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| The late Matiullah Khan coneals his infamous bare hands. |
Afghanistan’s
complexity refuses to fade as quickly as its strategic importance (Published at The Diplomat)
Among
the greatest hits of a popular wedding singer in Tarin Kot, the capital city of
the Afghan province that has produced such specimens as Mullah Omar and the man
who cut off the nose of the girl on the 2010 Time cover, is a ditty about an
illiterate former taxi driver, set to rebab and accordion. “Across the mountains
all the people know you / For you have killed many Talibs with your bare hands
/ God has saved you every time / You are Matiullah Khan.”
But
if you believe the reports of Afghan security officials,
God did not save Matiullah Khan – a warlord and longtime US patron in the
Afghanistan War – from a cross-dressing suicide bomber that lured him into the
backstreets of Kabul’s police district 6 one night last March. The
assassination, and the demure reaction of US and Afghan officials,
suggests Afghanistan is moving beyond the days when American counter-insurgents
channeled tens of millions of dollars to anti-Taliban strongmen, and is thus in
line with the White House’s February National Security Strategy declaration that “we have moved beyond the
large ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that defined so much of American foreign
policy over the past decade.”
Yet
war has not yet moved beyond the elders of Uruzgan, where Matiullah’s
replacement as police chief was shot dead by a suspected Taliban infiltrator
last Sunday.
They remain suspicious of the circumstances and contradictory official
reports of the death of Matiullah, a man as infamous for his security
precautions as he was for his summary executions of alleged Talibs. They wonder
how he was seen exiting his downtown hotel on his cell phone during a rare
visit to Kabul one moment, only to be blown up across town the next. Being
quite familiar with the various compositions of corpses of suicide bombings,
they wonder how his remained intact. Not having received any public condolences
from President Ashraf Ghani, they have led protests of thousands in Tarin Kot,
threatening to renounce a government that has moved beyond them.
War
has not yet moved beyond the 9,800 US troops that President Obama decided last month would stay in
Afghanistan through the end of 2015, either. That decision reversed plans to
close a US base in Jalalabad, where a US soldier was killed two weeks later, and where a
suicide bomber killed 35 Afghans a week after
that. Initial reports that the suicide
bombing was the work of the Islamic State have since been disputed by U.S. officials, giving way to
familiar reports of Taliban and Pakistani involvement, which cohere less
conveniently with joint US-Afghan calls in March for “reconciliation”
with the Taliban and “dialogue” with Pakistan.
Afghanistan,
in other words, is refusing to fade in complexity as quickly as it fades in
strategic importance. After all, it is the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al
Baghdadi – and not Pakistan-based al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri nor Taliban
leader Mullah Omar (an “ignorant, illiterate warlord, unworthy of spiritual or political
respect,” says Baghdadi) – who governs the
caliphate that meanders from the mosques of Mosul to the forests of Nigeria to the gates of the US consulate
in Benghazi, and who inspired the killing of cartoonists in
France last January.
It is
tempting, then, for Americans to dismiss Afghanistan’s complexity – to include
its Matiullah Khans –as Baghdadi dismisses Mullah Omar: no longer worthy of our
strategic respect. Yet while the strategy-fatigued
American people have pronounced the counterinsurgency manual, like its
architect General Petraeus, guilty, they have refused to completely wash their
hands of Afghanistan’s problems, and instead fantasize that they can solve the
same problems of Pakistani-fueled religious violence with ten percent of the
solution.
Indeed,
last December US troop levels dropped from their 2010 peak of 98,000 to 9,800,
even as the United Nations reported a 22 percent increase in
civilian casualties in 2014, making it the war’s deadliest year. The year also
marked a record yield of Afghan opium, a
resource whose abundance will spell prosperity for the country’s criminal and
terrorist networks for as long as it remains illegal. Meanwhile, even the
cultural metrics disappoint: for all the cups of tea shared between US “Religious Support Teams” and Afghans, Kabul in 2015
remains a city in which one faces public lynching
for being accused of burning a Koran.
Such
is the riddle that Matiullah Khan and his forlorn fellow warlords bequeath to
the US troops and diplomats who remain. A recent Washington Post article chronicled how the waning U.S.
support for Afghanistan’s warlords has pitted them in a “defining fight” for
relevance, quoting one Afghan who scoffed at the naïve “Western” dismissal of
warlords: “[T]hey have to be respected.” Yet for the White House, which cites
“reconciliation” with the Taliban as “the surest way to achieve the full
retrograde of U.S. and foreign troops from Afghanistan[,]” the anti-Taliban
warlords have outlived their usefulness. Years ago, when they were still
useful, one U.S. Army Colonel in Uruzgan with guarded respect for Matiullah
Khan asked himself, “At what point is a
person too gray and approaching black and just too bad to be tolerated?” It is
time for Americans to ask the same question of Afghanistan.
