Taliban by Fergusson James

Author:Fergusson, James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld

You Americans come here with a stamp

You brand one man Osama

One man Khalilzad

You came here to rebuild this country

You build roads and bridges

You call that rebuilding?

You should go back to your country with all this concrete

May it kick you in the head as you go

Ustad Rafeh’s suspicion of American motives was certainly common in Kabul. ‘The US did not come here to help or rescue Afghanistan,’ he told me. ‘They are here for their own strategic reasons. They want a permanent military presence here, to encircle Iran and to gain access to the oilfields of Central Asia. Their talk of peace and stability is just an excuse.’ School-burning looked like fundamentalist nihilism to the West, but in such a climate of paranoia and mistrust, it was all too easy for the Taliban to present it to the people as a legitimate act of war.

Perhaps McChrystal was right that some insurgents could be bribed to stop fighting. The technique had a long track record in Afghanistan. But there was also an old saying, often repeated by the British in the nineteenth century, that ‘you can’t buy an Afghan. You can only rent him for a while.’ Afghan attitudes towards foreigners were coloured by the Koran, certain passages of which can be interpreted as actively endorsing such fickleness. Sura 3:28 advises that ‘believers should not take the unbelievers as friends rather than the believers. Whoever does that has nothing to do with Allah.’ It is, however, all right to ‘befriend them with the tongue, not in the heart, if you have fear of them’ – and there were of course many Afghans with every reason to fear the armed might of Nato. The effect of offering such people dollars for their weapons was likely to be very temporary; and if Pashtun pride was insulted in the process, it could even make matters worse.

McChrystal himself was not without subtlety. He was well respected by Kabul’s diplomatic community, some of whom considered him one of those rare generals who ‘got it’ in Afghanistan. As a man who runs eight miles every morning and who likes to eat just one meal a day – to avoid ‘sluggishness’, it is said – he was almost as ascetic as the Taliban who opposed him. In March 2010 he was reported to be reading Winston Churchill’s The Story of the Malakand Field Force.12 Although over a hundred years old, some of Churchill’s observations on the resident Pathans (the old British word for Pashtuns on ‘their’ side of the Durand Line) are still relevant: ‘Tribe wars with tribe. Every man’s hand is against the other and all are against the stranger . . . the state of continual tumult has produced a habit of mind which holds life cheap and embarks on war with careless levity.’

Churchill also laid out three options for dealing with this fractious region: imposing the rule of law at gunpoint, pulling out and leaving them to it, or working through and with the tribal system.

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