Military Review English Edition January-February 2014 | Page 40

to accept this informal system for the sake of stability.30 The Musahibans exempted favored tribes from
conscription and reduced rural taxes, turning to trade
tariffs, aid, and loans to raise revenue.31 Education
reform was a priority, but the magnitude of reforms
was limited. Reforms often started in Kabul and other
more liberal areas and were slowly extended. Most of
these changes did not happen until the Musahibans
had been in power for three decades. Rather than
issue a decree outlawing the veil, for example,
Prime Minister Daud had the wives of the royal
family and senior government officials sit without
veils at the National Day parade in 1959. Clerical
resistance did not translate to popular rebellion
since the government had restricted its reforms to
the urban elites and had avoided interfering in rural
Afghanistan.32
This is not to say that rural society did not
change during this period and that this change
was not destabilizing. American and Soviet aid
funded a variety of economic development initiatives—improving roads, improving agricultural,
and introducing radios and other technologies.
While not particularly burdensome—hence the lack
of violence—these changes nevertheless chipped
away at social structures.33 The inevitable enriching
of particular social actors, for example, displaced
other traditional authorities. The growth of Kabul
University incubated both Islamic radicals and the
People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA),
Afghanistan’s communist party.

The growth of Kabul University incubated both Islamic radicals and the People’s Democratic
Party of Afghanistan, Afghanistan’s communist party.
When Daud moved against the PDPA in the
spring of 1978, the PDPA struck back through
allied military officers and ousted Daud. The
PDPA’s Kalhq faction moved quickly to implement
38

economic and social reforms. Resistance emerged
shortly thereafter. The most inflammatory reforms
included land and debt reform and requirements to
attend literacy classes, which compelled unmarried
male and female participation. These reforms portended a disintegration of traditional qawm-based
communal social support structures.34 As was the
case for Amanullah, it was the Khalq policy interventions in rural Afghanistan, including mandating
equality for women, a secular legal system, and
interference with the customary legal system, that
brought resistance.

Counterinsurgency in
Afghanistan
In the spring of 2009, President Barack Obama
appointed Gen. Stanley McChrystal to reinvigorate the American effort in Afghanistan. When
McChrystal completed a strategic review that
summer, he advocated for a robust counterinsurgency strategy and requested additional troops.
This request set off a tense and prolonged debate
through the fall of 2009. By the time it ended with
Obama’s December commitment to “surge” over
30,000 American troops into Afghanistan, the
administration had examined not just McChrystal’s
resource request, but also U.S. interests, objectives,
and rationales for the American commitment to
Afghanistan.
Field Manual 3-24 framed the terms of the fall
2009 debate. The discussion, as Chandrasekaran
explains, centered around two options: the military’s counterinsurgency strategy or a narrower
strategy of counterterrorism plus support for the
Afghan security forces. Because the military considered the Taliban to be an insurgency that needed
to be defeated, the problem, as FM 3-24 indicated,
was the absence of the state. If only the state could
penetrate Afghan society to deliver services and
provide for economic development, the insurgency
would wither. By this logic, the government of
Afghanistan could not survive if it did not resemble
the Western-ideal type. In this view, the alternative
counterterrorism approach did nothing to address
the insurgency’s sources of strength. Yet, the opposite may have been true. Rather than sapping the
insurgency of its strength, pursuit of the Westernideal type may have actually provoked it. Even if
the campaign plan prioritized particular areas, the
January-February 2014 MILITARY REVIEW