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One of the best research centers on Afghanistan published it's latest report from the field. Recommended. Its about Nad-e Ali in Helmand. It reminds me of an incident Dr.Mike Martin describes in his book. Let me quote it (it's long and fascinating and gives context): https://twitter.com/rsurush/status/1351056425284476933
'Where are the Taliban, Governor-Sahib",I asked Habibullah, the recently appointed (2008) district governor of Nad-e Ali (Mike worked in helmand). He smiled at the innocent of my question and pointed a Shin Kalay, a village. They are Taliban' he said. 'Very interesting,Governor',
the British colonel said. 'I intend to do something about that tomorrow'. At 3 a.m the next morning I was awoken by gunfire. The lead elements of the British battle group, after sneaking their way towards Shin Kalay had come under fire. The colonel appeared with his sleeping bag
over his shoulder. We got into our vehicles and drove towards Shin Kalay. A few hours later we were sipping tea in the mosque in Shin Kalay. The Taliban had put up a brie fight. The village elders were shaking us for liberating them for the yoke of Taliban oppression.
"They (The Taliban) even pulled our school down with a bulldozer', they said. To the British this was a gift: a ready-made development project to demonstrate that the Afghan government (read: international money) would build where the Taliban destroyed. It seemed to fit with ..
our narrative and it strongly supported our own self-view. we were liberators; saviours, but we did not understand what was going on. Some dynamics became clear fairly quickly. The 'Taliban' in the village were actually a tribal militia raised by the village
elders to keep the district 'police' out: the police had been raping village boys an stealing in recent months. It was unfortunate that the British had entered the village with twenty policemen in tow, but to us, we were there to operate in support of the Afghan government.
Habibullah, it turned out, was from the same tribe as the police; the villages form Shin Kalay a different tribe, and locked in a historical conflict with the first. Habibullah had been using us to get his police back into the village where they could tax the lucrative opium.
This looked like a 'tribal' feud. Delving a little deeper, and talking a little longer, it emerged that Habibullah had been to Nad-e Ali before. He had been the chief of the police during communist 1980's.
The next central government official to be appointed to Nad-e Ali was the same Habibullah, nearly two decades later. Now it began to look like a 'personal' fight. What of the school? Once we understood that the Shin Kalay 'Taliban' were actually a self-defence militia..
who were the 'Taliban' who had pulled the school down? Much, much later, and only after spending four years building relationships and trust with the elders of Shin Kalay, did I stumble on the truth: jealousy. One of the clans in the village had become so jealous of the prestige
that the school had bestowed on another, upon whose land the school was built, that they had invited some 'Punjabis' to Shin Kalay to pull the school down. When the Taliban Quetta Shura heard bout this, they sacked the Taliban governor for Nad-e Ali because he had not enforced..
(a the time) pro-education policy. "How do we define this fight?", Mike Martin wonders. @ThreshedThought
