Brother to brother

If you missed today’s full-house launch event for the AfPak Channel, be sure to check out the video below for the panel with New America Foundation president Steve Coll, the Washington Post‘s Afghanistan correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran, and AfPak Channel editor Peter Bergen, moderated by the Post‘s Karen DeYoung and with introductions by Foreign Policy‘s Susan Glasser.

One of many things worth highlighting from today’s discussion is Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s anecdote about his recent reporting trip to Kandahar, a Pashtun stronghold and the spiritual homeland of the Taliban movement. Rajiv told the crowd,

I visited perhaps the sole bright spot in Kandahar Province, a district called Dand, south of the city (of Kandahar). It’s a very small district, but it was fascinating… it’s essentially a suburb of Kandahar, but it has now achieved its own sort of distinct district status. The Canadians, over the past many months, essentially flooded that area with almost all of their troops, and they proceeded to see some fairly significant improvements in security.

But part of that has also come in an unexpected way. The district is half Barakzai, half Popalzai, two tribes in the south that are pretty pro-government, and in a small district where you have pretty binary tribal dynamics it makes it much easier than in some of the other parts of the region. What the Canadians did was to implement a cash-for-work program, but they decided to do it through the local district chief, who’s a very charismatic 31-year old guy, and he, like many local leaders, figured the best way to administer this would be to ask his brother to do it.

And his brother, of course, given a pot of money to hire people, did what many brothers of political leader might do in that country: he hired a bunch of Barakzai. To the Canadians in the PRT in Kandahar, this was a very disconcerting turn of events, and they talked to the district chief and said, "Look, you can’t be nepotistic about this," but it had a funny effect. By hiring up a lot of the Barakzai, the Barakzai leadership in that district sent a letter to the local Taliban commander saying, essentially, "Stay away, we like what’s happening here."

And, they deputized a bunch of young Barakzai men to pick up AK-47s and mount the roving formal security patrols, both of which I think have been very significant in the reduction of violence over there. So this gets to the larger point of the degree to which NATO is, in my view, still not aggressively moving enough to look at tribal dynamics in the South and ways to try to exploit them short of a "let’s create a bunch of warlords" strategy."

Rajiv’s story underscores the importance of understanding Afghan society, and he correctly points out that we have a long way to go, even with some faint sparks of good news coming out of Kandahar.