Sarah Chayes is the author of Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security. In an interview at Huffington Post, she looks now at Kunduz as an example of a corrupt government fueling support of an anti-government insurgency.
Talking of corruption can be a bit vague. She highlights the problem of land theft by government officials, to make it more real. She tries to convey what theft of land in an agricultural nation might really mean.
Back in the spring of 2009, when I first looked closely at Kunduz, the governor was famous for his land grabs. In an arid place like Afghanistan, almost entirely dependent on high-end agriculture, fruit growing and such, land is incredibly precious. Stealing someone's land is worse than murdering them.
Why Afghanistan Is Going To Fall To The Taliban Again. And It's Not Why You Think., Ryan Grim, Huffington Post
The governor being talked about as famous for his land grabs is
Mohammad Omar. He had been governor of Baghlan early on. And then governor of Kunduz for six years. He was assassinated in 2010. His brother, installed as a district police chief in Kunduz, had been assassinated the year before.
Internet sources say that Omar is affiliated with Abdul Rasul Sayyaf's Ittihad faction. And that he also has good relations with Jamiat-e Islami. These two factions have a very long history of land theft and other abuse.
Political organizers and journalists have made numerous complaints about Sayyaf’s Ittihad faction and the Jamiat-e Islami/Shura-e Nazar/Nehzat-e Melli faction in particular.
The Rule of the Gun: Human Rights Abuses and Political Repression in the Run-up to Afghanistan’s Presidential Election, Human Rights Watch, 2004
When the United States invaded Afghanistan, the first bricks of cash we handed out went to Mohammed Fahim of Jamiat. Abdullah Abdullah served to put some polish on the crudeness of what Fahim might say. This is according to the account in First In, by Gary Schroen.
Fahim went on to be First Vice President of Afghanistan, until his death last March. Abdullah is currently Chief Executive Officer, the prime-minister-like position in the unity government deal.
The second bricks of cash were given to Sayyaf, the Ittihad leader. In addition to being a warlord with a history of atrocity in the civil war, Sayyaf is a pious Islamic scholar. Sayyaf was insulted at the crudeness of how the Americans handed out the cash. In his presumably considerable experience of receiving money from say the Saudis, no one had ever just pushed money across a table at him before.
On the American side, the money pushers were aware they were pushing money across a table to the man who had brought Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan.
In 2009, the United States was developing an exit plan for Afghanistan. Large numbers of Afghan security forces, under trained, under educated, and under paid, would be ramped up and sent out into the fighting faster than anyone thought could really be done. There would be a large surge of U.S. forces, who would later leave. Some fifteen thousand conventional forces would assault the small opium trafficking town of Marjah, and once battle hardened, they would fully take the city of Kandahar. (This large assault of a small town, failed. Kandahar was dealt with by other methods. A discussed parallel civilian surge, by the State Department, never happened.)
And as a temporary measure, or so it was said at the time, small armed gangs of Afghan men would work with United States irregular warfare fighters to control small areas. Mohammad Omar, governor of Kunduz, got in on this plan.
In June 2009, Kunduz Governor Mohammad Omar announced the creation of an Afghan Public Protection Force (APPF) in Kunduz province, for which 150 to 200 men were to be recruited in each district to complement regular ANP. In July, Gov. Omar and provincial security officials conducted shuras throughout the province, in which elders and former mujahedeen commanders were asked to identify suitable recruits for the force. Omar subsequently learned, however, that APPF would not be expanded to Kunduz province and increasingly frustrated with a shortage of ANSF, especially ANP, Kunduz authorities moved to stand up militia forces which would work with the ANSF to combat the growing insurgency.
Militias in Kunduz; A Tale of Two Districts, U.S. Embassy Kabul
Small gangs of armed men are very handy for any governor wanting to steal agricultural land.
Ryan Grim, in his interview with Sarah Chayes, quotes the New York Times about the gangs.
Over the past few years, faith in the government and the warlords who were allied with the government, never strong, has rapidly diminished. Militias and Afghan Local Police forces installed by the American Special Forces were largely unaccountable. They extorted protection money from farmers, and committed rapes and robberies. But because they had guns and the backing of local strongmen close to the government, people’s complaints were ignored.
In Khanabad, a district southeast of Kunduz City, for instance, residents complained that the local militias were worse than the Taliban in part because while the Taliban would only demand payment once for a harvest, there was often more than one militia, each demanding its own share.
A Taliban Prize, Won in a Few Hours After Years of Strategy, Joseph Goldstein, New York Times
And here is Sarah Chayes:
This was (likely) a brainchild of then-Gen. David Petraeus, modeled on Iraq. The idea, first launched in Afghanistan in 2009, and in Kunduz a couple of years later, was to briefly train and stand up local militias to fight the Taliban. The notion was that U.S. special forces would be working with them, they would be supervised by local elders and unlikely to commit depredations against their neighbors.
I was against this initiative from the start, and argued hard against it when I worked for the commander of the international troops (the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF). I didn't see how the solution to poorly trained and disciplined police and armed forces was even less well-trained and disciplined local militias. And sure enough, ALP units quickly became the scourge of their neighbors, shaking people down, committing human rights abuses, and so on.
Why Afghanistan Is Going To Fall To The Taliban Again. And It's Not Why You Think., Ryan Grim, Huffington Post
The United States has defended the effort to its people, as a tale of two districts. In some districts, the small armed gangs brought security. In some, it was recognized, they brought little beyond robbery, rape, murder, and the theft of land.
In Kunduz, Taliban imams spoke in the mosques. The Taliban ran courts to deal with the corrupt, and bring justice.
As a result, over the past year, the Taliban have managed to put some of their imams in Kunduz’s mosques, as well as appoint judges that were able to solve some long-festering cases against powerful locals that the authorities had previously feared to touch. This gained them a fair amount of popularity among the local population. Still, nobody seems to have expected this!
Inside Kunduz: 'The Taliban have taken my city', Ershad Alijani and Gaelle Faure, France24
By the fall of 2015, they had taken the city.
The Huffington Post has given the interview a title, "Why Afghanistan Is Going To Fall To The Taliban Again." I'm not sure that Afghanistan in its entirety falling, as a given, is precisely the forecast that Sarah Chayes is making. If the Taliban takeover continues, she would not be surprised.
If the status quo prevails, will the Taliban takeover continue?
I don't see why it wouldn't.
There's a pattern that I wouldn't be surprised to see repeated. In the south, where I lived, what would often happen is a dramatic Taliban offensive, capture of a key site, followed by a government/ISAF recapture. But when you looked closely, you found that the Taliban had in fact executed a "strategic withdrawal." That is, they had faded away in the face of the counter-attack. This would usually happen in the summer or fall. Then, during the winter, they'd filter back into the area, start intimidating and assassinating people, and work their way back in. So, by the next year, they actually controlled all the territory they had gained briefly in that initial attack, but had regained it almost invisibly.
Why Afghanistan Is Going To Fall To The Taliban Again. And It's Not Why You Think., Ryan Grim, Huffington Post
Here, at any rate, is Michael Semple, seeing a rising chronic insecurity and civil war, with repeated gains and losses of the same territory.
The military campaign in Afghanistan is moving not toward a Taliban victory but toward chronic insecurity and essentially civil-war-type conditions.
Veteran Observer Dissects Taliban Kunduz Victory, Zhakfar Ahmadi, Radio Free Europe
English language experts on Afghanistan, people who have lived there, often have a noticeably different take on the presence of the United States in Afghanistan than we will read here. It is not a simple "U.S. Out Now" stance. There is a deeply anguished sense of what we have brought about. There is a sense that it did not have to be so bad.
Anand Gopal, in No Good Men Among the Living, tells the story of Mullah Cable, a former Taliban enforcer, an anti-government insurgent. At one point, Mullah Cable had not wanted the United States to just up and leave. Afghanistan, then, would just descend into civil war, same as it had before.
Sarah Chayes says she deals with this at a logical level. The United States cannot now help.
I was caught within a policy that was not going to achieve the objectives. So I said, “Oh! Well, how can I ask a soldier to die for it?” At which point, logically, I have to be in favour of withdrawal.
Sarah Chayes: on living in Afghanistan and sleeping with a Kalashnikov, Tim Lewis, Guardian
As part of our exit plan, we had ramped up numerous small armed gangs. The corruption and insecurity they bring, the injustice, then fueled the Taliban. This was a policy that was never going to achieve the claimed objectives. And we will be leaving Afghanistan beset with the gangs we had ramped up.
So, I'm afraid I don't see how the U.S. can helpfully respond in Afghanistan, at this point. We had more than a decade, and we squandered a remarkable moment in history.
Why Afghanistan Is Going To Fall To The Taliban Again. And It's Not Why You Think., Ryan Grim, Huffington Post