Though
some valued the continuity he represented, it is a safe bet that
there were few tears at International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)
Headquarters when news broke that the man known as AWK had been killed Tuesday
morning. The death of Ahmed Wali Karzai, head of the Kandahar Provincial
Council and half-brother to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, leaves a gaping hole
in Southern Afghanistan's power structure, and serves as an ominous metaphor
for Afghan politics as a whole. In Afghanistan, your friends are often just as
dangerous as your enemies-and those who live by the gun often die by it as well.
That
is why the key question in the wake of AWK's death is not whether his assassin,
Sardar Muhammad, was a long-time Taliban sleeper agent, had a personal
grievance, or represented a competing criminal network-all of which are
possible. There are many reasons to kill in Afghanistan, and distinguishing
between political, personal, and criminal motivations is to assume that there
is necessarily a difference. One lesson from AWK's life is that criminal, familial,
insurgent, and political spheres overlap tremendously in Afghanistan. The key
question highlighted by his death is whether that system can be changed-and the
answer seems to be no. Turns out AWK could not trust his friends; can ISAF vet
its own any better?
Several
reports have noted AWK's increasing collaboration with international forces
over the past six months, a notion starkly contradicted by his past public image when he was widely
disparaged as a criminal vampire taking advantage of a beleaguered Afghan
political system. Times change. Interests change. And sometimes they coincide in
unexpected ways. But the happenstance confluence of personal and state interest
that incentivized collaboration between ISAF and AWK is no basis for a reliable
political system.
It
is time to question a fundamental notion of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan,
which is the premise that the Afghan government can co-opt warlords and
powerbrokers by incorporating them into the Afghan governance structure. The
problem is that the institutions become fig leafs obscuring the deeper familial
and economic power structures holding together political coalitions and
the government itself. AWK was not a powerbroker because he was the head of
Kandahar's provincial council; he was head of the provincial council because he
was a powerbroker.
A
position in government legitimized and certified AWK's power, but the
bureaucracy and legal authority of the government was not its source-and in
that way AWK was not unique. He was one of the strongest of Afghanistan's
politician-crime boss-tribal leaders, but the contours of his power are
familiar nationwide. The problem in Afghanistan is that it is led by a legion
of AWK-like powerbrokers whose negotiations and accommodations are dressed-up
in the structures of a modern bureaucracy, but ultimately the result of older
power structures and personal accommodations. Those accommodations are as
fragile as the bodies of the individuals that make them.
As
Afghanistan expert Michael Semple writes, "the trouble with a
strategy...based upon constructing this highly personalized web of relationships
and alliances, between commanders, tribal figures, the mafia and even elements
in the Taliban is that there is no functioning institution to provide a successor."
President
Karzai said of AWK's assassination that, "this is the life of Afghan people,
this sorrow is in every Afghan home, everyone of us has this sorrow." Without
institutions strong enough to frame political relationships that supersede
individuals, it will stay that way.
Brian Fishman is a
counterterrorism research fellow at the New America Foundation and a fellow
with the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
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