Murky Militias in Forgotten Provinces Reveal Why Afghanistan War Isn’t Over
Ghor can be viewed as a microcosm of the layered complexity of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan’s blame-game continues. Six months on and accusations still fly about who collapsed the Republic: U.S. negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad and his dodgy withdrawal deal with the Taliban? U.S. President Joe Biden for sticking with the Trump-era decision to withdraw? Or former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani for fleeing the Presidential Palace and inviting the Taliban to take Kabul by doing so?
While there is truth in each narrative, change in Afghanistan is rarely down to one person or decision. Blaming collapse on such a small set of actors also continues the tendency to explain Afghanistan by assessing only a surface-level snapshot of Kabul politics or Western decisionmaking. It neglects the myriad of other layers, particularly the local dynamics that shape what happens everywhere outside of the Presidential Palace.
Ghor province is a perfect example. Neither a Taliban hotspot nor a battleground for national politics, it was perceived to be peaceful and rarely received much international or Afghan attention. But Ghor was neither peaceful nor unimportant. The Taliban recognized Ghor’s strategic value and deliberately manipulated local dynamics to facilitate their spread into a traditionally non-Taliban area – a strategy replicated across Afghanistan and a reason why the Republic collapsed so swiftly in 2021.
Ghor Province – A Strategic Gateway
Ghor is Afghanistan’s eighth largest province by area but contains a relatively small population of around 700,000 people. Tajiks and Hazaras are the majority ethnicities, although Ghor’s Tajiks are actually Chahar Aimaq – an ethnicity alleged to have been Pashtuns who were forcibly resettled to Ghor in the 1880s and then “Persianized” over the years, eventually coming to be called Tajiks. Only small pockets of Pashtuns live in Ghor now, which fuelled lazy post-2001 analysis that there was no Taliban presence (given that the Taliban traditionally, though not exclusively, draw from Pashtun communities).
Territorially, Ghor epitomizes Afghanistan’s central highlands, being at the country’s center and sitting mostly at more than 2,500 meters above sea level. With little farmland, six months of heavy snow, and few industries, Ghor is impoverished even by Afghan standards. It also has a history of neglect. Even today, experienced international analysts would struggle to identify Ghor on a map or name its provincial capital. At peak presence, the U.S./NATO coalition deployed a few hundred soldiers there – miniscule compared to the city-sized bases elsewhere. Ghoris also decried their underrepresentation in government institutions over the past 20 years. Rarely, if ever, were ministers or high-ranking government officials from Ghor.
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Ben Acheson spent seven years deployed to Afghanistan, including stints as director of NATO’s political team and as political adviser to the EU Special Representative before that. His first book “Wolves Among Men: The Pashtun Tribes in Afghanistan” is set to be published in 2022.