Carter Malkasian, War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier. (London: C Hurst & Co Publishers; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Reviewed by Brian M Downing
A government that is losing to an insurgency isn’t being out-fought, it’s being out-governed.
– Bernard Fall
In 1972, late in the Vietnam War, Jeffrey Race published War Comes to Long An – a remarkable study of a single province’s experience as the Viet Cong insurgency grew there from the late 50s to the mid-60s. The present book by former State Department officer Carter Malkasian takes its title from that study and seeks to present as penetrating an analysis of a district in southern Afghanistan as Race’s work did for a province west of Saigon. Fortunately for followers of counterinsurgency thinking and the Afghan war, Malkasian has been successful.
Upon living in the district for two years and interviewing scores of elders, officials, notables, villagers, American soldiers, and even many Taliban, Malkasian has chronicled the Garmser district from the rebellions against the communist government in 1979 through various wars and governments to the present day. Three crucial themes stand out: administrative competence, tribal politics, and control of land.
The communist programs of the late 70s brought schooling, land reform, and greater official presence to the district. This led to resistance then open rebellion from notables (elders, landowners) who lost land and power, and from mullahs who resented non-religious education. Poor peasants who had benefited from land reform eventually placed religion over self-interest and joined the mujahideen.
In the course of the long war, many notables were killed or went into exile, and the mullahs, theretofore a politically unimportant group, rose to prominence in local affairs. Local government had changed.
The Soviet withdrawal, completed in 1989, meant victory for the mujahideen bands but it also brought infighting and chaos. This situation played itself out in much of Afghanistan, perhaps most notably in Kandahar (to Garmser’s east) where a tightly-knit group of former mujahideen and students – the emerging Taliban – suppressed warring bands, established their rule, and determined to take over the country.
The Taliban’s rise in Garmser was based more on politics than on warfare. In the absence of a unified opposition or appealing alternative, some notables accepted the Taliban for their piety, others saw them as preferable to the present turmoil, still others judged them as inevitable winners and aligned themselves accordingly. A few elders resisted, but they soon gave up or fled. Garmser fell with very little fighting.
The first Taliban government found support from the younger mullahs, who became teachers and judges and administrators, and from the poor, who had benefited from the communist land reform, which had been overturned by notables but reinstated by the Taliban. Many others found the Taliban’s autocratic but decisive rule preferable to the bickering, delay, and indecision of the notables.
The Taliban’s appeal wore away. Enforcement of austere religious codes and conscription for the interminable war against the Northern Alliance became irksome. The mullahs had religious instruction, though not much, but knew nothing about getting products to markets, building bridges and roads, or maintaining the canals that run through the district. Education and healthcare saw no improvement. Hope for postwar prosperity faded.
When the US-backed Northern Alliance swept south after 9/11, the Taliban fled without a fight into Pakistan and the old Garmser notables returned to power – and with them came the old bickering, delay, and indecision. Local government was all too often inept and corrupt, leaving many residents to recall the Taliban as at least evenhanded and based on external law, not personal or tribal interest. Efforts at reconciliation with the old regime were minimal: many mullahs were harassed and beaten, and land was taken back from the poor.
Regrouping in Pakistan, the Taliban saw Garmser as ripe for retaking, though not yet for attacking. The Taliban, above all else, are adept at organization and strategy. Mullahs were sent to work with indigenous ones to agitate against Garmser notables and settle disputes independent of the government. Cadres came later to recruit and train local youths, who rallied to the mullahs’ denunciations of government corruption and its reliance on foreign troops, though money and notions of adventure figured in young minds as well.
District government had little in the way of military force to counter the growing threat. Militias were the personal retinue of notables and there was insufficient elite consensus to form a strategy against the better organized Taliban. As of then, there were no American, British, or Afghan troops in the district. By the fall of 2006, with only sporadic opposition, Garmser was again in Taliban hands.
The second Taliban government found support from tribes that felt slighted by the former district governor, from people who had been wronged by his administrators, and from the poor who, under the Taliban, had tilled their own land – the same land that the communists had given them, that the notables had taken back, that the first Taliban government had returned to them, and that the notables had taken back. Allowing landowners to retake land was “one of America’s greatest mis-steps in Afghanistan” (p. 81).
The Taliban’s old failings recurred in their second government. Economic development remained weak, education worsened. The first Taliban government had made schools chiefly religious in nature; the second closed them altogether.
In late 2008, the US deployed marines to reestablish control in Garmser and after several months of hard fighting – much of which was surprisingly conventional in nature, with the guerrillas defending fixed positions – the Taliban were on their back foot. A further blow came when disputes over land ownership flared between Taliban leaders and tribal elders who had previously supported mullah rule.
The Taliban were driven far to the south of Garmser and then across the Durand Line into Pakistan. Remaining guerrillas planted IEDs and intimidated or assassinated government officials. They still do. More ominously, many locals continue to think of the Taliban as fair administrators and guarantors of land for the poor.
From his vantage point of US political officer in Garmser, Malkasian sees considerable economic and political development there over the last few years, once security was reestablished and Washington finally saw fit to allocate resources to the hapless, ravaged district.
A reasonably fair and effective district government has formed, linking the Kabul government with local notables. Judges, some with advanced degrees in Islamic law, travel about the district settling disputes more impartially than had predecessors. Schools are reopening. The economy is doing well; average income is up twenty-five percent from 2010 to 2011. Tribal militias have been integrated with the national police force, reducing the potential for warlordism. Unfortunately, the author presents these accomplishments far too briefly.
Despite signs of progress, Garmser’s future, Malkasian notes in considerable detail, is clouded. As American forces withdraw, local confidence in their government and military is falling. With several hundred fighters just across the Pakistani border, the Taliban are beginning to reassert their presence in Garmser, increasingly by infiltrating the police and army.
Most critically, hope that the absence of US troops would lead to greater cooperation among the district government, tribal elders, and landowners has thus far not been borne out. Without such cooperation, the Taliban can exploit local divisions and take control over the district, just as they did twice before in the last twenty years.