Local Issues and Legitimacy

By Dave Anderson:

The LA Times has a very good article on the Kunduz region in Afghanistan.  I first want to highlight the confirmation and reiteration of a long-lasting and disturbing indicator from a COIN perspective, and then hit on the major point of political legitimacy and coalition building.

A Taliban-run shadow administration, complete with a governor, a court
system and tax levies, wields greater authority than its official
counterpart in much of Kunduz province.



Traffic is thin and nervously quick on the main highway, where
insurgent roadblocks and ambushes have been common, spurred in part by
a new NATO supply line running south from Tajikistan.



"There's no safety now -- it's war," said Abdul Rahman, an ice cream
vendor who is afraid to travel to his home in an outlying district.
"The Taliban aren't in the city yet, but they're out there everywhere
in the countryside around here. I'm scared."

When the insurgency can set up road blocks and toll booths on the major highway in a region, that indicates it has a more pervasive presence then the government.  When an insurgency or insurgencies are perceived to be everywhere, the government is losing.  When the insurgency or insurgencies are running courts and collecting taxes from the local population while the central government is not able to perform those basic functions, the government is a hollow joke and not a relevant actor to most people.  But we know this and have known that the Taliban have been running a parrellel and more pervasive shadow government in significant portions of Afghanistan for years now. 

The more interesting part is the local issue fights and motivation of one of the most prominent insurgent commanders.  He is fighting for a bigger piece of the pie but is willing to collect security rents in return for political power.

A key link between the two is the feared Soviet-era insurgent commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Kunduz native.


Hekmatyar's fighters frequently stage attacks against Western
troops and Afghan security forces in the north. But in what analysts
describe as a classic Afghan hedging technique, the commander is making
political inroads in the region, even as he keeps up the battlefield
pressure.



Many think Hekmatyar is positioning himself for possible power-sharing
in a new administration likely to be led by President Hamid Karzai. The
Afghan leader, facing a runoff challenge from his former foreign
minister, Abdullah Abdullah, is cementing ties with powerful warlords
such as Hekmatyar, ignoring Western discomfort over such alliances.

The easiest way to make peace is to give some of your enemies a chunk of what they want.  Karzai is attempting to cover his own ass and conceding to the reality that the Kabul government has a very light writ into the countryside without ISAF forces to back his faction up, a political re-arrangement of extraordinary decentralization and fragmentation serves Karzai's purposes much better than seeing his head on a pike. 

And realistically, Hekmatyar has a demonstrated capacity to bring order to his region of the country even if it is an oppressive order.  The United States as a declining but still hegemonic power has interests towards order above human rights in areas of tertiary concern.  Kunduz Province's internal governance, as long as there is actual governance and an elite that does not support deep-strike terrorism, is such a tertiary concern.