Conflict in the Sangin district of Afghanistan

A version of this originally appeared on Mike Martin’s personal blog, Threshed Thought.

The news seems to have gone quiet about Sangin district in Helmand. Before Christmas there was an intense media storm that the district was about to fall to the ‘Taliban’. There were reports of the SAS being deployed, and the day after, the story of multiple Taliban commanders being killed in a night raid. As I have written before, it is impossible to separate every one with guns in Helmand into two groups: the ‘government’ and the ‘Taliban’, so it is difficult to see who the SAS were targeting, and who they were supporting.

As any sixth form army cadet will tell you, military operations must be based on a sound intelligence assessment of the the battle-space. So, what do we know about Sangin?

Sangin is one of the more contested districts in Helmand. The basis of this contest are the strangely gerrymandered 1964 district boundaries, which brought together an odd collection of tribes: mostly Ishaqzai and Alikozai, but also good doses of Alizai and Noorzai.

These tribes are all well represented elsewhere in Helmand or in neighbouring Kandahar, but none of them have pre-eminence in Sangin. This has led to a dispute over control of the district centre. Why? The group or individual that controls the district centre controls the market where the local drug dealing occurs (which they can tax), but it also results in control of the police. This is important in southern Afghanistan: the group that is the police is able to protect their own role in the drugs trade and persecute others’ roles, including manipulating government eradication to pursue their own tribal enemies.

In Sangin, the contest has historically been between the Ishaqzai and the Alikozai. During the Jihad (the war between the mujahidin and the communist government in the 1980s), these two tribal groups (and the multiple constituent sub-tribes) allied themselves with different jihadi groups. This enabled them to continue their inter-tribe feuding under the cover of holy war. Much the same is going on today.

When the Taliban arrived in 1994, they actually kicked out both the Ishaqzai and Alikozai warlords, although the Ishaqzai warlord’s men immediately began working for the Taliban. Once the Taliban fell, Karzai reinstated that Alikozai warlord–Dad Mohammad–and US special forces allowed him to conduct a reign of terror over the Ishaqzai communities to the south of Sangin district centre. The U.S. were not being vindictive or mischievous in their behaviour; they were just completely ignorant of the dynamics–something I suspect may be happening today.

The U.S. were so blind to local dynamics that when two of their special forces soldiers were killed in 2003, Dad Mohammad managed to convince them that the killers were in the Ishaqzai community. Shortly after, the US established a firebase in the compound of a ‘Lal Jan’–an Ishaqzai smuggler. This base then got handed over to the British–and became FOB Jackson–and it is now the ANA in base in Sangin. Lal Jan has been trying to get it back ever since.

Finally, let’s look at the comments of Hashim Alikozai, a Helmandi senator. He paints the conflict as a government:Taliban, good:bad, black:white dichotomy, except with the added twist that the Taliban were mostly from Pakistan. When western media interview Afghans, they usually look at the job title. But looking at his name, we can see he is Alikozai, so he is likely to have a bias when talking about Sangin.

This is the story of Afghanistan recently: the Afghan government is desperate to have the Americans (and to a lesser extent) the Europeans involved. This is because the US help them in all the various micro civil wars involving their local allies (in this case the Alikozai) that are taking place all over the country. Afghan government figures will repeatedly state that the situation is dire and can only be resolved with western help; viz the much-hyped (by the Afghan government) ‘rise’ of ISIS in Afghanistan recently.

So what is going on in Sangin?

It is likely to be a variation on local tribal groups, arranged around smugglers, who are trying to control the district centre. This is because they want to tax the local drugs trade, and to control the police. And why does the UK government want to be involved in this local spat between drug dealers? Because ten years ago we went there by mistake, and now we are still pretending we didn’t make a mistake. That is why we claim it is strategic, even though it is a collection of mud huts surrounded by poppy fields.

Featured image: “1st CEB, Coalition forces complete Outlaw Wrath, destroy more than 50 IEDs” Photo by Cpl. John McCall, 1st Marine Division, Sangin Afghantistan. CC BY 2.0 via DVIDSHUB Flickr.