Societies are riddled with bad people; it just so happens Afghanistan has a lot more of them. We were discussing who the bad people were and how they were harming society here.
Since my memory is horrible, resulting in my absolute reliance on my notebook, I decided to look into who the bad people in Afghanistan are. Since weather prevented our flight this morning, I had plenty of time to talk with an officer from the ISAF Joint Command Information Dominance Center, which is basically ISAF’s memory.
View the day 24 vlog, here.
I was struggling to find a simple phrase to describe “bad guys” since it’s too generic and Taliban and Al Qaeda are too specific. Then, when we were up north, one of the soldiers called them anti-Afghan fighters. That pretty much summarizes it, but now that I know what to call them, who are they?
Taliban and Al Qaeda are well covered so I’ll only mention one interesting fact about them. When I went through counter insurgency training, they said there were approximately 20,000 of them in Afghanistan. That seems like quite a lot to me, until I compare it to the total population of this country, which is roughly 30 million. They aren’t the only people who cause damage to society here though. The other people could be anyone from full blown warlords to simple farmers.
For starters, Al Qaeda isn’t the only terrorist organization here. The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) lists 15 more to be exact. The list can be found here. I’ve heard some of the suicide bombings and attacks are carried out by these other terrorist organizations, but the Taliban or Al Qaeda take all of the credit.
Waking up this morning, I only had a basic understanding of what a warlord is. Someone with lots of power and influence and uses it against people. The people I talked to today compared them to gangsters. The trick to warlords is they can be good to. But if they are good, and use their power and influence to help people, they’re called local militia leaders. This dabbles into the tribal aspects of Afghanistan, where tribes and their warriors banded together around a central “natural” leader to defend and protect the population. Sometimes this works out for the people and these militia leaders fight off big organizations like the Taliban and AQ, or it works out badly and the warlords could work with T & AQ against the people.
There are also mercenaries here from various countries. To me, these are the scariest because my mind has been contaminated by too many action movies. Basically, these guys are out for the kill and the cash. They may have their own weapons, and the Taliban or Al Qaeda pay them to kill us. They would shoot you, take a picture of your body and show the pay agent the photo to receive the “reward”. The good news here is they better run. Because if they shoot at someone and they’re seen, its one man versus an Army and for all their fancy training and weapons I guarantee international forces can outgun and outshoot them any day of the week.
Corrupt government officials do damage against the people. I would consider them anti-Afghan. They may not be firing weapons, but they may be passing information which could be even more dangerous. They could also be stealing money or preventing progress which definitely hurts the people.
There are also the normal Afghans out to feed their families. They may not hate us, but T & AQ pay good money to those willing to plant IEDs.
Then there are the criminals. Every society has them, Afghanistan is no different. It’s just hard to determine who the criminal is and who the insurgent is sometimes. If one Afghan murders another Afghan he might simply be a murderer, not an insurgent. I’m really glad I’m not a lawyer, because I couldn’t imagine how difficult it could be determining between the two. There are robbers, thieves and any other type of criminal here, just like in every society around the world. It will take a lot of work to be able to move Afghanistan to a place where they can root them out.
After my conversation, I realized how complex the situation here is, and I’ll never over simplify it by saying “bad guys” again.
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