Why Everyone Got Afghanistan Wrong
Virtually everyone overlooked the lack of a clear authority, the country's developmental complexity, the collective trauma in its social imaginary, and social conditions making it ripe for fascism.
Over the course of reading 20 books on Afghanistan at the end of the summer, amid a wider study of nation building, it became increasingly clear that virtually all the experts were failing to account for four critical factors that allowed the Taliban to reclaim power: the lack of a clear system of authority, the developmental complexity present in the country, the impact of collective trauma on its social imaginary, and a series of social conditions ripe for fascism.
The first problem lay in the lack of a recognizable system of authority. The elected Afghan government was theoretically responsible for the country, but most of its budget came in the form of military and humanitarian aid, which it did not control. Control of the humanitarian aid was dispersed over a wide array of international agencies, each with its own values and missions; control of military aid was dispersed among a wide array of states, each with its own imperatives.
The US may have led a coalition that "occupied" the country, but it had maintained a light presence since 2014. Moreover, "the coalition" itself was massive, at one point involving 50 other states. And each state was responsible for overseeing its own territory, bureau, or process. Hence, at one juncture, the relatively pacific Canada was responsible for maintaining security in the former Taliban capital of Kandahar, while the more militaristic United Kingdom was responsible for the nearby Helmand province, which would soon see heavy fighting. The lack of any clear system of authority only increased when it came to the state itself. Italy was responsible for reforming the judicial system, Germany for training the police, and so it went with the whole of the government.
Like many poor states, the government itself lacked control of the provinces, which were largely governed by a series of warlords-turned-statesmen. Each of these had their own systems of patronage, and many had troops they could call on in a crisis. The warlords were given a bad rap, but they were actually a varied lot with many coming to make responsible governors and cabinet members, according to observers, like Dipali Mukhopadhyay, who researched their tenures. Meanwhile, almost everyone overlooked the fact that traditional tribal councils had assumed a more democratic form at the local level where they were challenged to work with all of these forces. And virtually nobody saw fit to mention that the Taliban had formed shadow governments, which took on their own functions in every village, province, and city.
We can only guess at the insecurities this lack of a clear system of authority generated because virtually no one articulated, much less researched, its effects. It almost certainly left Afghans confused about who was in charge. It probably made it difficult for them to access their own government services where they existed. It likely led to some measure of disillusionment with democracy. And it is virtually guaranteed that it left many seeking a powerful force to govern the country, a force they would later find in the Taliban.
The second major problem that compounded this lack of authority was developmental complexity. The Afghan state was somehow tasked with integrating the activities of isolated tribal village councils, charismatic former warlords, a Weberian bureaucracy, advanced democratic foreign states, and global humanitarian institutions, like UNICEF and Save the Children. Each involved different levels of moral inclusion, social identification, functional capacities, and educational achievements. Hence, they involved radically different value systems, and in order to cooperate they required leaders capable of integral thinking. In other words, they required leaders capable of seeing things not simply from multiple different viewpoints but also multiple different developmental stages, with development here referring to increasing stages of integrated complexity.
Astonishingly, Afghans elected in Ashraf Ghani, a former Johns Hopkins professor of anthropology, who wrote a book on "Fixing Failed States, and was shortlisted to be Secretary General of the United Nations, a leader capable of speaking across these vast gulfs. Ghani was a former finance minister, who had overseen dramatic increases in economic growth, and he focused on battling corruption. It was the same formula adopted in the book he wrote long before he had any hope of becoming president. The only problem is that you cannot battle corruption in a state like Afghanistan without taking on the social structures that sustain it. And you cannot generate the momentum needed to bring about change without the kind of informal support that typically accrues to leaders who reward their supporters with positions of power. The question of whether or not he bestowed these privileges on his own brother is beside the point, though he almost certainly did not leave the country with $170 million, as reported by Russian news sites.
The third problem that virtually none of the experts focused on was collective trauma. Of course, everybody versed in Afghanistan knew that it had been at war for the past four decades. What they failed to account for is the way traumas are compounded over time and how traumatized individuals tend to lack the capacity to make sense of violence. Hence, Carlotta Gall, former New York Times correspondent and author of "The Wrong Enemy," could note that the Afghans she interviewed near suicide attacks on civilians often blamed them on coalition forces, even though they had obviously been carried out by the Taliban. Meanwhile, Ukmina Manoori, an uneducated trans villager who fought with the mujahideen against the Soviets in the eighties, and eventually rose the level of national legislator, would write about how he could not at first distinguish between the violence of coalition forces and those of the Soviet Union, which killed roughly 60 times more civilians annually. The violence of occupying powers had just all run together in his mind.
Thus, when total annual civilian murders from all sources declined dramatically in 2014 to a level more typical of a major American city in the early eighties, and America itself was so disengaged from battle that it would only lose an average of 14 soldiers a year, it still appeared to virtually everybody that the country was at war. And while the Taliban would kill roughly three times more civilians than coalition forces in the years for which UN data were provided, it was possible for some Afghans to imagine they were responsible for the vast bulk of killings. The problem was only compounded by journalists like Anand Gopal, who reported from the areas of heaviest fighting in the peak years of the war and could thus write about the miraculous peace that returned once the Taliban reclaimed power.
What virtually everyone ignored was the fact that, while the civilian deaths from terrorism and drone strikes were real enough, the idea of the violence was constructed in our own imaginations. Ideas of what it looked like in the provinces, and how it was dispersed across the country, were largely the result of collective traumas. And the failure to ground these visions of violence in any sort of data whatsoever on the part of most commentators meant that there was no way to construct a relatively unbiased account of the extent of the violence and who was causing it.
All this played into Taliban hands.
Meanwhile, the fourth problem that went almost completely unanalyzed was the Taliban's similarity to other fascist movements, which were sweeping the world right at the moment the Taliban was making a comeback. Fascist movements typically claim power in the wake of unstable efforts at democratization and dramatic increases in women's rights. They come to power amid high levels of inequality and the lack of clearly identifiable sources of authority. They meet social instability with regimentation, the breakdown of traditional social structures with the reification of newly constructed traditions, and the rising power of women with patriarchal extremism.
The Taliban may have been addressing the anxieties of a country far less economically developed than Nazi Germany or Trump's America. They may not have been centered around a cult of personality, as is typical of most fascist movements. And they may have been more reliant on cultural traditions than Mussolini's Italy. But the traditions they looked to were those of a single ethnic group which dominated the rest, and they were fused with a series of bizarre religious admonitions, which caricatured a barely remembered past. Meanwhile, the nihilism of their terrorism and their constant courting of destruction were all characteristic of fascist movements the world over.
And their fascism directly followed from the lack of identifiable sources of authority which they sought to remedy; the developmental complexity of the country, which led many to transform their lives and others to regress; the collective traumas that suffused their national imaginary, which led many to perceive violence as an all pervasive force to be defended against from the outside; and the more general tendencies of people the world over, who were swept up in a vast globalized fascist movement.
Since virtually everyone ignored the conditions leading to their rise, and their relationship to a vast global fascist movement, the Taliban was all too often treated as a traditionalist anti-occupation movement—even though everyone who knew anything about Afghanistan knew they had long been reliant on Pakistan, which sheltered them, funded their activities, organized their missions, manned them in moments of crisis, and even backed them with armies of trolls on social media. The result was a massive victory for globalized fascism, egged on by many of the same people who were instrumental in removing the most powerful fascist in the world from office less than a year prior to the Taliban’s reclamation of power.
~ Theo Horesh, author of The Fascism This Time: and the Global Future of Democracy