UPDATED: "Taliban": Well, They All Look the Same....

This week Josh Mull ("UJ"), both in his guest blog and in his comments, has offered valuable insight into the complexity of local groups and insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I've now discovered an analysis by Steve Hynd ("Cernig"), which I think is an excellent introduction to the political, economic, and social dimensions beyond the label "Taliban". It's reprinted below this report from Al Jazeera:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWT1kqoeszI[/youtube] 

Taliban: What's in a Name?

Two years into the Iraq war, moderately well read Westerners already knew that the insurgency there wasn't monolithic. Honest reporting repeatedly made clear that Al Qaeda, Sunni militant groups of various varieties and Sadrists didn't see eye to eye and often worked at cross purposes even while all were hostile to America and its allies.

Yet after seven years in Afghanistan, the same cannot be said about Western knowledge of militants in the region. There's a big, amorphous mass called "The Taliban" which is in cahoots with Al Qaeda - and that's about as fine grained as it usually gets.


That was sufficient back in 2001. The American-led coalition invaded to engage Osama bin Laden's group and the Taliban's organized fighters and on the battlefield itself Afghans quickly sorted into those who were either Al Qeada or Taliban, or those who were against them.

But it doesn't cover the current complex situation at all well,which means the West's voters are at a disadvantage when it comes to understanding - and approving or disapproving - their leaders' plans. As Brandon Friedman, a former officer who served in Afghanistan, put it in a recent email:

Instead of fighting organized theocratic government forces and their foreign terrorist guests, we're now arrayed against a Tatooine-esque combination actual foreign terrorists, actual Taliban fighters from two different countries, narco-warlords jockeying for regional power and influence, regular warlords jockeying for regional power and influence, angry Afghan citizens who've grown weary of civilian casualties, angry Afghan civilians who've grown weary of foreign forces and their broken promises, regular Afghan citizens who side with the Taliban out of sheer necessity for survival, angry opium farmers, Pakistani agents, and, finally, the invisible blight of government corruption.

Reducing that complexity to a simple "Us and Them" formula hinders much of the debate about Afghanistan.

So it was pleasant to see, among coverage of recent US missile strikes, a report by Mark Mazzetti, David Sanger and Eric Schmidt of the New York Times which tried to explain the various flavors of Taliban, their motives and their aims. The piece highlighted the difference between the Taliban group that Pakistan is most interested in opposing, Baitullah Mehsud's Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and the network run by Jalaluddin Haqqani, which is believed responsible for the campaign against Western forces in Afghanistan.

The latter group thinks the former has no business attacking Pakistani security forces or the Pakistani government, pointing to a reciprocal tension between Pakistan and the US-led coalition in Afghanistan. While the Pakistani government is happy to do peace deals with Haqqani's network and less so with Mehsud's, the coalition is more likely to eventually do so with the latter. Meanwhile, Pakistani counter-terror efforts are always going to focus on Mehsud's groups - which isn't all that useful to the West.

We could do with more of this kind of reporting about the region. In particular, we could do with more differentiation on press reports of the four or five main current strains of Taliban of interest to Western efforts in the region. That's the plea recently made by Frederick Kagan, in a short article for the National Review Online reproduced at the American Enterprise Institute:

There is no such thing as "the Taliban" today. Many different groups with different leaders and aims call themselves "Taliban," and many more are called "Taliban" by their enemies. In addition to Mullah Omar's Taliban based in Pakistan and indigenous Taliban forces in Afghanistan, there is an indigenous Pakistani Taliban controlled by Baitullah Mehsud (this group is thought to have been responsible for assassinating Benazir Bhutto). Both are linked with al-Qaeda, and both are dangerous and determined. In other areas, however, "Taliban" groups are primarily disaffected tribesmen who find it more convenient to get help from the Taliban than from other sources.

In general terms, any group that calls itself "Taliban" is identifying itself as against the government in Kabul, the U.S., and U.S. allies. Our job is to understand which groups are truly dangerous, which are irreconcilable with our goals for Afghanistan--and which can be fractured or persuaded to rejoin the Afghan polity. We can't fight them all, and we can't negotiate with them all. Dropping the term "Taliban" and referring to specific groups instead would be a good way to start understanding who is really causing problems.

Mullah Omar's Taliban - the original Afghanistan-ruling Taliban - is nowadays more under the day-to-day direction of Mullah Bradar (or Brehadar), Omar's trusted chief of military operations but it still leans heavily towards the position of Jalaluddin Haqqani's Taliban, which has largely supplanted it as the pre-eminent force in Afghanistan. Both are based in Pakistan but mostly interested in attacking allied forces in Afghanistan and the Afghan government. As one prominent member of Omar's group told Asia Times reporter Syed Saleem Shahzad last September:

It is necessary to understand that there is a sea of difference between the people who call themselves the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Taliban [led by Mehsud] and the Taliban. We have nothing to do with them. In fact, we oppose the policies they adhere to against the Pakistani security forces.

We individually speak to all groups, whether they are Pakistanis, Kashmiris, Arabs, Uzbeks or whosoever, telling them not to create violence in Pakistan, especially in the name of the Taliban.

Journalists in the West could do worse than refer to veteran reporter Anand Gopal's incisive look at the various competing groups of militants in the region, which also include the resurgent Hizb-i-Islami of charismatic fundamentalist Hekmatyar, who like Haqqani used to be one of those favored by both CIA and ISI intelligence agencies. Gopal writes of a "rainbow coalition" arrayed against U.S. troops, which is "competing commanders with differing ideologies and strategies, who nonetheless agree on one essential goal: kicking out the foreigners."

As Brandon Freidman writes, it's tempting to default to the soundbite term "Taliban" when talking about all these groups and to thus treat them as if they were one monolithic structure. But a more nuanced debate is not only healthy in any democracy, it might pave the way for Western public acceptance of what every military commander has said must eventually happen if there is ever to be real peace - an accord with more moderate groups to reconcile them to mainstream Afghan and Pakistani politics.

Comments

[UJ]

[Caution: Snottiness Ahead]

Cernig is right about the conflation of all of these militia groups (though I'd disagree with his assertion that its "honest" reporting, implying dishonesty from anyone who doesn't keep to his strict nomenclature.)

I have a problem with his narrative of Iraq's civil war, though he's right to point out the parallel. I don't remember any of these thoughtful, detailed pieces on the Iraqi insurgency from 2005 that he's talking about. There was a lot of coverage of the British and their (now laughable) successes in the Shiite south, but the Sunni groups were at that point inaccessible. I do, however, remember this exact line of reasoning from 2006-2007 just as the US was preparing for its so-called "Surge" strategy.

Back then the same "genus" of reporters, analysts, and experts tried desperately to explain to us idiot westerners that we simply do not and/or can not understand the unique tribal nature of the militants, the ethnic and sectarian divisions within society, or the specific geopolitical agendas of the individual players. Along with the idea that anything "tribal" is magically resistant to western influence, the implication is that the mission is so complicated or ethereal that it can never actually be accomplished. They said the Surge was doomed to fail and nothing could be done to save Iraq.

Here's my favorite money quote from insurgency/terrorist researcher Evan Kohlmann's piece in Salon at the time: "The idea that the U.S. is bolstering Sunni extremist groups in Iraq deliberately is pretty ridiculous and sounds awfully conspiratorial to me." Why? Because, "most of the Sunni groups consider themselves to be antithetical to the very idea of the United States."

Damn those Sunnis and their congenital opposition to freedom!

Of course we now know these Sunni militias as the Sahwa, the Awakening, Concerned Local Citizens or a variety of other terms. They engaged the US military diplomatically, took weapons and money, and in return policed the streets of Iraq and even took up campaigns against al-Qa'eda cells and sundry other non-aligned, criminal militias. This was absolutely fundamental to the success of the US strategy as well as a major contributor to the current improved security environment in Iraq.

So why didn't the strategy fail? After all, these guys belong to tribes, and the tribes and militias all have different names, and some groups want one thing, and other groups want something else entirely! Oh noes! The strategy worked because absent from any of this analysis is the fact that these tribal militants are Human Beings! They have basic needs and basic agendas, and they're capable of reasoning, logic, and above all else pragmatism.

Now of course it's important that we understand the differences between the groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan in order to develop workable Tactics, but from a Strategic, counter-insurgency perspective, there's not really any conclusions to draw from the differences in militia groups. Tactically you may have to adjust on a tribe-to-tribe or militia-to-militia basis, but the basic strategies of COIN operations remain the same.

Quite frankly there is no difference strategically between Tehrik-i-Taliban and the Camorra, Mehsud's tribe and the Chiricahua, or Hizb-i-Islami and the 1920 Revolution Brigades. The solution requires ample resources, substantive intelligence, and more than anything else, time and patience. COIN tactics change, but the objective and its solution remains the same whether you're in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or the Republic of Lakota.

With that I'd dispute the entire thrust behind Cernig's piece. I appreciate his concern for the lingo used in the debate, but I don't buy the conclusion that western voters and consumers of the mainstream media would be better off if they were more educated on the individual flavors of extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It doesn't matter if Mullah Omar wears a hat on his feet and shoes on his hands, what matters to the electorate is the objective of the mission and the price of the mission.

If the discussion is tactics, fine, then even the smallest difference between Taliban and taliban becomes extremely important. However, the question for western citizens is whether or not they are committed to ending terrorist safe havens in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and whether or not they're willing to pay the billions of dollars and countless lives required to do so.

There are much more important issues for researchers and analysts to discuss about Afghanistan and Pakistan than whether or not the Washington Post, or some guy in Kansas, knows what Gulbuddin Hekmaytar eats for breakfast.