An Afghan warlord and tribal chief welcomed the ‘western’ attack against Mullah Omar’s Taliban. The Talibs were from a different power group than his own and he hoped to get a better deal with the new rulers.

But those ‘westerners’ put another rival group of his into power. Sure, they gave him a bit power too. He was elected into the parliament and the loot coming with that job made things better. But then the rival group in power screwed him. They used the ‘westerners’ to fight his interests with deadly consequences.

But he is a smart men and he fights back against these folks with sophisticated public relation. When that does not work, he shows off some of his real power.

The other side responds by again trying to use the ‘westerners’ to suppress him and his followers.

The outcome of this fight is uncertain. But it definitely shows one thing. Most ‘westerners’ have no real comprehension of what the conflict in Afghanistan is really about, what Taliban are and are not and why ‘the west’ will end up defeated in Afghanistan just like Alexander the Great, the British imperialist of the 19th century and the Sowiets.

Thus follows the story of Haji Habibullah Jan, the leader of the small but proud Pashtun Alizai tribe reconstructed from some deep Goggle dives.

It is longish, sorry for that, but it is also a mind opening look into a foreign culture even while based on ‘western’ news sources.

My search started with this story about the big Afghan jail break every major newssource recently covered. Those reports included this ridiculous line:

Lawmaker Habibullah Jan said some of the hunger strikers had been held without trial for more than two years. Others were given lengthy prison sentences after short trials.

Jan said 47 of the prisoners had stitched their mouths shut during the hunger strike in May.

The emphasised part is of course baloney. Pashtuns ain’t fakirs. They do not stich their mouth shut. To reproduce that quote is pure Orientalism. But Habibullah Jan knew that the ‘western’ press would react to such a juicy quote. That is obviously the reason why he put it out.

Still I wondered who that loudmouth is and why he did this. Here is what I came up with.

The earliest story to find about Habibullah Jan is from April 2002. Under the headline Afghanistan looks to life without warlords we find an interview with, oh yeah, a warlord:

Habibullah Jan was 16 when he took up a gun in 1978 and joined the "holy war." His father, a tribal leader, had been imprisoned by the new communist regime. "He’s still missing," Habibullah notes, for the record.

Today Haji Habibullah is a heavyset man, with soft black beard, who chain-smokes Marlboro Lights through thick fingers. He is, in effect, a brigade commander for Naqibullah, with more than 2,000 men in his charge. His entire adult life has been spent in fighting and exile, victory and defeat.

"We finally drove the Russians out and the communist government collapsed. But our bad luck was that the mujahedeen came into power. They can’t sit down together," Habibullah said. "The second bit of bad luck was that the countries that supported us abandoned us."

Which country abandoned the resistance in Afghanistan after the Russians were defeated? Yes we know, the U.S did so. But Haji Habibullah Jan was ready to forget and to compromise:

Now that the
Americans are back, Habibullah said, the "international community" must
help finance and train a new national army to impose order on a
disorderly map. "I hope that will mean the end of the warlords."

In 2004 some folks from Medicines Sans Frontieres asked for help from Habibullah:

In thirty minutes we arrived at our first destination, the compound of Commander Habibullah Jan in Senzari village. Habibullah Jan is security responsible for the area around the road leading to Helmand province west of Kandahar. His private army patrols the tracks and valleys of this region, often coming into conflict with destabilization forces. He was holding court in front of his compound with a group of elders as a smartly uniformed guard with a handlebar moustache waved us in.

…

He’s an impressive man, strongly built and well dressed. He assured us there was no problem along the road to the camp and that he had many patrols in the surrounding area.

Haji Habibullah is also a smart man who has seen the world. He not only went to Mecca, but as part of an Afghan delegation which also included Hamid Karzai’s brother Wali, visited Dubai and Japan in mid 2004.

The Washington Post spoke with Habibullah at a presidential election rally Hamid Karzai held in Kandahar in 2004.

The local military commander, who goes by the single name Habibullah, was busy preparing the rally and ticking off lists of tribes that had sent representatives. He said he had a good official relationship with the central government, but his Pashtun heart was clearly with Qanooni, the Tajik mujahid from Panjshir.

"When I was a boy, I carried a Kalashnikov on my shoulder. I do not want my children to carry a gun," he said, adding that he supported militia disarmament. But he complained that Karzai and many of his aides had lived in exile during the country’s most bitter years and still keep foreign passports. "I am a citizen and I have the right to one vote," he said, "and it will not be for Karzai."

In 2005 Habibullah Jan was himself up for election as a candidate for a the Wolesi Jirga, the Afghan parliament. Unfortunately, as the Pakistani Dawn reported from Kandahar on September 5, 2005, that candidacy killed him:

Candidate Habibullah Jan was killed by the Taliban, provincial chief Abdul Rahman said.

“He was wounded by a mine planted outside his house and taken to hospital where he died,” he said.

Well, maybe not. On October 9, 2005 Haji Habibullah Jan got 5,928 votes and was thereby elected as member of the parliament. (Only 25% of the registered voters did actually bother to get a purple finger.)

Between 2005 and 2007 there is nothing I find about this Habibullah. Those years seem to have been relatively peaceful times.

But then stories including him again start to come up again. In September 2007 the Canadian Globe and Mail quotes him:

"The Taliban are much weaker than last year," said Habibullah Jan. "They can’t stay and fight if they’re confronted."

Habibullah the optimist who certainly does not like the Talibs. But soon thereafter trouble starts. Two Mullahs in Habibullah’s district get killed by U.S. special forces.

Hundreds of enraged Afghans, some chanting "death to Canada," blocked a highway Wednesday following a raid by foreign troops that left two religious leaders dead.

…
Canadian military officials have denied involvement in the raids by both their own soldiers and NATO’s.
…
"Their informers are giving them wrong information," one protester told
CP, referring to the information that led to the raids. "It is
disgusting."
…
Habibullah Jan, a lawmaker from Sanzari village, told the Associated Press that NATO forces were responsible for the deaths.

He warned that if international forces continued to target civilians, "people will take up arms against the government and NATO."

Besides killing two religious leaders the U.S. military also took some prisoners.

One Afghan man at the protest told CBC News that he had guests in his
house when soldiers burst into the building. "The soldiers tied their
hands and feet, covered their eyes and took them away," he said.
Another witness said the raids were by American and Canadian soldiers,
who took eight people and killed two.

It is a central issue in Pashtun tribal code to defend their guests.

Habibullah’s son joined the protest:

Neither the Canadians nor other NATO soldiers were involved in the raids, a military spokeswoman said; the only other foreign troops operating in the area belong to U.S. Operation Enduring Freedom, a counterterrorism force.

…
The slain men belonged to the Alizai tribe, a group disenfranchised from the government, and their deaths happened in a Kandahar suburb known as Senjaray, south of Highway 1, a ramshackle warren of mud huts that is notorious for hiding Taliban. Insurgents were spotted among the protesters yesterday, and elders say it took some effort to dissuade the mob from marching into Kandahar city.

…
"This is the biggest protest we have had in years," said Hyat Ullah, 21, the son of local parliamentarian Habibullah Jan. "We ask the foreign forces to be very careful, to avoid getting into personal fights between people. These things make big problems."

(Sidenote:

Half of the U.S. military in Afghanistan is not under NATO command but is kind of freelancing. This is a ridiculous situation and a main cause for all the trouble in Afghanistan. Unity of command is a MUST in all military endevaours.)

Now things get a bit more complicate as we have to dive into Afghan tribal culture (scroll down).

The 13+ million Pashtun in Afghanistan have two branches, the Durrani and Ghilzai. There are Zirak Durrani and Panjpai Durrani. The Zirak Durrani are government aligned. One of the tribal group in these are Popalzai with their most prominent member being President Hamid Karzai and his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. Wali plays a major role in Kandahar as chairman of the provincial council.

After the Sowiets left Afghanistan, the Zirak Durrani dominated Kandahar. When the groups under Mullah Omar got into power, they disenfranchised the Zirak Durrani in favour of their own Ghilzai subgroup. Now the Zirak Durrani rule again and they disenfranchise all others.

One tribal group in the non-government aligned Panjpai Durrani are the Alizai.

AfghanProfile.net notes on the Alazai:

A bitter conflict between this tribe’s leader in Kandahar, Habibullah Jan, and Ahmed Wali Karzai was a source of instability in the province until the two men reached a negotiated truce in recent weeks."

What was the reason for the bitter conflict? A fight about drug profits or some other loot? Did Wali Karzai, who has an MA from USC, send the Americans to kill the two Mullahs from Habibullah tribes?

We don’t know. But something serious had happened and that ‘negotiated truce’ did not hold long.

A recent Times article about Wali Karzai’s drug connections says:

At the end of last year, Habibullah Jan, a powerful tribal chief and member of parliament from Kandahar, became the first person to accuse Wali directly in parliament of involvement in the drugs trade.

That was a big embarrassment for the Karzai brothers as it made some international waves. There even seems to be some truthiness to it.

Another Kandahar MP made a similar allegation, but would speak only off the record.

A senior Afghan security official, who also asked not to be identified, claimed that Afghan officials had repeatedly complained about Wali to President Karzai. “The problem is that neither the Americans nor the Europeans are interested in doing anything about this,” he said.

Why are the ‘westerners’ not interested? They need both Karzais:

[Others] say that Wali brings co-operation and stability to the south, principally by maintaining the dominance and loyalty of President Karzai’s tribe, the Popalzai.

Stability? Like more tribal feud? The Karzai brothers seem to have lost the senses to manage stuff on the ground.

Hamid Karzai last year selected the son of the deceased leader of the Alokazai tribe, which usually supports him, as the new chief of the tribe. That was a big mistake as the move was against the tribal rules where the elders decide about such, not the Afghan king and member of another tribe. Now the Alokazai are unruly and ‘taliban’ activity is up in their area.

So there are essentially feuds going on here. Habibullah never liked the Karzais anyway, but went along with the tide. Only after some U.S. forces, who support the Karzais rule in Kabul and Kandahar, raid his people, kill two of their religious leaders and take others as prisoner, he really  gets pissed. He starts to denounce Wali Karzai in parliament and makes this a major issue with the foreign press.

The next we hear of him is last month, when he visited unruly prisoners in Kandahar:

More than 200 Taliban suspects ended a weeklong hunger strike at a prison in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar after a parliamentary delegation promised their cases would be reviewed, a lawmaker said Monday.

Lawmaker Habibullah Jan said the three-member delegation received written demands from the prisoners and would pass them on to President Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul.

To get ‘western’ press attention a public relation experienced Habibullah came up with the colourful picture:

He said some of those on the hunger strike had been held without trial for over two years. Others were given lengthy prison sentences after short trials. Jan said 47 of the prisoners had stitched their mouths shut during the strike.

The inmates had been captured by Afghan, NATO and U.S.-led forces, who are battling a fierce Taliban-led insurgency in the south, Jan said.

…
The Kandahar prison is under the jurisdiction of Afghan authorities.

The Afghan authority in Kandahar is Ahmad Wali Karzai.

How many of Habibullah’s tribesmen were in the prison he visited? How many had been labeled ‘taliban’ and incarcerated by his rival Wali Karzai and his U.S. forces?

The next thing we hear, only a few days after Habibullah pacified the prisoners (with what?), is the big prison break:

More than 1,100 inmates of a prison in southern Afghanistan, including militants, escaped after a Taliban suicide attack on the building, the NATO force in Afghanistan said Saturday.

After this PR disaster Hamid Karzai tried to divert criticism by threatening to attack Pakistan. That didn’t help much.

But now, he lets us know, the area west of Kandahar, the main area of Habibullah Jan’s Alazai tribe and some Alokazai, is suddenly in Taliban hands:

The Taliban have taken control of 18 villages west of the Argandab River and started digging trenches and mines, a tribal elder from the region said. NATO and Afghan forces moved troops in to the region and dropped leaflets from the air warning civilians to stay inside their homes if fighting erupted in their area.

Dropping leaflets in an area where most people are illiterate may not be good tactics. Anyway –  are those people really ‘taliban’ or is Karzai cooking up some atrocity to punish the rival tribe and its head, Haji Habibullah Jan?

The United States military said a patrol of Afghan police and American and allied forces conducted a five-hour patrol from daybreak on the west side of the Argandab River valley, where there have been reports of Taliban fighters. The patrol encountered no resistance, said Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Green, a United States military spokeswoman at Bagram air base north of Kabul.

“Nothing but normal patterns of life were observed,” Colonel Rumi said. She could not confirm reports that the Taliban was destroying bridges.

Hmm – no Talibs observed even though some Karzai surrogat says they are there?

So far the story as I could reconstruct it. I am sure we will hear more from Habibullah. That could be in an obituary or in some other context.

One thing is for sure. This fight against ‘Taliban’ has little to do with a group of lunatics or revolutionaries. It has a lot to do with tribal feuds, disenfranchised groups and fighting over some loot poor people have lost or found.

The western forces may be knowledgeable in these structures and use them for their purpose. Then, of course, you might also believe that the U.S. military was the power behind the prison brake.

I do have some doubt over that though. Are the ‘western forces’ really smarter about Afghani society structures than Afghani academics? Are they smarter than Afghani warlords and tribal chiefs who have lived fighting and surviving for 30 plus years? Na.

From an remarkable 2008 survey and report by a Canadian reporter on the grounds in Kandahar:

In a sample of ordinary insurgents, 42 fighters in Kandahar province were asked by The Globe and Mail to identify their own tribe, and the results point to a divide within the Taliban ranks: Only five named themselves as members of the three major tribes most closely associated with the government, suggesting that tribal animosity has become a factor that drives the recruitment of insurgents.
…
"This government is a family business," said a prominent Afghan aid worker in Kandahar. "The other tribes get angry when a few tribes have all the power."

That is what it is about to Afghans. That is what ‘taliban’ are about.

Now please explain how the ‘west’ will win that war.