Wednesday, December 19, 2001
The Afghan way of war
There’s no indignity in surrender to fellow countrymen
AJAI SHUKLA
BY the time the Northern Alliance captured Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul, many analysts had begun to question the effectiveness of the American air campaign, waxing lyrical about the resilience of the hardy Afghans and the fanaticism of Al-Qaeda warriors. The Taliban’s unexpected capitulation in Kabul first illustrated the hazards of crystal-gazing in an unfamiliar context. The circumstances of Mullah Omar’s surrender in Kandahar further highlighted the peculiarity of the Afghan conflict, when the Taliban leader apparently vanished into thin air, despite the eager presence of American ground forces in the vicinity. The setting, preparation and execution of the War Against Terror are unique to Afghanistan and must be understood within this framework. The first principle of warfare in Afghanistan is survival. There is no glory in fighting to the last man, or even to the point where one’s strength is so dissipated that the next battle is jeopardised. In Afghanistan, history has proven that a defeated commander, or one whose army has suffered heavy losses, seldom recovers credibility. On the other hand, one who has avoided such a situation by withdrawing, negotiating with the enemy or even defecting along with his troops not only lives to fight another day but also keeps his army and his reputation. Even Ahmed Shah Masood, now an icon and a legend, chose to withdraw from Taloqan after losing 700 men in three months of Taliban attacks.
The reason for this is not cowardice, but realism. For almost a quarter of a century, Afghanistan has seen continuous fighting in which 1.5 million people have lost their lives. Conflict has been a daily reality and soldiering — part of full time — one of the few options for a man. In this context, there is little taste for pitched battles and massed troops laying down their lives in a glorious last stand. That would reduce a soldier’s life expectancy even further than harsh circumstance already does. Troops therefore look to commanders to plan battles so there are as few casualties as possible. It is permissible to take a long time to achieve one’s aims, but not to sacrifice too many lives or fight unnecessary battles.
Afghans perceive their history, not without reason, as a long saga of successfully resisting foreigners, all of whom meddled in the country and then abandoned it when their purpose had been served. In popular folklore, Afghans are a brave and proud people; foreigners are treacherous meddlers, not to be trusted on any account. This distrust extends to almost every nationality — American, Russian, British, Iranian and Pakistani above all. India is apparently one of few countries for which Afghans have a tangible bank of goodwill. In this worldview, surrendering to or negotiating a defection with another Afghan faction is permissible, but capitulating to a foreigner is disgraceful. Several big-ticket United Front generals — Rashid Dostum to name just one — have defected more than once between various factions without much damage to their military reputation.
While American bombing has gone a long way towards breaking the Taliban’s will to fight, an American ground attack would have been opposed by the Taliban far more vigorously than was that of the United Front. The Afghan attitude towards foreigners was also evident just before the attack on Kabul, when the US indirectly accused the United Front of dragging its feet in launching the attack despite the effective smashing of Taliban front lines. The United Front, which has been fighting the Taliban for six years, saw America’s need for a quick and visible success as completely different from its own aim of gaining a relatively bloodless victory. It eventually not only stuck to its own timeframe, but also backtracked on its promise to stop on the outskirts of Kabul, entering the city ostensibly to prevent looting and anarchy.
If the US believed the United Front would miss a chance to grab power, it displayed considerable ignorance of Afghan realpolitik. The United Front seemed clear that in dealing with America, real power would be far more useful than a reputation for sticking to promises. They believed America was using the United Front to do the real fighting; they, in turn, used the US to capture power in the country. It is difficult to ascertain who eventually used whom; it is likely that both sides benefited from each other. While most of Afghanistan fell without committing sizeable numbers of US troops, the United Front went into the Bonn negotiations holding all the aces.
The face-off at Maidanshahr was another textbook example of the warfare of defections and surrenders. When two United Front armies trapped Taliban forces between them, they deliberately left open the road running south to Ghazni. This allowed those Taliban fighters who had seen the light to switch loyalties, and the rest to escape without messy fighting. When there is no opportunity to escape, hardcore fighters are killed by their own comrades who wish to negotiate with the enemy. In Kunduz, after the Taliban surrender, 60 Chechen militants were found shot with their hands tied behind their backs — they had opposed any talk of surrender.
The so-called surrender of Mullah Omar at Kandahar also illustrated the hierarchy of associations in Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai, the future leader of the country who negotiated the surrender at Kandahar, quickly realised that Omar would never surrender to him because of his closeness to the Americans. Instead Omar made a deal with Mullah Naqib, who not only had tribal associations with Omar, but had also until recently been a Talib himself. Omar could do business with someone like him without losing face and Naqib handled things in true Afghan fashion, letting Omar go free while the Americans fumed helplessly. Simultaneously, Karzai brokered a deal between various factions fighting for control of the city, thus allowing everyone except the Americans to maintain face.
It is only in Tora Bora that a fight to the finish seemed to be in the offing. Here the predominantly foreign fighters, reportedly led by Osama bin Laden himself, did not have the Afghan option of defecting, exchanging their Pashtun turbans for Tajik pakuls, and soldiering on. The Arabs face possible execution, and Osama a humiliating trial by an American military tribunal — options that they are unlikely to relish. Pursuing Osama and his fighters beyond the Tora Bora mountains, checking out every escape route they could have exploited thus seems to be the only option for the anti-Taliban forces. A battle in Afghanistan, finally?
The writer is a retired army officer and is the defence correspondent with NDTV. He is currently in Afghanistan
© 2001: Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd. All rights reserved throughout the world.