[Since
2001, the United States has invested more than $100 billion building Afghan
military and police forces, a judicial system and schools in hopes of moving
the country closer to normality. But all that spending appears to have done
little to slow a cycle of rage and revenge that has made Afghanistan one of the
world’s most dangerous countries.]
By Tim Craig
 |
|
A member of a breakaway
faction of the Taliban guards
a gathering in the
Shindand district of Herat province
in Afghanistan on May 27,
2016. (Allauddin Khan/AP)
|
KABUL — In a remote area of Afghanistan,
where thousands of years of hardscrabble tribal culture increasingly mixes with
a resurgent Taliban militancy, this is how Fazl Ahmad allegedly died.
Local officials in Ghor province said one of
Ahmad’s distant relatives was suspected of killing a former Taliban commander.
In December, militants dragged Ahmad from his house and cut out his eyes in
retaliation.
Ahmad was still alive and screaming when the
attackers began carving the skin off his chest, leaving his heart exposed. Then
they threw the 21-year old laborer off a 10-story cliff, officials said.
“They skinned
him alive,” said Ruqiya Naeel, a member of parliament from the area.
The Taliban
denied involvement in the grisly crime, the aftermath of which was documented
in a recently circulated video and photograph.
But even so, Ahmad’s death is the latest in a
string of violent acts across Afghanistan over the past six months. Rattled
officials say the 15-year war has taken an increasingly brutal turn.
“The amount of casualties, particularly with
civilians, is a crime — a crime against humanity, a crime against Afghanistan, and
a crime against our people,” Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said, somberly, in a
meeting with reporters last week.
Since 2001, the United States has invested
more than $100 billion building Afghan military and police forces, a judicial
system and schools in hopes of moving the country closer to normality. But all
that spending appears to have done little to slow a cycle of rage and revenge
that has made Afghanistan one of the world’s most dangerous countries.
[Afghanistan hangs 6 Taliban inmates in face
of increasing violence]
Horrific violence is nothing new in
Afghanistan.
Public executions were common when the Taliban
ruled the country in the 1990s, and tens of thousands of Afghans have been
killed during the post-2001 Taliban insurgency. Afghanistan, like neighboring
Pakistan, also has a long history of cultural and religious conservatism
associated with violent retribution.
But analysts say the scale of the brutality
continues to evolve as the Taliban becomes more fragmented and pushes out into
additional areas of Afghanistan. Younger Taliban commanders also now operate
more independently and are increasingly inspired by other brutal acts easily
viewed on the Internet, they say.
Over the past month, after a U.S. drone
strike killed Taliban leader Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, militant groups have
hijacked at least five buses, dragging passengers into the road to execute
dozens of them, especially if they or members of their families were suspected
of being police officers or soldiers.
There also have been three recent deadly
attacks on Afghan courthouses or judicial employees. Last month in Jowzjan
province, a reported Taliban militant armed with an assault rifle shot and
killed a burqa-clad woman for alleged adultery, according to a video of the
crime posted to YouTube.
“There are now tens of examples of public
lashings, executions, and killings,” said Abdul Jama Jama, a provincial council
member in Ghazni province.
In recent days, the United Nations, Amnesty
International and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission also have
expressed concern over what they view as a hardening culture of violence here.
Brig. Gen. Charles H. Cleveland, chief
spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition, said some of the recent reports of
violence “looked like the days pre-9/11.” But he cautioned that “the base line
is pretty high” for sweeping assumptions about whether brutality generally is
worsening.
Still, Afghan officials and analysts are
worried as the violence also expands into areas of Afghanistan that until
recently had remained relatively safe.
A push by the Taliban, dominated by ethnic
Pashtuns, into northern and central Afghanistan, where large populations of
ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks reside, has proved especially destabilizing, officials
said.
Once the Taliban settles into an area, its
fighters often begin aggravating historical rivalries among ethnic groups as
well as stoking more-localized feuds that in some cases have simmered for
decades. That is another reason for the growing brutality, officials said.
“They are changing their war tactics,” said
Shah Waliullah Adeeb, a former governor of Badakhshan province. “They are
trying to show people that the government is weak . . .
and show that they are in charge.”
But some analysts say that more fundamental —
and dangerous — changes within the Taliban may be leading to greater upheaval.
[Taliban replaces leader killed in U.S. drone
strike]
As the original leaders of the insurgency
die, they are being replaced by younger commanders who appear less interested
in maintaining ties to the local areas in which they are fighting. These
fighters also are more connected through the Internet to the global ambitions
of militant Islamic groups, which is resulting in some Taliban commanders’
attempting to borrow the fear tactics used by the Islamic State in Iraq and
Syria.
This month, for example, a group of Taliban
fighters killed a high school student in Ghazni province by cutting off his
nose and ears after accusing him of being a spy, local officials said.
“The Taliban had always been the village
homeboys, but I think that is changing quite dramatically,” said Vanda
Felbab-Brown, a senior security and intelligence fellow at the Brookings
Institution. “But the younger generation is more accepting of violence, less
remembering of the horrors of the civil war [of the 1990s], and much more
socialized to the global agenda.”
Other analysts caution that the recent
violence is more a symptom of the broader Afghan culture, where a pattern of
revenge and killing has been common and disputes among families or villages
often have little to do with the war.
“People want to settle old scores,” said
Najib Mahmood, a law professor at Kabul University. “You can hardly find any
house that does not own a gun because of the war, and people use a gun even for
a minor issue.”
That historical inability to break the cycle
of revenge is one reason that human rights groups and European ambassadors were
angered by Ghani’s recent decision to resume executions of Taliban figures.
Last month, after a truck bomb killed 64
people in Kabul, the government hanged five Taliban prisoners. Since then, the
Taliban has pointed to the executions to justify its attacks on the Afghan
judiciary.
Some analysts also worry that President Obama
made a mistake in ordering last month’s drone strike that killed Mansour, the
Taliban commander.
They note that violence in Afghanistan
escalated last summer after it was announced that the Taliban’s other former
leader, Mohammad Omar, had died two years earlier.
They now fear that the trend will accelerate
as new Taliban leader Haibatullah Akhundzada seeks to consolidate his power.
Akhundzada is an Islamic cleric and the
Taliban’s former top judge. But many analysts consider him to be even more
rigid than Mansour, who was a former Taliban government minister who witnessed
the carnage of Afghanistan’s civil war in the 1990s.
“Mansour believed a terrible outcome for
Afghanistan would be a protracted civil war in Kabul and the north,”
Felbab-Brown said. “Many of the younger commanders don’t have that restraint.”
Akhundzada, in contrast, in the past issued
religious edicts authorizing suicide bombings as well as Taliban-on-Taliban
executions to deal with dissenters, according to Western intelligence
assessments.
“The Taliban under Haibatullah will become
even more dangerous,” said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Pakistan-based expert on
militancy.
As a result, Kabul University’s Mahmood
predicted, Afghanistan will continue to slide even further away from “the rule
of law.”
“It will take decades to see Afghanistan
become a normal country again,” he said.
Mohammad Sharif and Sayed Salahuddin in Kabul
and Aamir Iqbal in Peshawar, Pakistan, contributed to this report.
Read more:
U.S. widens war in Afghanistan, authorizes
new action against Taliban
Taliban strikes in heart of Kabul in deadly
attack on elite agency
Afghanistan paid 11,000 militants to lay down
their arms. Now the money has run out.