My Share of the Task(186)
The Afghans’ vocabulary grew to account for the diverse taxonomy of groups we lumped together as “the Taliban”: “fighting Taliban” differentiated active insurgents from simply the pious but quiescent madrassa students; “clean Taliban” were good mannered, while “thief Taliban” used the insurgency as a guise to engorge themselves; “local Taliban” typically had a more sympathetic reception than those from even a province away, who were eyed warily because of their capacity to run roughshod; of least concern were the “Taliban sitting at home,” older members of the former regime, all but retired.
In Iraq, Zarqawi did not care whether fighters underneath him identified themselves as “Al Qaeda” so long as their sabotage and bombing fell within his strategic framework. Not so for the Taliban leadership. They needed fighters and supporters alike to think of themselves as Taliban, and be recognized as such. It was crucial to the Taliban’s desired—but phony—image as a cohesive, national liberation movement on the march. Meanwhile, the perception of a unified Taliban movement benefited local fighters, who looked more legitimate and fearsome to foes and recruits. The connection between the local units and top-level leadership was the mahaz, or “front,” which ranged in size from as few as twenty fighters to as many as a thousand. To have the prestige of commanding a smaller mahaz, a young man had to win approval from the Quetta-based leadership, who in turn provided him arms and mentorship. By co-opting these mahaz, the leadership made its disparate movements look cohesive, and helped them, through a chorus of spokesmen they fielded throughout the theater, claim quick credit for any and all violence that suited their interest. Even so, the links between the two levels often remained tenuous—in some areas, senior leadership was unable to fire the local commanders.
The local nature of the insurgency meant that “the Taliban” was not a fungible group that the leadership could reposition at whim. While there were some particularly vicious roving bands of more fanatical militants who gained notoriety acting as shock troops, most locally recruited insurgents would not stray far from the property and family and tribe whose safety and dignity were often a reason for taking up arms. Outbreaks of insurgency we were seeing in the north and west that summer were not the result of big tranches of southern Pashtun fighters infiltrating the north, but rather concerted efforts to turn local resentment into violence. While some argued that pursuing the Taliban in one area of the country would simply displace them to another—like squeezing a balloon at one end only to see the other side expand—our view of the insurgency argued against this happening to any significant degree. Insurgent field leaders were relatively mobile, and they could focus on inflaming a new area, but, as a sign of their weakness, they could not relocate whole armies of fighters.
This prevented the Taliban’s senior leadership from orchestrating a national strategy with any of the sophistication we saw in Iraq. The Taliban were seeking to build a national political infrastructure, with varying degrees of success. But their strategy was, more than anything, opportunistic, even when seeking to choke off Kandahar or control swaths of Helmand. The insurgency grew where it could grow, where the government was weakest or worst. Their reliance on local grievances, not nationalism or ideology, was a glaring liability. The introduction of minimally decent and competent governance could cause the local resistance to wilt.
But their composition also, I knew, made for a daunting tactical, intelligence, and development challenge. To our frustration and bewilderment, security and popular sentiment could often be night-and-day on an opposite ridgeline, between towns, or across far more subtle geographic features: In one of the most violent areas in the corridor connecting Helmand and Kandahar, one of my civilian advisers reported that the few lanes of a highway formed the dividing line between relative stability in the arid stretch to its north and a vicious fight among pomegranate orchards and grape vineyards to the south. To prevail, we needed to create a counterinsurgency effort that was synchronized across Afghanistan but agile enough to adapt to the war we faced in each village and valley.
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Not long into the summer, during a morning update—at ISAF, I had instituted a forum similar to the O&I meeting we’d run in TF 714—a briefer from one of the regional commands noted that there had been a civilian casualty recently in his area of operations. This death came on the heels of other incidents in the days prior, in which one and two civilians had died. I asked the circumstances of this latest event, which was forty-eight hours earlier, and the briefer admitted he had no details. Neither did my staff there in ISAF headquarters. The steady trickle of dead Afghans appeared to be an afterthought.