, becomes even more confusing. Quite aside from the tribal system, there is also a thriving, ancient, and still functioning feudal system in place in the hinterland of the country. Feudal lords hold sway in many places, and demand obedience from the people over whom they rule. This places them and all of their forces (which in some cases are not negligible) in direct conflict with the new caste of warlords, who gained prominence during the last 30 years of conflict, as well as the new found “democratic” government of Hamid Karzai. Any removal of power from this traditional feudal system is seen as a threat, one that the feudal lords are more than willing to fight against, no matter what their tribal allegiance. And so, a Tajik lord, who is at war with the Taliban, is also at war with the coalition forces who attempt to remove the source of his power and replace it with a new democratic system. Never mind that the people in rural Afghanistan have no real notion as to what democracy is, or how it works, it is what they are told to do, at odds with the lords who oversee their lands and crops.
So when there is a gun fight outside of Pashtun territory, there is a very good chance that it is not our men battling the Taliban, but rather the forces of the local feudal lord, or possibly the warlord, who is rebelling at the erosion of their political clout. But no, whenever blood is spilled, it is always against the Taliban, for it is imperative that our forces of “goodness” are at odds with “evil”, as simple and black and white as that. If our forces are at war, not with the enemy we have identified (the Taliban), but rather against diverse local militia, then it raises concerns as to what we are doing in that nation – it is no longer a fight for freedom, it is a bloody occupation for material gain, because if that is the case we are in fact fighting and killing the very men we so arrogantly claim to be liberating. We are not simply removing a hostile government, we are trying to change the very fabric of a society that has existed for centuries unchanged, and we are trying to institute these changes over night, because we understand so very little about the people and their way of life.
Let me be very clear on this – we are not at war with the Taliban, but rather we are at war with anyone who opposes our rule in that nation, because we do not, and make no attempt to truly understand the population, their various allegiances, and their lifestyle. We simply paint the entire conflict with this all encompassing brush, and claim that whenever shots are fired they are fired, not by reasonable everyday Afghans, but by the heartless “black eyed Talibs”. The truth is not so simple. It is usually very reasonable men who take up arms against us, because we represent the destruction of their entire way of life, a way that stretches back, unchanged, a thousand years. We will force “modernity” upon them, and heaven help those who oppose us … if they do, the desert will be littered with even more “Taliban” dead.
The Scottish author, Rory Stewart, is all to familiar with this brand of “know-nothing imperialism”, as he undertook a very courageous trek, walking on foot across the entire country of Afghanistan, from Herat to Kabul, in 2002, just after the war had begun. Such an act of courage is almost unbelievable, and I strongly urge anyone to read the account of his journey, in The Places In Between. On his adventure, he met and stayed with many diverse people, from feudal lords to Taliban fighters to international aid workers. To say that he has an insider’s view of the conflict is an understatement. He was met with tremendous acts of kindness, as well as acts of hostility, in some very unpredictable places, but it afforded him a very unique perspective on the opening conflict of this war on terror. He maintains that policy makers in Afghanistan, all very educated men and women from wealthy Western families, knew “next to nothing about the villages where 90 percent of the Afghan population lived. … But what did they understand of the thought process of Seyyed Kerbalahi’s wife, who had not moved five kilometres from her home in forty years? Or Dr. Habibullah, the vet, who carried an automatic weapon in the way they carried briefcases? … The people of Kamenj understood political power in terms of their feudal lord Haji Mohsin Khan. Ismail Khan wanted a social order based on Iranian political Islam. Hazara such as Ali hated the idea of centralized government because they associated it with subjugation by other ethnic groups and suffering under the Taliban … Without the time, imagination, and persistence needed to understand Afghans’ diverse experiences, policy makers would find it impossible to change Afghan society in the way they wished to change it.” As he explains, the think tanks and NGO’s responsible for rebuilding Afghanistan society had employees who, a “year before had been in Kosovo or East Timor and a year later they would be in Iraq or offices in New York and Washington.” In short, the re-builders were not invested in the nation for the long haul, making any drastic change, and all such changes in the rural traditional hinterland would be drastic, next to impossible.
Stewart theorizes that this nonchalant attitude or lack of understanding at the highest bureaucratic level (the UN, or NATO) is a new form of imperialism, one that is much more dangerous than the clichéd imperialism of the 19th and 20th centuries. I will include all of the argument at this point, as I feel that it is of primary importance in viewing the conflict in Afghanistan, but also in beleaguered nations all over the globe:

Critics have accused this new breed of administration of neo-colonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitive, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite, and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens. They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn’t their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny.
Postconflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or the stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neo-colonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgment they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation, and oppression.
Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan.

So let us not be bamboozled into this media frenzy of the “Us versus the evil Taliban,” with the rest of the happy Afghans cheering us on in the struggle. Many of those same Afghans want us gone from their homes, for us to stop the killing of their people, be they Aimaq, Tajik, Pashtun or Hazara. This is not a struggle of good versus evil, and it never has been – it is the struggle of a nation being torn asunder to answer to the wrath of the Gods of War, that imperial juggernaut of our time, the United States of America, and I am sad to admit, Canada is a pawn in their service. When the Harper government tries to extend our term of service in the Asian desert, we need to demand why, and the reasons need to smack of the truth. No more shadowed lies and half-truths. We are not at war with the Taliban. Do we fight them? Yes, we most certainly do, but we are not at war with them exclusively. The very socio-political fabric of Afghanistan is in turmoil, and is at the centre of this conflict. We need to understand more about that, more about the people, more about the history, before we attempt to alter it further – because without that understanding, we will alter nothing, except to create the “charming illusion” that we are fighting a War on Terror. And that is another subject that requires some light of truth to be shed upon it…
How many more Afghan men, women and children will be slain? How many more coalition soldiers? For what cause, and for whose benefit? Be they Taliban or be they field hands, or be they warriors fighting for their local warlord, who is busy maintaining his hold on power. How can we so callously end the lives of so many when we do not even bother to understand the dynamics that are fuelling the many faceted dimensions of the conflict? Sadly, we seem not to even care – because our failure to understand the nature of the conflict does not impact our lives, and the tremors or death will only be felt by a small percentage of us in the West; but in Afghanistan, our lack of understanding is destroying an entire nation.