Uruzgan, Afghanistan: A Land of Loyalty, Opium, and God

"Tarburwali (Pashtu for the rivalry of agnatic cousins) ... the position of leadership itself is structurally weak. It lacked the right of command and so depended on the ability to persuade others to follow. (No Afghan feels anyone else is above him.) It is tough being a chief of a people whom you had to cajole into action and where criticism is constant. For this reason religious leaders were often more successful than tribal ones in uniting large groups. Coming from outside the system and calling on

God's authority, they could circumvent tribal rivalries.

— Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan, A Cultural and Political History

Barfield paints a picture of how politics work in Afghanistan. Similar to the international policy of large nations, there are constant negotiations, with the threat of force always lingering in the background. At the time of the 2001 US invasion following the horrific attack on the World Trade Center, Afghanistan was in ruins. Decades of internal conflict, exasperated by the Soviet invasion to prop up the failing Communist regime in Kabul, precipitated the civil war between tribal leaders, which ended in the supremacy of the Taliban movement. Our well-intentioned efforts to reconstruct — or should I say, construct — the civil society that Western nations wanted to see in Afghanistan, were based upon teams of civilian and military personnel in each province of the country. By 2010, our efforts had proved unable to create a fully functioning central government. However, we had created a parallel government made up of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). Now it was time to dismantle them without the country imploding into another round of civil war. I walked into that effort as a senior rule of law advisor with the US Department of State, assigned to the remote region of Uruzgan Province.

My assignment was to assist the people of Uruzgan with the development of a justice system consistent with the new Afghan Constitution. Uruzgan is a region of Afghanistan where the Kabul government always faced a population that harbored resistance to its influence but needed its cooperation. A mountainous region whose people possess a fierce independent pride, a place rebels have run to and fought from for centuries. Populated by multiple tribes and subtribes their loyalties ebb and flow based on patronage and the Pashtunwali honor code, all wrapped in a sense of proper Islam. It is essential to understand that Islam is in a state of flux in Uruzgan as the conflict between the centuries-old Hanifi sharia and the relatively new Wahhabi sharia, grounded in the old Salafism, turned into a sharia legal theory by Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya (1262–1328) and promoted by the Talib, rages in the land. It is a high-altitude desert where crops are grown by hand-dug irrigation canals near the glacier streams making their way down from the mountain ranges toward the Helmand River. It is an exhausting effort, and the crop that gives the greatest return for such efforts is the opium poppy.

As I read Barfield while preparing to go to Afghanistan, I couldn't help thinking his words concerning what we saw as a backward country seemed to be torn right out of the headlines of news about our own government. Does not our president come under constant criticism? Is not our government formed on the basis of persons of different pri