The Washington Independent » gul agha shirzai

Send Warlords, Guns and Money

Spencer Ackerman — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:08:37 +0000

For a really excellent facts-on-the-ground view of Afghanistan, don’t miss defense wonk Nick Dowling’s series of posts at Small Wars Journal. Take a look at his trip through Nangahar, the province run by warlord Gul Agha Shirzai:

Sherzai is practically a caricature of the Afghan warlord: a former Muj against the Russians, he combines ruthlessness with Machiavellian political skills and a convenient comfort with corruption or worse. He would be easy to dislike if not for the fact that he keeps Nangarhar safe and increasingly prosperous while staunchly pro-American. The visible focused police presence I saw in downtown Jalalabad is indicative of how Sherzai has tamed the province and increased capacity along many dimensions. Fertile lands and an increasing role as a regional economic hub have spurred ideas of what reliable power, further irrigation, and an airport could yield in turning Jalalabad’s agricultural wealth into a valuable export.

All that still seems pretty easy to dislike! As Dowling writes, Shirzai basically robs the citizens of Nangahar, collecting a tariff at a border crossing into Pakistan and placing it into his personal “fund.” Reconstruction and development work is funded through U.S. and international contributions. Payment of civil-servant salaries come from Kabul. That’s warlordism for you — corrupt and distasteful by definition. The question is whether to accommodate it or confront it.

Here’s Dowling’s take:

One can think of stabilization as a sequence from engagement to ceasefire to managed peace to self-sustaining peace to long term development and (perhaps) democratization. Nangarhar is ready for a stronger emphasis on sustainable development and governance capacity building that can withstand the inevitable departures of Sherzai and most US assistance. This is not to dismiss the contribution made by Sherzai. He is a good example that working with nasty characters can be a necessary and effective part of small wars.

Certainly history bears out the fact that it happens, and if the concern is security, effective would seem an apt description. The biggest contribution to security in Iraq came when the United States decided to cut deals with Sunni insurgents instead of confronting them. Despite gauzy lionizations, the former insurgents’ characters didn’t change when they shifted from anti- to pro-American, just their calculations of interest. Dealing with them is appropriate when everyone understands the transactionalism of the arrangement.

But let’s say the concern isn’t just immediate security but stabilization. Then it’s important to develop Dowling’s point about stabilization being a sequence of events — in this case, one that would compel Shirzai to change his ways for the benefit of Nangahar, or to help establish viable institutions that weaken Shirzai and assist in development. That way Shirzai’s achievements in security can be a platform to build upon and a weigh-station out of warlordism. Now, if the United States doesn’t have an interest in stabilization, then it should just look for a competent warlord and leave him alone. But if we’re deciding that we do, then leaving Afghanistan to the “governors” could look like a short-sighted approach.

Treating Karzai Like a Bad Smell

Spencer Ackerman — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:44:30 +0000

Here’s a rigorously reported piece on the history of the relationship between the United States and Afghan President Hamid Karzai — as you’ll see from the piece, we only have a U.S.-Afghan relationship as a derivative effect — from Rajiv Chandrasekaran. It suggests this must be a perplexing time for Karzai: he spent the last seven years being alternatively cultivated by the Bush administration and providing it with a fig leaf, so to see the Obama administration being unimpressed with him and seemingly unwilling to change its perspective on him has to be difficult to understand. According to Chandrasekaran, now that it appears unlikely that anyone will successfully dislodge Karzai from office in the summer’s elections, the Obama administration’s approach will be to treat him as irrelevant:

Obama intends to maintain an arm’s-length relationship with Karzai in the hope that it will lead him to address issues of concern to the United States, according to senior U.S. government officials. The administration will also seek to bypass Karzai by working more closely with other members of his cabinet and by funneling more money to local governors.

Time will tell whether this amounts to irresponsibility. But it seems egregious to write off the probably reelected president of a major ally while fighting a war in his country, even if he’s failed to demonstrate his capability to govern responsibly. It would be nice to think that the administration’s approach is to broaden the U.S.-Karzai relationship into a U.S.-Afghan relationship. But it’s not like the governors of Afghanistan are a bunch of enlightened technocrats and statesmen. They’re people like Gul Agha Shirzai — warlords-turned-governors. In a country with a weak central government and limited history of competent central governance, efforts to rebalance the relationship between the capitol and the provinces by well-intentioned foreign actors can easily end up as destabilizing vectors.

I defer to Joshua Foust, but it doesn’t take a Karzai apologist (or Bush apologist) to start wondering if the administration’s approach to Karzai isn’t beginning to seem like anything-but-Bush-ism.

After Karzai: The Warlords?

Spencer Ackerman — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:38:20 +0000

The Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Rosenberg (with aid from Yochi Dreazen) has a piece that I can’t recommend strongly enough: a profile of Gul Agha Shirzai, the “former” warlord who might end up replacing Hamid Karzai, that asks whether the alternative to a weak government of technocrats is a government of warlords. That gloss is a bit of an oversimplification, since Shirzai has been governor of Nangarhar province in the country’s east for five years, but he tells The Journal that the relative security and tribal-based graft he’s brought to Nangarhar will be what he offers Afghanistan as a whole:

“I will go to all the tribal elders, the way I have done it in Nangarhar. And we will negotiate with the tribes who are supporting the Taliban,” Mr. Shirzai says, sitting in his bedroom at the governor’s mansion in the provincial capital, Jalalabad. “We don’t have to rely only on fighting and bombing and jet planes. That we use only for those people who won’t talk.”

Interestingly, he’s directly in favor of a Sons-of-Iraq-style tribal-militia program, something that the current government is at least halfway uncomfortable with:

Speaking with a handful of American military officers and officials after the March 5 security meeting, the governor said he was considering setting up village militias in districts of his province where the Taliban are strongest. The central government, with U.S. support, is setting up a similar pilot program in another part of the country.

Anyway, Shirzai is what you’d expect of a warlord: he gets his kickbacks, intimidates his rivals and everyone’s happy. (A Jalalabad shopkeeper tells The Journal, “Every politician in Afghanistan is a thief, but our governor doesn’t take all the money for himself. He is building our city.”) A friend of mine always wonders why the press refers to some corrupt foreign leaders as “warlords” and others with the more dignified “tribal leaders.” While the two aren’t exactly equivalent in this case — Shirzai’s tribal ties aren’t in Nangarhar — here at least the shorthand used for Afghanistan will at least remain consistent if Shirzai ends up becoming president, not that I have any idea how likely that is or isn’t. A blow against euphemism! Maybe if he was born in London, Shirzai would be called a Wide Boy.

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