Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond

Abdulkader H. Sinno

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780801458064
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"After we had exchanged the requisite formalities over tea in his camp on the southern edge of Kabul's outer defense perimeter, the Afghan field commander told me that two of his bravest mujahideen were martyred because he did not have a pickup truck to take them to a Peshawar hospital. They had succumbed to their battle wounds. He asked me to tell his party's bureaucrats across the border that he needed such a vehicle desperately. I double-checked with my interpreter that he was indeed making this request. I wasn't puzzled because the request appeared unreasonable but because he was asking me, a twenty-year-old employee of a humanitarian organization, to intercede on his behalf with his own organization's bureaucracy. I understood on this dry summer day in Khurd Kabul that not all militant and political organizations are alike."—from Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond

While popular accounts of warfare, particularly of nontraditional conflicts such as guerrilla wars and insurgencies, favor the roles of leaders or ideology, social-scientific analyses of these wars focus on aggregate categories such as ethnic groups, religious affiliations, socioeconomic classes, or civilizations. Challenging these constructions, Abdulkader H. Sinno closely examines the fortunes of the various factions in Afghanistan, including the mujahideen and the Taliban, that have been fighting each other and foreign armies since the 1979 Soviet invasion.Focusing on the organization of the combatants, Sinno offers a new understanding of the course and outcome of such conflicts. Employing a wide range of sources, including his own fieldwork in Afghanistan and statistical data on conflicts across the region, Sinno contends that in Afghanistan, the groups that have outperformed and outlasted their opponents have done so because of their successful organization. Each organization's ability to mobilize effectively, execute strategy, coordinate efforts, manage disunity, and process information depends on how well its structure matches its ability to keep its rivals at bay. Centralized organizations, Sinno finds, are generally more effective than noncentralized ones, but noncentralized ones are more resilient absent a safe haven.Sinno's organizational theory explains otherwise puzzling behavior found in group conflicts: the longevity of unpopular regimes, the demise of popular movements, and efforts of those who share a common cause to undermine their ideological or ethnic kin. The author argues that the organizational theory applies not only to Afghanistan-where he doubts the effectiveness of American state-building efforts—but also to other ethnic, revolutionary, independence, and secessionist conflicts in North Africa, the Middle East, and beyond.

CHAPTER 1

Organizing to Win

It was on the strength of their extensive organization that the peasants went into action and within four months [in 1926] brought about a great revolution in the countryside, a revolution without parallel in history.

—Mao Tse-tung, 1927

After we had exchanged the requisite formalities over tea in his camp on the southern edge of Kabul’s outer defense perimeter, the Afghan field commander told me that two of his bravest mujahideen were martyred because he did not have a pickup truck to take them to a Peshawar hospital. They had succumbed to their battle wounds. He asked me to tell his party’s bureaucrats across the border that he needed such a vehicle desperately. I double-checked with my interpreter that he was indeed making this request. I wasn’t puzzled because the request appeared unreasonable but because he was asking me, a twenty-year-old employee of a humanitarian organization, to intercede on his behalf with his own organization’s bureaucracy.

I understood on this dry 1991 summer day in Khurd Kabul that not all militant and political organizations are alike. While officers in Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i Islami (Islamic Party) promptly honored written requests from their organization to allow me to set up basic clinics, field commanders (comandan) from other parties used the opportunity—and any other available leverage—to negotiate concessions from their party’s bureaucracy. The Hizb was a centralized organization with semiprofessionally trained officers, whereas the six other major mujahideen parties were based on highly decentralized and continuously renegotiated arrangements: field commanders gave their loyalty, support, and assistance to a party in return for the resources necessary to maintain their resistance activities.

The internal structure of the resistance explains not only how its field commanders dealt with me but also how different parties have performed during all Afghan conflicts since the 1979 Soviet invasion. During this summer of 1991, the mujahideen were bogged down around the defensive perimeters of the Afghan regime’s main garrison cities such as Kabul and Jalalabad. Jubilant experts expected that the regime of Dr. Mohammad Najibullah would collapse soon after the withdrawal of its Soviet patrons, but it lasted for longer than three years because the mujahideen were too loosely organized to mount the sustained assaults that would have led to victory. Ironically, their very decentralization had allowed them to be resilient in the face of overwhelming Soviet power for an entire decade earlier. I explain in this book how different modes of organization, such as these, affect the evolution and outcome of conflicts among organized groups in societies at war. But why should we try to understand the way group conflicts evolve and conclude?

Civil wars, revolutions, wars of liberation, guerilla wars, and other intrastate wars kill and maim millions every decade. Alas, they rarely end in negotiated settlements.1 Yet social scientists have little understanding of the processes driving outcomes of civil wars other than those settled by negotiation. We generally focus on the rare negotiated settlement instead of decisive endings because the peaceful outcomes reflect our sensitivities and concerns.2 Most of us, understandably, want to predict where conflicts will emerge and how to end them before they cause widespread human suffering or require costly intervention. Understanding the processes and correlates of decisive outcomes remains the concern of those directly involved in conflict—those in power, their advisers, and those dedicated to replacing them. Some participants survive long enough to analyze and share their experiences; but they may have good political reasons to ascribe their successes to the righteousness of their cause or the power of their ideology instead of the more mundane but critical factors that probably enabled them to defeat their rivals. Social scientists too should focus on decisive outcomes because winners of intrastate conflict shape the political system of the country, affect its economic performance, sometimes overhaul its culture and social structure, and rearrange the country’s alliances with other states.

Our understanding of the dynamics of group conflicts is still very basic. Surprising developments such as the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the fall of the Berlin wall were the result of complex processes that few observers, no matter how thorough and seasoned, were able to foresee. Few Western scholars thought that the United States would face an insurgency in Iraq after 2003. The succession of conflicts that afflicted Afghanistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion included similarly baffling developments and unpredictable outcomes at every juncture. Very few observers expected the Afghan mujahideen to resist the mighty Red Army so stubbornly, or the Soviets to withdraw without achieving any of their original goals. Once they did withdraw, almost everyone predicted the prompt defeat of their puppet regime by the seemingly invincible mujahideen. But the Najibullah regime survived until aid from Moscow ceased completely. Once the victorious mujahideen entered Kabul, they shocked the world and their staunchest supporters by engaging in fratricidal warfare, with many organizations reserving their most aggressive behavior for their ideological kin. When the bloody balance of power between the five surviving organizations appeared to stabilize, a new entrant suddenly emerged to sweep aside parties, warlords, commanders, khans, bandits, and smugglers alike—the Taliban. The Taliban seemed poised to overtake the remaining 5 percent of Afghanistan when an attack by one of its key allies, al-Qaida, motivated a determined United States to actively support the nearly defeated Northern Alliance forces and become a direct participant in the conflict. U.S. intervention dismantled the Taliban as an organized force in a few weeks. But if the past is any indication, resistance to the U.S. and NATO military occupation will develop into a full-fledged insurgency.

Observers generally provide simple explanations for surprising developments in Afghan conflicts. Some would tell you that the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation was so resilient because of U.S. support, the provision of Stinger missiles, the deep religious motivation of the mujahideen, or cultural factors. Some would tell you that the meteoric rise of the Taliban resulted from Pakistani support and Saudi money, ideological purity, or a public that was receptive to their strict law-and-order agenda. But such explanations often fail to define how those factors led to the unexpected outcomes, and many do not withstand the weight of contrary evidence. I propose an alternative way of analyzing conflict, one that is grounded in the analysis of organizations in conflict.

Ethnic groups, social classes, civilizations, religions, and nations do not engage in conflict or strategic interaction—organizations do. When Samuel Huntington tells us that civilizations clash, he is merely informing us that there are organizations (states and nonstates alike) that are engaged in conflict across what he believes to be borders of civilizations. When Marxists talk of class revolt, they envision it as instigated by a dedicated organization that mobilizes the toiling masses. As any close observer of civil war will tell you, ethnic groups rarely fight each other en masse—organizations, which are either ad hoc or extensions of existing social structures, use an ethnic agenda to attract some members and wage conflict in their name. Engaging in conflict consists of performing a number of essential processes, such as coordination, mobilization, and the manipulation of information, to undermine rivals within a contested territory. Amorphous entities such as civilizations, ethnic groups, or the masses cannot perform such operations—only organizations can do so. To say that a certain conflict pits a politicized group against another is to use shorthand to indicate that organizations that recruit from among those groups are engaged in conflict. It is perfectly reasonable to use shorthand, but its use distracts the social scientist from focusing on the mechanisms that best explain how conflicts begin, evolve, and conclude.

An organizational approach to the study of conflict is both old and new. The fourteenth-century Muslim chronicler and analyst Ibn Khaldun (Muqaddimah, 130) tells us that “a dynasty rarely establishes itself firmly in lands with many tribes and groups.” In the sixteenth century, Machiavelli theorized that an occupier’s success in holding a newly conquered territory has much to do with the organization of its inhabitants:

Whoever attacks the Turk must reckon on finding a united people, and must trust rather to his own strength than to divisions on the other side. But were his adversary once overcome and defeated in the field, so that he could not repair his armies, no cause for anxiety would remain. . . . But the contrary is the case in kingdoms governed like that of France, into which, because men who are discontented and desirous of change are always to be found, you may readily procure entrance by gaining over some Baron of the Realm. . . . But afterwards the effort to hold your ground involves you in endless difficulties, as well in respect to those who have helped you, as of those whom you have overthrown. . . . All those other Lords remain to put themselves at the head of new movements; whom being unable either to content or to destroy, you lose the State whenever occasion serves them.3

His insight remains astonishingly relevant for today’s conflicts.

Some three centuries later, Alexis de Tocqueville argued that patterns of societal organization governed the outcome of competition among colonial powers in the Americas. Decentralized states such as Britain, he said, endow their citizens with the characteristics (independence, initiative, autonomy) necessary to make successful colonists, unlike centralized ones such as France. This, he argued, explains why the Americas were ultimately dominated by people of British background and not by settlers of French descent. He also mentions that a society needs strong social groups and institutions capable of independent action in their own right to check the power of the established government, or any domestic or foreign usurper.4 Tocqueville also focused on the importance of organization within classes as well as the centralization of power in his elegant explanation of the French Revolution.5

The lives and writings of perceptive participants in resistance and revolutionary conflicts suggest the importance of organizational matters. The unsuccessful experiences of European anarchists who disdained political organization show how detrimental fragmentation can be for revolutionaries. A premature shift from a decentralized structure (with its regional autonomy and specialization, cohesive small groups, and efficient local mobilization) to centralization has been widely recognized to be disastrous for revolutionary organizations by participants in the Greek Communist experience and the Tet offensive in Vietnam.6 And Major (later General) Charles Callwell (1976, 157–58) notes in his late nineteenth-century manual on guerrilla war that it is in the best interest of the centralized state to assist in the transformation of its rivals into a centralized and specialized organization that mimics a modern army. The Chinese Communists accomplished the classic successful transformation from decentralized guerrilla forces into a centralized conventional army after World War II.7 This successful restructuring occurred after several failed and premature attempts (in Jiangxi between 1927 and 1934 and in northern China during World War II) that led to defeats but provided lessons that assisted the ultimate successful transformation.8 Mao summarized his experience with the following recipe:

There must be a gradual change from guerrilla formations to orthodox regimental organization. The necessary bureaus and staffs, both political and military, must be provided. At the same time, attention must be paid to the creation of suitable supply, medical, and hygiene units. The standards of equipment must be raised and types of weapons increased. Communication equipment must not be forgotten. Orthodox standards of discipline must be established.9

Vo Nguyen Giap applied Mao’s formula to resist the three latest occupiers of Vietnam.10 He successfully transitioned his forces from decentralized guerrilla bands into the three-tiered force—a mobile centralized force with specialized units, regional forces, and local militias, all flanked by a parallel system of political commissars—which defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu and caused the United States to abandon Vietnam. Giap’s description of the process shows the care given to organization building by those who successfully practice the craft of resistance and revolution:

In the early stage of the Resistance War, our army was in extremely difficult conditions, short of arms and munitions, its formation varied from one locality to another. Parallel with the gradual development from guerrilla warfare to mobile warfare and with better supply and equipment, we had from scattered units, gradually organized concentrated ones, then regiments and divisions of a regular army. In the units of the regular army, the organization was unified step by step. The regiments and divisions were made up at first of infantrymen only. Later there were units of support and later sappers units and light artillery units, etc.11

We have research on Communist organizational thought because of the West’s longstanding obsession with the Communist revolutionary threat, but Communists have no monopoly on concern with matters of organization. Members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood engaged in tense debates about organizational matters that they believe to be extremely important. Such debates recur wherever Islamist movements develop, and different groups have adopted the organizational structure they felt best suited their situation. Nor is concern with organization restricted to territorially bound groups—it extends to transnational activities, as the words of Sheikh Fathi Yakan, a Sunni Islamist leader from Lebanon’s northern city of Tripoli, reveal:

Another principal feature that a unitary global Islamic movement should have is decentralization [la-markaziyyah]. . . . Emigration [hijrah] in the time of the Prophet (peace be upon him) was a profound indication that decentralization should be part of Islamic work and that the establishment of Islam could be easy and possible in one place and difficult, if not impossible, in another. It then becomes necessary to expand efforts where results are easier to achieve, to preserve time and energy.12

Advocates of decentralization, which would otherwise be abhorrent to Islamists because it might indicate an acceptance of the division of the Ummah (Muslim community), justify its adoption based on the writings of the fourteenth-century theologian Ibn Taymiyyah. Ibn Taymiyyah maintained that the Ummah does not necessarily need a single leader (imam) and that, when historical conditions require it, there could be several leaders so long as they are worthy individuals. Sayyid Qutb, the foremost ideologue of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, advocated extreme local centralization by recommending the formation of a tightly knit...

Table of contents

• List of Maps and Figures
• 1. Organizing to Win
• Part One: An Organizational Theory of Group Conflict
• Part Two: Explaining the Outcomes of Afghan Conflicts
• Part Three: And Beyond . . .
• Glossary of Terms
• Participants in Post-1978 Afghan Conflicts
• References