 Good afternoon, everyone. It's my great pleasure this afternoon to introduce Professor Tom Barfield. Just a couple of notes from the Academy. I picked up Tom's profile from the Boston University website, and I'm struck by how all of us who have these profiles have pictures of ourselves that were taken many years ago. I'm also rather jealous of Tom and anthropologists because he gets to teach courses like nomads. I don't think I could get away with that in law school. And just finally as a note from the Academy, I think we all aspire to, but few of us achieve, having written the book. I'll get into a bit of Tom's background, but he did write the book Afghanistan, a Cultural and Political History. It's required reading of all of my students in the Afghanistan Legal Education Project at Stanford Law School. It's required reading in Dr. Jalalie's daughter's introductory political science classes. It is a classic. Tom Barfield is a professor of Anthropology at Boston University and president of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies. He's conducted ethnographic research extensively across Central Asia. He's working on things now like, what did you call it, Tom? Empires of nostalgia. You know, I am jealous being, I chose the wrong field obviously. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship to write his classic and I think without further ado, since you don't need an introduction, but I've wasted my breath in your time introducing you, Tom Barfield. Well, thank you. Thank you very much, and I want to thank the organizers for bringing such a group together. I want to thank people. Having lunch in the second day, I will try to see if I can't keep people awake. It's also a little bit, I didn't pick the topic, an anthropologist being asked to critique counterinsurgency. But then Ashraf Ghani is an anthropologist, and he's president of Afghanistan. So we fill a lot of roles. So I want to do some things sort of conceptually, not necessarily completely sort of run the table, but really ask some questions, and particularly in terms of state strengthening some of the difficulties of combining state strengthening with counterinsurgency, but even more problematically with counterterrorism. And before I begin, having sort of written a book that takes a running start of 500 years, that this is not the first time state building has been important in Afghanistan, or that foreigners have thought this is how we will bring stability. I like to point to people that this will be the fourth foreign withdrawal that the Afghans have seen, all remarkably similar, in that foreigners arrive seeking to make Afghanistan into their own image, and leaving Afghanistan content to let the Afghans run it any way they please, as long as it doesn't bother the rest of the world. Consequently, the Afghans actually have a template for this. We do not. In fact, one of the most interesting things is that the Afghans can legitimately claim their insurgencies have driven every foreign force from Afghanistan. The more interesting thing is no insurgency after having done that has ever succeeded in toppling a government in Kabul that retains an international patron, and God knows I thought they'd be able to do it with Najibullah. But he proved me wrong, and he did not collapse until after the Soviet Union collapsed. No patron, no state. But if we're looking at periods of state strengthening, what I want to suggest, which as we heard a few comments from Mr. Siddiqui yesterday, is is this really a good idea? I mean, how strong do we want it? Because we do have to remember that most of the state's strengthening in Afghanistan has usually been for the benefit of an elite in Afghanistan that is very much in favor of it and wants the foreigners to strengthen the state for them, and then leave soon. And there's been three periods of state strengthening in Afghanistan in the last 50 years. The first and perhaps the most famous is Abdul Rahman, who killed more Afghans than the British ever did in both Anglo-Afghan wars, over a hundred thousand people. He also destroyed all autonomy in Afghanistan. He created a real state, a centralized state that has been the dream of all his successors. Even Ashraf had to mention, yes, he's one of my ideals. From the rural perspective, this is not such a great ideal. Because he was the only one that was successful. The two other times of state strengthening included Aminullah in the 1920s, creating a top-down modern state. Abdul Rahman wanted a centralized state. He built the car, but he chose not to drive it. I mean, no social reform, no nothing. Don't cause me problems, and I'll leave you alone. Aminullah wanted to change things, and certainly at the end of the First World War, Afghanistan was one of the leading lights of the Islamic world in terms of change, along with Turkey and Iran. It didn't turn out so well. He was overthrown in 1929. The third period of state strengthening was the PDPA in Kabul, taking more of a leftist approach. Sometimes they saw themselves as successors to Aminullah, but on steroids. The interesting thing is, out of these three state-building exercises, two ended in destroying the state. Therefore, one of the things I think we need to be careful of is, when we're thinking about strengthening the state, if it means that Kabul feels that it can run roughshod over the countryside, it risks political stability. Because if we look at one of the longest periods of peace in Afghanistan, and the Canadian Prime Minister said, oh, Afghanistan, it's always had insurgencies, but actually it doesn't. And for 50 years, from 1929 to 1978, the Musahiban, do-nothing dynasty, proclaimed they were the absolute rulers in Afghanistan, and almost never sought to prove it. It was 25 years before they even decided maybe we should do infrastructure, maybe we should do education. Very slow, and that probably led to their demise with the PDPA, but it also led to 50 years of peace. It's what I call the Wizard of Oz strategy. I am the great Oz. Don't look behind the curtain. It served everybody's function. OK, so these are the, you know, just to be aware that when we're talking about strengthening the state, it is true that a state that's too weak is a problem, but a state not so much that really is too strong, but a state that believes itself to be so strong as the PDPA thought, hey, we've had 50 years of peace. Let's do something with this government. That's what brings things down. And so with a new regime coming in, one of the important questions with the internationals saying we really need to strengthen your state, it's really important that the state not overplay its hands. This has brought it down in the past. So one of the problems that any state faces now is the question of counterinsurgency being asked to talk about counterinsurgency. And there's a lot of debate. What's the best counterinsurgency strategy? The best counterinsurgency strategy is not to allow an insurgency to begin. We've heard from many of speakers that think about if you were Mullah Omar, it's September 11th, 12th, 13th, and you've announced if the foreigners come, we will beat them like the Russians. All Afghans will rise. We'll fight another 10 years. In 10 weeks, he's on a motorcycle. Disappearing into the mountains on his way to Pakistan. You got to ask yourself, like, what went wrong? Where's my xenophobic allies? Where's my friends? It's gone 10 weeks. But as was noted, the Taliban were not so much defeated as they decided to go home. Times had changed. System was gone. And this was the time, the time to do reconciliation, the time to do the counterinsurgency stuff is not in the midst of a war, but when a war is over. And this was the time to come in and announce that everybody is a winner. I mean, if Mullah Omar couldn't hold Kandahar, everybody was entitled to enter the winner's circle. That was the whole deal. If one looks at the rise and fall of dynasties of states in Afghanistan, one of the things, and Ali Jala Ali can correct me on this, but is an absence of decisive battles. The night before decisive battle, people decide who's going to win. And the next day, there's no need for a decisive battle. How that happens is sort of a mystery, but people know when it happens. And if you're a leader, you're very nervous. Everybody's behind you one day and suddenly the palace is empty. If you see all the uniforms in the foyer, it's time to sneak out the back door. You have lost your legitimacy. You don't have to ask how you can leave that to a political scientist who will be writing a dissertation on it in 10 years. But if we look at it, this was the time to really focus. And instead, it is almost that the West could not believe it had won so it searched for enemies and its allies that it helped. Because remember, there were fewer than 400 Americans on the ground when the Taliban fell. That's not a whole lot. This was an Afghan owned and unoperated. We had made it provided the money. We had made it provided the air power. But as the Afghans did the deals, they made this happen. But also having won, there was an incentive for those who had won to say, well, if you're looking for enemies, I have enemies. That's Abdul over there. He took my land, because you don't care about the land, but you do care that he might be an al-Qaeda sympathizer who joined the Taliban and you should bomb his village immediately so that I can take his land. Now, it's not going to be put that way, but our guys in some senses were looking for trouble that wasn't there. And they got it, that the Taliban who had decided to go back to their village or disappear into Pakistan were essentially given incentive to reorganize, to come back. So one of the most important things, I would say, in terms of thinking about these types of operations, which was certainly said by other speakers, is know when you won. But the military side is not the complete part. It is bringing peace that's the difficulty and that involves politics. And we're at the U.S. Institute of Peace, you know? Where's the shock troops from the international brigade of international peace? I am here to impose peace, stand aside. Yeah, that's what we should be doing. You know, this is where diplomats should step in. Cut deals where everybody smiles. We can do this. But not if there is a sense going around that there must be some enemy under the cover somewhere we will find them. And particularly in places like Afghanistan that have long histories of manipulating foreign patrons. Always think twice before somebody says, that's just the enemy that you're looking for. Well, as was told by people by 2006, there was a significant insurgency, but this was not really recognized. I remember I was asked along with a number of other academics and scholars by the British who were leading the NATO operation in Kandahar to come to Germany for a conference. So we could tell this new force coming in how to deal with Afghanistan. The biggest conversation was how are we going to deal with NGOs? You know, how can we cooperate with NGOs to bring devout? This is really kind of peacekeeping. And somebody even said, if somebody shoots at us, should we shoot back or we should just wait, you know? And they stepped into one of the biggest, the Canadians and the British, one of the biggest fights they had seen in more than a generation. It was totally unexpected. But we knew there was an insurgency on the way, already there. And it's not till the Obama administration, 2009, 2010, as we've heard, that essentially the United States steps in that the Afghan army, security forces are not up to this. The United States should step in and begin a counterinsurgency. But it's a particular kind of counterinsurgency that I call counterinsurgency by proxy. Because Afghanistan is the home of the Afghans, not the United States. When the British are fighting an insurgency in Northern Ireland, they have a stake in it. When the French are fighting in Algeria, they believe they own Algeria. When the United States goes in to say we will deal with the insurgency, Afghans stand the hot side while we take care of this, does this strengthen or weaken the state? In one sense, it streaks them, Zed, because you're taking out major opponents. But on another way, you've left training wheels on the bicycle. They're not going to learn how to do this themselves. Even worse, I think the analogy would be, you go to the doctor and he says, you know, you're really kind of out of shape. You should go to a gym, have a personal trainer. Well, in the Afghan context, you say, that's a really good idea. I'm kind of out of shape. You go to the gym, you see a really good looking personal trainer. But he can lift weights better than you. He can run the treadmill better than you. So you spend an hour watching him lift weights, run the treadmill while you read a magazine. It tires you out so much that you can go home and get a good night's sleep. This is what we did in Afghanistan. In some ways, by not involving the Afghans at all, essentially, in the most important battle in their own country, an insurgency in the heartland of southern Afghanistan, which I should note, that's really the first insurgency in Afghan history. Insurgencies are us, live in eastern Afghanistan and just north of Kabul. The Duranis, the southern Afghanistan, they're always late adopters, in part because they have a lot of irrigated land to use. But, you know, it's, when we're looking at this, what we see is that we protect a state from collapsing, which is useful, but we do not provide it with the tools to sort of, in terms of security, to run its own operation. And the negative impact of this is it means the palace can play patrimonial corrupt politics because it's not worried about losing. You know, so even in places like Helmand, Kandahar, other places, the governor there has got to worry about what the palace thinks, not what the local population thinks, because fundamentally, what we've got is a regime that's acting as if nothing is changed because they have this protective shield. So they can go out there about their business, they can engage in criminal enterprises. They can do mismanagement, but it really doesn't matter fundamentally because NATO, ISAF, the United States is taking care of the problem, at least preventing it from falling apart. Now, this brings to the question of, so, okay, what should you be doing in counterinsurgency, and particularly the whole idea of coin? And as was mentioned in one of the talks yesterday, Coin Strategy talks about governance, good governance. This is what's causing trouble. The problem, as Nemot Najumian and I once wrote an article, is that governance and government are not always the same things. In Western societies, developed societies, yeah, governance comes from government. If my house is robbed, I call 911. Okay, if I run a red light, there's a cop that pulls me over. In Afghanistan, there is no 911. If somebody steals your cow, you have to go get it back. If somebody kills your brother, it's a blood feud. But what you've got in then essentially are mechanisms at the lowest level for governing, meaning maintaining social order. This has its limits, which is why these people have never rejected the sovereignty of the Afghan government because a government, even the most anarchic kind of people, recognize somebody needs to keep the roads open. Somebody needs to prevent Pakistan or Iran from coming. There's somebody needs to print the currency. Somebody needs to design the flag. But, and this was noted, it's the 200th year anniversary of Mount Steward Elphinstone's, the Kingdom of Kabul and its dependences, Britain's first explanation of Afghanistan. They said, according to the Afghan ruler, he has all the powers of an Asian potentate. He can do anything. According to his subjects in the village, his powers are much more limited. And there's a pause that said, there is much disagreement on where these limits are. And this, this is a fundamental problem in Afghanistan that elsewhere in the world was taking care of two or 300 years ago. That is the state became predominant. That is, Weber could define a state as having monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Afghanistan, the state as the highest level of authority, has been contested for more than 200 years and has not really been resolved. Either way, local people have never replaced the state. But the state has never been able to make itself, even under Abdul Rahman, so powerful that it could run everything. So one of the important things, if you're looking at a coin strategy, is, and perhaps I'm wrong on this, I haven't read the entire long manual, which is available from a free download. But what you get is, I would say in coin, an assumption that it's a zero sum game between two parties, the insurgents and the government. The difficulty is that it assumes the population you are fighting over is largely passive, waiting for one side to win. And I would argue, particularly in Afghanistan, the population is not neutral, they're players. They may not like the Taliban, they may want the Taliban out, but they don't necessarily want to see agents of the Karzai government showing up. And this is a really tough thing to do. And I think General McChrystal had a real problem with this when he announced, moving into Helmut, that he would deliver a government in a box. That is the last present these people wanted. It's a Karzai jack-in-the-box. You turned it and outpumped a full administration. Tax collectors, police, we're all here. No, that's not what they wanted. But our assumption was we're fighting on behalf of a government that's lost control of the territory. When from sort of the United States, we don't want the Taliban there, but it's a second-order problem as to whether local people are taking care of this or whether the palace is taking care of this. So I would argue that, you know, that most of coin strategy, it looks to me, is based on colonial examples and others in which they largely dealt with peasant populations, which Scott's work, Weapon of the Week, are largely, they see themselves as having no role in politics. At the local level, Afghans have never accepted this. So this leads me to talk a little bit about the question of where you fight insurgency. And in addition to fighting insurgency being kind of, as I call it, a proxy insurgency war, we do the work on behalf of a central government. But it's also in so many places, the fighting of the insurgents didn't seem to be based on strategy so much as convenience of where to fight. Why was Helmand, both for the British and the Americans, the place to start? Maybe 5% of the population, not since Mahmoud of Ghazni's sort of winter palace has it ever been particularly important, but they're there. Why? Well, books are some, well, the British knew Kandahar was more important, but the Canadians were there. And we don't work well with Canadians. We'll take Helmand. And when the Marines move in, we want to go in. They can't work in Kandahar because the Marines don't even work well with others at all. So there's even, you know, so instead of R.C. South, suddenly we have R.C. Southwest, which is Marineistan. And when people say the Afghans are divided into tribes, hell, there's nothing like that when you look at NATO and U.S. military. There's the Marines, there's the regular guys, then there's the Allies and somewhere on the horizon of the Afghans. And yet that's set where we're going to fight, who we're going to fight. Same thing in the East. We must control Noristan. Afghanistan never even conquered Noristan until 1895 and they did it in the winter and then left. You can't even take donkeys into Noristan and Kunar. Also, another place that Afghans ignored. As I wrote in my book, Afghan leaders control territory by ruling populated areas and ignoring these other places. Things that I will ever live to regret. I call it the cheese holes. That it's Swiss cheese. You rule the cheese, you ignore the holes. Afghans knew better. They would not send. They never did. A base up the core and got what? Pick a fight with lumber smugglers who never liked anybody, not even other Noristan. Yet we did. And all of these places were marginal. So we choose to fight an insurgency, not in the places that are most strategic important, but they're in fact the most marginally. That politically don't mean anything, whether you lose Kunar or Noristan or whether Helman raises a black flag doesn't really make any difference. But that's not how we were doing it because we were doing counterinsurgency by demonstration. We will show they are. We are so effective in Noristan or in Helman that the insurgents will say, Oh, look at those guys. Let's give up. The big problem was in Kandahar or in eastern Afghanistan, Paktia, Paktika, Nangrahar, but no, we're elsewhere. And what I would say is that's an example where if it's not your fight, you don't make the hard strategic decisions. You don't have somebody saying, I don't care if you don't work well with others. I'm commander in chief. You guys lump it, learn it. So this brings me finally to a little talk on counter terrorism, which all the way going back to 9-11, we have no idea what it is. It was always noted terrorism is a tactic, not a group, not a thing. It's a tactic. So who are terrorists? What do they do? But the most important thing to realize about counter terrorism in places like Afghanistan is that they are potentially state destroying. Why is that? Because counter terrorism in developed countries is handled within the law. It's a legal problem. You may not like them, but we consider them murderers. We've got one on trial in Boston. We don't even, he looks so goofy. Boston doesn't even consider him a terrorist. That's not up to our standards. But you've got a situation in which the legal system handles it, and that would be the same in Europe, Canada, Britain, United States. But in weak states, particularly places like Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, counter terrorism always takes place in secret outside the legal system. This means that the country is actually losing its sovereignty, has no idea what's going on, therefore is unable to weigh the consequences. But worse than that, it can actually go against the stability type of operations. If a group is considered to be terrorists, then the anti-terrorist people are going after them, regardless of how your diplomacy is going, or how your counter insurgency is going. If we're looking at this, what we see is a situation in which potentially it's highly unstable, only takes place in weak states. Look at where drones are. The Fata region of Pakistan, I notice we don't send one to Mullah Omar and Quetta, much more high value target, but we don't go there. Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. All places that fundamentally can't really object or are actually happy to see this kind of support. The difficulty is, if you're in the counter-terrorism business, a positive solution might be the complete destruction of the state so that everybody fights everybody else because then they can't bother us. That would be, from a counter-terrorism point, a good solution. They cannot threaten us. It's a very bad solution for the people who live. There are, even for those of us who are talking about increasing the Afghan state's capacity in terms of making it work. And because in these weak countries, it is not responsible, either to the military chain of command, to ambassadors, or to the Afghan government, we don't have the checks and balances that we need. So in terms of looking at this, what I would say is that if we're looking at questions of counter-terrorism and we're looking at questions of counter-insurgency, one of the most important things to realize about Afghanistan, which has been talked about by many people at the conference, is it's a very complex society in which today's friend is tomorrow's enemy and vice versa. And in that kind of situation, it's not as George Bush would, you're either against us or for us. In Afghanistan, well, which day of the week? I could be against you, but I could be for you. It changes. We assume, once we've identified somebody, that is fixed. And one of the lessons of Afghanistan and certainly people who spent a lot of time there, realize it's a much more fluid situation. And one of the interesting things to watch is whether the withdrawal of foreign troops may actually focus the new government and others to come to a deal within Afghanistan because they no longer have enough protection to act in an arbitrary manner. They need this for internal reasons. And God knows, Najibullah did this when the Soviets withdrew, 80% of the Mujahideen stood down. They were fighting Russians, Russians were gone. So when we're looking at this, it's both a dangerous period, but potentially a period of opportunity because the Afghans, in a way, are more likely to craft a political decision that works because it's their country, it's their culture, it's their politics. So I'll leave it there for today. Thank you very much. I'm tempted to probe Helman because it seems to me, it seems to me that there were other objectives at play, right? One of my students showed lovely slides of the poppy fields of Helman where he was based for some time. So maybe you would talk just a little bit about the opium eradication program and its perceived fueling of terrorism in Afghanistan. If we had actually eradicated the opium production in Helman, I might agree. But in fact, eradication was like the insurgency demonstration eradication. Send weekly reports home, something is eradicated, and yet, if you look at the UN figures, the actual production of opium is increasing every single year. So, and in fact, it was really clear that NATO had no interest at all, neither the British or the Americans, and helping to eradicate opium because it would upset the people that they were trying to make friends with. And it was well known that DEA guys couldn't get rides on helicopters, would be sent to the wrong place, that fundamentally not our problem. So there I would say, and you know, if you wanna do opium, Kandahar had opium, there's other places you could go. But I find it interesting that of all the places that you pick to make a stand, Kandahar, which is the center of population, of political influence in Southern Afghanistan, that receives troops much later than Helmand. And that's, from a strategic point of view, it seemed to me that that's absolutely reversed because if you controlled, if you had Kandahar under control, you really wouldn't need to worry about Helmand. But the reverse was not true. You could absolutely control Helmand and it wouldn't affect what was going on further to the east or west.