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Fredrik Barth's Political Leadership among Swat Pathans (1959) stands out as one of the
classics of political anthropology. Intended partially as a corrective to E. E. Evans-Pritchard's
emphasis on social structure as the key to understanding political relationships in tribal societies,
Barth emphasized the role of individual initiative and choice in the creation of political
authority. In shifting attention from social structure to the individual, Barth's work is a critical
milestone in the development of anthropological theory, presaging the rise of rational choice
and practice theory. Barth's study of the Swat Pathans (now more commonly referred to as
Pakhtuns) in Pakistan also generated one of the more interesting debates within anthropology.
Indeed, debates over Barth's work (1959, 1981, 1985), Evans-Pritchard's study of the Nuer of
the Sudan (1940) and Edmund Leach's of the Kachin in Burma (1970[1954]) are at the center
of anthropology's contribution to political theory.'
All this being said, it is mystifying and troubling that this rich vein of ethnographically
grounded theory has been almost entirely ignored in explanations of the now almost twentyyear-old civil war in Afghanistan. The Afghan border is just a few hundred miles from Swat, as
the crow flies. The Afghan border region is inhabited predominantly by Pakhtuns who speak
the same dialect and share the same genealogical and mythic charter, the same forms of
economic livelihood, religious beliefs, and ethos and understanding of life and death as the
people of Swat. Most important for the purposes of this discussion, Afghan Pakhtuns' political
traditions consist of the same range of diverse forms as in the northwest frontier region of Pakistan
that includes Swat.
The fact that the Swat literature has been so widely ignored would certainly seem to imply
that-for all the sound and fury within the discipline-sociocultural anthropologists actually
practice their profession in something of a soundproof room. Physical anthropologists studying
hominid origins and archaeologists who discover some significant new site will see their
contributions discussed in the news, but social and cultural anthropologists are primarily good
for novelty value, for producing human interest stories rather than serious analyses of social and
political issues, as anyone who has monitored the newspaper stories written each year at the
time of the American Anthropological Association convention is aware. In trying to explain why
Barth's analysis of Pakhtun political leadership has been overlooked in explanations of the
The conflict in Afghanistan, now two decades old, has generated considerable
attention from journalists, policy analysts, and political scientists, but the literature
on the conflict includes few references to the work of Fredrik Barth on political
leadership among the Swat Pakhtuns of neighboring Pakistan. Here I explore the
relevance of Barth's work to an analysis of the war in Afghanistan. In particular, I
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Afghan civil war, other factors come to mind beyond the relative invisibility of anthropology in
the outside world. The first, and perhaps most obvious, reason is that the Afghan civil war might
reasonably appear to represent a very different phenomenon than what Barth and his critics
were talking about. Afghanistan is embroiled in a conflict that began with a Marxist revolution
(1978), which spawned a popular insurrection, which, in turn, led to invasion by the Soviet
Union (1979). In the years that followed, a hydra-headed Islamic guerrilla movement developed, resisting and eventually dislodging the Soviets, before turning on itself in an internecine
In this article, I argue that our understanding of the Afghan conflict can be considerably
improved by considering it in light of Barth's work and the critical debate around it. I examine
changing patterns of political leadership among Afghan Pakhtuns in light of what Barth and
others have written about political leadership in Swat. Before moving onto Afghanistan and the
comparative discussion, however, I will summarize Barth's study and the critiques put forward
(1959:2). Barth's project among the Swat Pakhtun has focused primarily on the contractual
relationships established by Pakhtun khans (landowners) with tenants and followers. In Barth's
words, "Each chief establishes, as it were, a central island of authority, in the form of a men's
house group, in a politically amorphous sea of villagers. From this centre his authority extends
outwards with decreasing intensity" (1959:91). Traditionally, a chief's area of authority was
temporary, in large part because of the custom of periodic land redistribution, but even with
the end of land redistribution, Barth indicated that there was considerable flux in the composition of different factions because of the changing fortunes of individual chiefs and the continuing
ability of followers to shift their allegiance to a different leader.
The second focus of Barth's concern was with leaders he referred to as "Saints" whose
authority is premised on their association with Islam. In contrast to khans, whose success
requires a reputation for self-assertiveness and ruthless defense of their interests, well-regarded
saints will have established a reputation for "moderation, piety, indifference to physical
pleasure," as well as "wisdom, knowledge, and control of mystical forces" (Barth 1959:101).
Cultivation of these qualities, along with a dignified, pacific manner and disciplined observance
of Islamic rituals, confirms villagers' respect for saints; in some cases, saints inspire awe and
veneration. In Barth's words, a reputation for holiness
gives their opinions great weight, particularly among the more pious or gullible sections of the population,
and thus contributes to their political influence. Utilizing such a reputation, a verbally facile Saint can
very profoundly influence community opinion, both among the body of villagers, by setting them up
against the dominant landlords, and among the landlords themselves, by changing their point of view or
threatening them with accusations of heterodoxy. [1959:102]
The perspective employed by Barth in Political Leadership among Swat Pathans "does not
allow any shorthand language whereby patterns, lineage-systems, exploitation and class, or any
other macro-feature is described as 'reproducing itself' " (1981:129). The various forms of
political relationship Barth documented in Swat "all emerge from process in which people
exercise judgment and act with intent under the circumstances in which they find themselves-whether the aggregate consequences of their separate and collective acts are indeed
what they wished and sought, or are unwanted (perhaps even unperceived) by themselves"
(1981:130). "Society" in Swat thus emerges as "an aggregate of all these choices, whereby
persons in a wide range of dissimilar opportunity situations purposely and inadvertently shape
their own life histories and those of others" (1981:131).
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In his critique of Barth, published in Man in 1972, Talal Asad criticized Barth's focus on free
choice as the central operating principle of Swat society. In Asad's view it was not free choice
but the presence of a sovereign landowning class that was the key to political leadership in
Swat. This meant that
the system does not regulate itself as it were after the consent of all participants has been obtained. It is
regulated by a dominant class of landowners who exploit the landless. Once the agrarian class structure
is recognized as the basic political fact... it becomes no longer possible to represent the political system
as essentially made up of opposing blocs in dynamic equilibrium, a system which is simply the result of
Pakhtun khans acquire their political authority through their control of scarce land and their
transactions of individual leaders and followers and the dyadic contracts that emerge out of
those transactions. Barth's individualistic, contractual market model masks the fact that land is
controlled by a relatively small number of men who are in a position to dominate and exploit
those without land. This is not a free market, in Asad's view; rather, it is class domination.
Akbar S. Ahmed's critique of Barth's portrait of the Swat Pakhtun appears in Millennium and
Charisma among Pathans, published in 1976. Ahmed's main criticism is that Barth's work failed
to come to grips with the rise of a state system within the boundaries of Swat, a state system
centered on the charismatic figure of the Wali (ruler) who, in contradiction to the self-interested
khans, did much to improve the lives of his subjects. Ahmed argues that this omission stems in
large part from the fact that Barth did not make several important distinctions crucial to
understanding political developments in Swat. The first of these, according to Ahmed, distin-
guishes between nang (honor-bound) Pakhtuns and qalang (rent-paying) Pakhtuns. Nang
Pakhtuns generally inhabit the mountainous fringe of the Pakhtun universe where the land is
poor and life is harsh; nang societies are acephalous and segmentary in structure, and codes of
conduct are bound by traditional codes of honor. Qalang Pakhtuns, on the other hand, are
hierarchical; they inhabit tracts of fertile land that produce large marketable surpluses; their
patterns of social interaction are asymmetrical and structured less by Pakhtunwali (the Pakhtun
nature of society.... The stratified nature of Swat "qalang" society enabled a homologous but vastly
enlarged paternalistic State to be imposed on it without much friction. [1976:81]
Ahmed also criticizes Barth for his treatment of religious leaders which, according to Ahmed,
fails to differentiate between the relatively debased occupational and lineage groups who
represent everyday forms of Islamic observance and extraordinary, charismatic leaders connected to various Sufi traditions of mystical Islamic belief and practice:
Whereas the orthodox "mullah" (and also "Barthian Saints") work within the village social organization,
and in practice with the good will of the Khan, the Sufi works outside the village organization and
established normative patterns of social behaviour. [Ahmed 1976:55]
In contrast to "Marxist and Barthian man (as 'maximizing entrepreneur')" who "confront[s] the
material world, comprehend[s] it and wish[es] to possess it," the "Sufi is in the world but not of
it... he confronts it, comprehends and then rejects it" (Ahmed 1976:88).
Most charismatic Sufi leaders, Ahmed admits, appear at times of crisis to galvanize popular
sentiments and then disappear when the crisis is over. But some charismatic leaders succeed
in routinizing their authority, and this is possible because people recognize the leader as an
example of some larger, transcendent phenomenon. In the case of the Swat, the Akhund of
Swat, the spiritual founder of the Swat dynasty, was able to rise above the fray of everyday
politics because he was viewed by the people of Swat as exemplary of a model of ascetic piety
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associated with the prophet Muhammad and other great Sufi figures who have followed in his
wake. In failing to see the qualitative differences between local saintly lineages and those
connected to the wider Sufic traditions of Islam, Barth precluded any possibility of understanding
the origins of the Swat state, which began with the saintly person of the Akhund, passed through
a stage of intense millenarian ferment at the end of the 19th century, and ended up with the
establishment of the Swat state by one of the Akhund's grandsons in the first decades of the 20th
century.
The third critic I will discuss here is Michael Meeker, whose article "The Twilight of a South
Asian Heroic Age: A Rereading of Barth's Study of Swat" appeared in Man in 1980. In response
to the arguments of Asad and Ahmed to the effect that Barth placed too much stress on the
landlords and overemphasized conflict, Meeker bluntly disagrees, arguing that "Barth correctly
insists on the role of pragmatic and rational strategies in connexion with the use of force and a
resort to coercion" (1980:685). If anything, Meeker contends, Barth "underplays the disruptive-
ness of a quest for personal advantage in the political history of Swat," by seeing perduring
conflict "as part of a working system of leaders and groupings rather than as a calamity that left
"Heroic" or nang values were superimposed upon agrarian or qalang society, Meeker argues,
which is the reason Swat is prone to violence. And, in contrast to Ahmed's portrait of charismatic
Sufis "in the world but not of it," Meeker views saints as themselves entangled in the logic of
power in Swat: "As leaders of followings, as competitors with other saints with followings, and
as men whose role as peace-makers require [sic] them to exercise authority over chiefs, they
too are tainted by a quest for influence and prestige" (1980:697). For Meeker, Barth's principal
mistake is not in having conflated ideal-type categories but in having resorted to established
paradigms of social integration when the evidence would support the opposite conclusion-that
the processes he was describing were characteristic of a society out of balance with itself. For
all his efforts to differentiate himself from structural-functionalists like Radcliffe-Brown and
and his critics. In order to simplify and streamline this discussion of the evolution of political
leadership in Afghanistan, I will break down the now 19-year-old conflict into a series of stages,
which suggest themselves to this analysis not only because they involve discernibly different
patterns of political leadership but also because each illuminates something pertinent to the
perspective and concerns of one of Barth's critics. In my discussion of these perspectives and
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concerns in the context of particular historical events, I will elucidate what happened and why
and assess the applicability of Barth's and his critics' approaches to the world beyond Swat.
The first stage of the conflict extended from April 1978, when the Marxist Khalq party took
power in Afghanistan, through December 1979, when the Soviet Union abandoned all pretense
of being an interested ally and took control of the government in Kabul. In examining this period,
Talal Asad's analysis of the class underpinnings of political domination is clearly the most
pertinent, since it was in this period that the Marxist government tried to manipulate class
animosities in order to mobilize a popular movement in support of its revolution.
The second stage was much longer, lasting most of the decade from 1980 until the Soviet
withdrawal in 1989. This was the period in which seven Islamic political parties headquartered
across the border in Peshawar, Pakistan, came to control the resistance movement against the
Soviet-backed regime in Kabul. In analyzing this protracted period of the war, I will focus
primarily on the applicability of Akbar S. Ahmed's contention that, in Swat, Islam provided a
binding force against the corrosive competition of khans, thereby fundamentally transforming
in 1995, was a period in which the power of the Peshawar-based leaders began to wane. In
their place, local warlords and commanders became increasingly autonomous and predatory
in their relationship with local people. Given the antagonistic relationship between leaders and
followers, which I believe was at the heart of political relationships during this period, I will
refer primarily to Michael Meeker's work, which is potentially the most useful in explicating
this stage of the conflict.
Finally, I will discuss the fourth and current stage of the conflict, which extends from 1995
to the present, during which the Taliban militia has gradually exerted control over all but a
handful of provinces in the northern part of Afghanistan. This is in many respects the most
difficult stage to characterize, in part because it is ongoing and least fully studied, and in part
because it seems in many respects anomalous, especially in relation to the positions outlined
by Barth and his critics.
its base of support to other sectors of society. To accomplish this end, the party promulgated a
series of reforms intended to appeal to those whom they viewed as their natural constituency,
such as tenant farmers and landless agricultural laborers. Among the reforms were measures to
redistribute large landholdings and eliminate mortgages and other instruments by which peasant
farmers had traditionally lost their land to creditors.
In addition, the party began an intensive propaganda campaign designed to cast traditional
khans and religious leaders as "feudal" lords responsible for keeping the Afghan masses enslaved
and impoverished. Using radio, television, and rallies in every town of any size throughout the
country, the Khalq broadcast its message that a new era of class struggle had begun, that the
party for the first time had given the poor and disenfranchised the upper hand, and that in
partnership the party and the people would revolutionize Afghan society. Instead of joining this
partnership, however, the vast majority of Afghans-poor and wealthy alike-took up arms to
overthrow the regime in Kabul. Despite offers of free land and the government's promise to
cancel outstanding debts, village after village initiated attacks against government offices,
schools, and military posts, so that one year later by the spring of 1979, the government had
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essentially lost control of the countryside and, with it, all hopes of instituting its promised
revolution.3
On the surface, it would appear that the political program promulgated by the Khalqis was
premised on an understanding of Afghan society congruent with Asad's analysis of Swat, and
ethnographic descriptions from before the war indicate that wealth differentials of the sort found
in Swat are similar to those found in many, if not most, areas of Afghanistan.4 The question
arises, then, why, when given the opportunity, those who had most to gain by a class-based
revolution promising a fairer distribution of resources did not side with the Marxists. There is
not a simple answer to this question. Women's education, government interference in domestic
affairs, the disrepute of many of those who flocked to the party after the revolution-all of these
have been cited as reasons for the revolution's failure. In my own research, however, the reason
that I have most often encountered centers on the regime's disparaging treatment of elites and
their unwanted glorification of peasant suffering.
One of the principal tactics of the revolution from the first was to brand landowners, of even
modest means, as "feudals" in order to separate them from the larger number of landless
peasants, tenant farmers, and agricultural workers. This was to be the primary means by which
the party would jump-start the revolution, the assumption being that there was a widespread
underlying antagonism against the wealthy that few were willing to express openly. Revolution-
ary strategy focused on ways of harnessing this antagonism, primarily by committing the
government to supporting the poor against the rich. The failure of this plan was dramatic
evidence of how blinded the Khalqis had become by socialist dogma and how out of touch
they were with their own people. As Barfield has noted,
Since . . . absentee landlords were few, [the Khalqi government] took land from local owner-operators.
This generated great, sometimes violent opposition, for a man's land is his livelihood. In small kin-based
communities, taking land from one segment of the village and giving it to another, or bringing in outsiders
runs afoul of the complex web of social relations that bind the people. [1981:46]
Barth has written of Swat that leadership was premised on "securing the respect of all major
sectors of... society," and this in turn engendered on the part of politically active khans "a
comprehensive sensitivity to a host of culturally defined limits and standards for the exercise of
power and prestige" (1985:1 79). The same could be said of khans in Afghanistan who were tied
to their communities by a variety of reciprocal expectations that obliged them to recycle much
of their wealth back to their followers and farmers in the form of hospitality, ritual expenditures,
and salaries. In most parts of Afghanistan in the 1 970s, the economy was not heavily monetized,
and though Jon Anderson and others have written that the practice of big landowners taking
their profits out of the community for investment elsewhere was beginning to appear in the early
1970s, it was common for the wealthy-in Afghanistan as in Swat-to reinvest their profits in
keeping up a men's house and maintaining a cohort of allies and followers (see Anderson 1978).
The other half of the ideological equation-glorifying peasants as "heroic" in their poverty
and exploitation-was equally misconceived. One of the Khalqi tactics for encouraging this
perception was to hold rallies in villages throughout the country during the course of which
formerly landless peasants would be brought forward to receive deeds to recently confiscated
land. In most cases this tactic backfired, as many of the peasants who were placed in this position
found it humiliating to be recognized publicly for their economic misfortunes. The categories
intoned time and again by the Khalqis in reference to the rural poor-terms such as "exploited
for most Afghans, for whom the status of victim was insulting.5 Likewise, there was little
sympathy for the notion that large landowners were to be condemned for their fortune or that
it was justified to refer to them as "cruel feudals," "bloodthirsty exploiters," or any of the other
extreme terminology used to describe those with sizable landholdings. Landowners received
their bounty because of the deeds of their ancestors in the past and their own actions in the
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present, and so long as they fulfilled societal expectations by returning a portion of their wealth
back to the community through the guesthouse and various ritual acts of redistribution, few
begrudged them their good fortune. Likewise, it was also understood that those who tilled the
land and worked for others received their due, and few expected more from society or sought
glory in this world for the sufferings they had encountered.
In applying Asad's arguments to the Afghan context, I found that while the events of 1978
and 1979 do not necessarily refute his contention as to the importance of class structure in
Pakhtun society (forms of class stratification certainly did exist), they would appear to contradict
his argument as to the absence of free will among those subject to the authority of the Pakhtun
landowning class, unless one wanted to argue that the poor suffered from an extreme form of
"false consciousness" that blinded them to their own exploitation even when offered the
opportunity by the Khalqis of freeing themselves from their shackles. In my own view,
Afghanistan simply had not traveled far enough down the road of stratification, monetization,
and disenfranchisement for its people to be seriously attracted by Marxist rhetoric. In this sense,
it might be argued that the failure of the revolution was that it came too early, and in a tribal
and peasant society in which class divisions had not hardened and in which wealthy and poor
were still bound by ties of common descent and reciprocal obligation that far outweighed the
class divisions crucial to Khalqi party rhetoric.
To the extent that Asad's critique of Barth hinges on the notion (1) that class is the central
political reality and (2) that the differential control of economic resources so severely distorts
people's options that the poor are not in fact able to exercise free choice, it must be said that
this position is not relevant in the Afghan context, especially in comparison to Barth's emphasis
on individual initiative for landowners and tenants alike, which seems far more readily to square
with the facts. But Asad's critique has a second aspect as well, which has to do with the
appropriateness of employing a synchronic analysis. Thus, Asad ends his article on Swat by
arguing that Barth's synchronic analysis precludes accounting either for the increasing disparity
in economic and political power in Swat or for the fact that the landowning class was
accumulating ever more effective means for dominating and exploiting the landless. Whether
emergent patterns of class division might have become more evident and decisive in Afghanistan
the limits of a synchronic analysis such as that employed in Barth's original monograph for
grappling with realities that are as complexly interrelated and historically contingent as those
we encounter in Afghanistan and in Swat.
by local tribal poets and recorded on cassette tapes at various stages of the war.6 Poetry from
the first period of the war tended to be hortatory, centering around symbols of honor, descent,
and heroic action. By the early 1980s, however, the poetry had changed, most obviously in the
new centrality of Islamic symbols and the absence of honor-based imagery. The organization
of the conflict changed as well. Early on, groups banded together in traditional forms of
association to make decisions on tactics and operations. For example, attacks against government bases were generally preceded by tribal jirgas (councils) at which the elder and middleaged men of the community did most of the speaking and made all of the decisions. Military
action would then be organized through traditional organizational structures, such as the tribal
lashkar (army), which generally mirrored the social organization of the group as a whole in
being nonhierarchical and segmentary in structure. Overtime, these forms of military organization
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proved maladapted to the demands of the war, and they were also superseded, in this case by
smaller, more mobile units answering to resistance parties in Peshawar rather than local
councils.
would seem to be an appropriate resource. Ahmed noted "a Weberian and vectorial quality"
in "the development of types of authority" in Swat (1976:140), "from the patriarchal traditional
authority of the . . . Khans to the emergence of charismatic leadership . . . and the institution-
alization of charisma in the State" (1976:17). In the Afghan context, too, transformation of
political leadership had a "Weberian and vectorial quality," in the sense that traditional
patriarchal authority gave way to charismatic authority that was later institutionalized in
something resembling a state bureaucracy. Thus the political parties emerged in Peshawar in
part because traditional local forms of resistance, steeped in local rivalries, had proven
inadequate to meet a well-armed and organized external enemy. Recognizing these limitations,
people looked for unity and leadership among charismatic individuals and religiously based
political formations. These forms of leadership transcended local contexts, connecting communities to larger patterns and institutional arrangements in the Islamic world at large. Over time,
charisma was institutionalized through the administrative organs of the political parties which,
in addition to their military functions, took on many of the civil, economic, and political
responsibilities of a government in exile.
A cursory examination of the situation would thus seem to indicate that Ahmed's analysis has
considerable relevance to the conflict in Afghanistan; however, its relevance is limited in ways
that Barth's is not. My argument is based on several ethnographic points. First, the ideological
transformation from tribal honor to Islam occurred differently in Afghanistan than in Swat (as
perceived by Ahmed). In Afghanistan, the most immediate precipitant of change was not-as
Ahmed's analysis might lead us to expect-the stirring of an "atavistic" renewal of Islamic spirit
brought about by the presence on Afghan soil of a foreign, atheistic invader. According to many
informants with whom I spoke, the most profound impact of the Soviet invasion was, rather, a
deep sense of dread and uncertainty generated by the sudden appearance of helicopters, MiG
jets, and artillery barrages. The modern machinery of war thus created a crisis of confidence
that dampened the euphoria accompanying early victories against the Khalq government and
caused people to reconsider the larger significance of the conflict and how it had to be fought.
Poems composed during the first stage of the war include lines intended to spur men of the
present day to acts of heroism reminiscent of ancestral feats (see Edwards 1993). The disparity,
however, between poetic images of ancient battles fought with swords and rifles and the realities
of high-tech modern warfare was dramatic. Perhaps even more destabilizing was the indiscrimi-
nate manner and scale with which the new style of combat annihilated people. References to
heroic combat were no longer appropriate or resonant in this setting. Islam helped to fill this
void, but the Islam that came to the fore was not that of charismatic saints who turned enemy
bullets to water as in an earlier era in Swat. Miracles and saints were no more plausible or
relevant in the context of modern warfare than heroic ancestors. What did resonate was the
Poems of honor also promised that those who died in battle would earn the immortality of
tribal remembrance, but Islam offered the more comprehensive pledge of eternal paradise,
which was especially potent in a situation in which the continued existence of any individual
community-the unit within which memory and honor were preserved-was uncertain. It was
thus not the promise of charisma that was at the center of Islam's attraction, but the nihilism of
impersonal conflict as experienced in the late 20th century, a fact well understood bythe Islamic
political parties that began publishing magazines and newspapers fully given over to the subject
of martyrdom. Originating in the early 1980s, these publications featured various theological
and historical essays on martyrdom, but most of their pages were devoted to pictures and short
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obituaries of party members killed in battle. Through these publications, the memorialization
of individual casualties also strengthened the authority of the party as moral arbiter of value and
Turning to organizational aspects of the transition from tribal and village organizations to
more centralized party organization in Afghanistan, it is apparent that charismatic leadership
in itself was again not a significant factor. In the competitive climate of Peshawar in the early
1980s, with seven political parties all trying to get an edge up on their rivals, the decision as to
which leader to follow was generally determined by (in Barthian fashion) a rational calculation
of which party could produce more goods. Thus, the typical situation around 1980 was that the
men of any given tribe found themselves in desperate need of weapons, ammunition, and
supplies. Instead of ending in a few months, as generally happened in the past and as might
have happened once again had the Soviets not intervened, this conflict continued for more than
a year after the first skirmishes. The existing organization had no dedicated apparatus for
procuring supplies of any sort; to the contrary, the tribal ethos explicitly militated against the
nonbattlefield assignment that would preclude his participation as a full equal of his tribal
cousins. Additionally, the egalitarian nature of Pakhtun tribes stood in the way of any centrali-
zation of command, as members from collateral branches rarely acquiesced to the authority of
any one of their number.
While the need for weapons, ammunition, and supplies persisted, tribesmen in the mountains
heard radio reports over the BBC about the political parties then forming in Peshawar. Rumors
reached the fronts that the parties were distributing weapons to those who joined. At first, many
increasing their own political authority, and accepting a membership card from one of the
parties seemed a small price to pay. In this manner, hundreds of tribesmen eventually made
their way to Peshawar, made contact with one of the parties, and returned a few months later
with a camel-load of Lee-Enfield rifles. Before long, tribes that had once formed united fronts
were riven by factions and an overarching arms race that changed the emphasis in many places
from fighting the Soviets to gaining an advantage over old rivals. Tribal unity was thus disrupted,
and the endemic factionalism that characterized the parties in Peshawar was transferred to the
fronts inside Afghanistan.
Contrary, then, to Ahmed's depiction of Islam's role in Swat, Islam in the Afghan setting has
been as divisive as it has been unifying. Also, contrary to Ahmed's sense of the vectors of change,
the ultimate direction of change during the period when the Islamic parties first asserted their
domination over the Afghan resistance was not toward the progressive development and
centralization of social and political institutions but rather toward increasingly brutal and
authoritarian control. Authority in this context centered around gaining tactical advantage over
rivals in the movement and securing the obedience of party members. In this sense, centralization of power in the Afghan context had most of the negative features of state centralization and
very few of the positive features that both Ahmed and Barth ascribe to the Wali's rule in Swat.8
While accepting that Ahmed's depiction of the unifying role of charismatic Islamic leaders in
19th-century Swat may indeed be accurate, it nevertheless is the case that Islamic leaders in
the Afghan resistance through the 1980s had the opposite impact-factionalizing and demoralizing the population with their incessant scheming and self-interested pursuit of personal
advantage. The world these leaders created thus bears a much closer resemblance to Barth's
model of rational political actors carving out blocs of supporters and savaging rivals than it does
to Ahmed's more idealized image of charismatic visionaries imbuing their followers with an
exalted vision of a more perfect society.9
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within Afghanistan and abroad that the Marxist regime would collapse within weeks. While
that collapse did not occur for another three years, the impact of the withdrawal was still
dramatic, in part because the regime managed to survive. The regime's durability demonstrated
that it was neither so dependent nor so unpopular as most people had assumed. Similarly, with
the Soviet departure, the ideological opposition between Islam and Marxism grew increasingly
indeterminate. Once again, it was Afghan facing off against Afghan, without any outsiders
interposing themselves, and that fact, along with the continued bitter rivalry between the Islamic
parties, made it altogether unclear what the long conflict had been about or who was in the
right. Another critical and related development after the Soviet withdrawal was the gradual
detachment of local commanders from the Peshawar nerve center. With less fighting on the
ground and far fewer enemy aircraft to contend with, local fronts were no longer so dependent
on weapons and supplies as they had been previously. Local front commanders were able to
operate more freely, and some used this freedom to develop opportunistic ties with government
as I discovered when I was in Jalalabad, the capital of eastern Ningrahar province, in 1995. In
discussions with officials of the then-new Islamic government, I was told that many of the
officials of the previous Marxist regime had sold their homes to higher-ups in the new
administration before moving their families and possessions to Peshawar. There they took up
residence, sometimes in the homes of vacating refugees who were moving back to Afghanistan.
While there was less outright violence between the old and new regimes than had been
expected, and the threat of attack by aircraft and artillery essentially ceased, security in the rural
areas probably worsened as local commanders and tribal khans started preying on their own
people to maintain their influence and revenues (both of which had dried up substantially as
the Peshawar parties lost their clout following the departure of the Soviets). On the road between
Kabul and Jalalabad, which traditionally has been the principal artery linking Afghanistan with
the outside world, there were at least five roadblocks controlled by different tribes, parties, and
warlords. At each of these roadblocks, every truck, bus, and automobile was subject to search
and seizure, and a sizable "road tax" was levied. On smaller side roads, similar practices were
followed, although once one got off the main thoroughfares, the roadblocks tended to be more
impromptu affairs: piles of stones, for example, or simply a group of men holding kalashnikovs
and commanders assuming control over those parts of the government that produced the most
revenue. Chief among the revenue producers were the main customs house, the tollhouse at
the Khyber Pass, and Jalalabad airport, where five jetliners reportedly arrived every day from
Dubai loaded with appliances, VCRs, and other consumer products that would eventually make
their way across the border into Pakistan. While a handful of dominant political leaders
associated with the provincial shura governed these most lucrative posts, there was a hierarchy
of commanders just below them, some of whom exercised control over greater or lesser
governmental posts and some of whom operated independently as local strongmen in their
village or district.
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Status differences between warlords and commanders were reflected most dramatically in
their vehicles, with those at the top end driving Mercedes Benzes and Mitsubishi Pajeros,
mid-level commanders moving about in new, air-conditioned Toyota pickup trucks, and
lower-ranking commanders making do with cast-off Soviet jeeps. Another mark of a leader's
status was the number of bodyguards who accompanied him on his rounds. At various points,
I had the opportunity to speak with some of these bodyguards and discovered that few had any
interest in or knowledge of the larger politics of the Afghan conflict. They simply followed the
lead of their commander, and they told me that if at any point their patron decided to join a
different political party they would do likewise without any hesitation. While the willingness of
these men to switch parties might appear to be evidence of their loyalty to their leaders, it
appeared to me more the result of necessity in that a strong commander provided security and
peoples" provides an interesting angle of approach. For Meeker, "heroic identity turns upon
personal strategies and personal instruments devoted to force and coercion." As such, there is
an individualistic dimension to the hero who is often specifically associated with the disruption of polity,
society and even family. As an ideal of folk epics, he was a member of a small band of adventurers whose
very way of life involved extortion, kidnapping, raiding and pillaging. And, in fact, such companions in
adventure were often to be found on the margins of polity and society, uprooted from their homelands
and separated from their families. [Meeker 1980:682-683]
In many respects, this description applies to the organized pillage that went on between 1989
and 1995 and that continues on a somewhat reduced scale today under the Taliban. While
Meeker undoubtedly had camel-riding, sword- and rifle-toting nomads in mind when he
emphasized the importance of "personal instruments of force and coercion" in the construction
of "heroic identity," the image that comes to my mind when I read these lines is that of the
commander whom I accompanied in his shiny new Toyota pickup, five bodyguards squatting
in the back, each one with a treasured AK-47 or a rocket-propelled grenade launcher cradled
in his lap.
In his critique of Political Leadership among Swat Pathans, Meeker is particularly harsh in his
criticism of Barth's treatment of religious leaders as complementing tribal leaders and "thereby
providing for the foundation of a synchronic political system that is aesthetically balanced and
historically legitimate" (Meeker 1980:698). While accepting that "the exercise of force by chiefs
opens the way for Saints to play the role of peace-makers," Meeker also recognizes more clearly
than Barth that religious leaders are equally potential agents of disruption and injustice
(1980:696). This insight is relevant to Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the religious parties used
religious sentiment, especially the constellation of rituals, images, and meanings centered on
martyrdom, to solidify their own authority; in the process they not only plunged Afghan society
into an ever deeper abyss of violence, but also effectively negated the possibility that religion
could act as a force of moderation and peace in the conflict. Barth understood the importance
of strategic ruthlessness to the success of the Badshah of Swat, the founder of the Swat dynasty,
but the Badshah's ruthlessness as it is depicted by Barth is ultimately directed toward a positive
and benevolent project. What is absent in Barth's analysis but more readily identifiable in
Meeker's is the irrational malevolence that can pervade a "heroic culture" and the corrupt and
cynical uses to which religious commitments and initiatives can be directed.
The new technologies of warfare make Meeker's analysis even more pertinent than in 1980
since the proliferation of light automatic weapons and four-wheel-drive vehicles capable of
negotiating unmaintained roads has fractured the monopoly that states and state-aligned armies
have held-at least in recent centuries-over the use of force and coercion. In harkening back
to an earlier, prestate era of disruptive violence, Meeker thus foreshadows the advent of an even
more pernicious form of violence: namely, that involving small, mobile bands of young men,
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disconnected from any restraining ties of kinship or social obligation other than their loyalty to
individual commanders. Meeker's article provides a useful supplement and partial corrective
to Barth's work, especially in the way that it opens Barth's analysis to larger historical patterns,
especially patterns of disruptive forces.10 As much as any contemporary anthropologist, Meeker
is sensible to the role of violence in culture and to "the darker side of institutions that stabilize
Even so, I wonder if Meeker, writing in 1980, pushes his point far enough, at least so far as
pre-Taliban Afghanistan is concerned. Afghan politics were then beset by predatory violence
that undermines the assumption of rational agency associated with khans and heroes. Thus, in
relation to commanders-those who might be said to represent heroic agency in Afghanistan-a
reputation for unpredictable violence came to matter as much as the traditional skills of a
political leader. In such a climate, even the type of "ruthlessness" Barth attributes to successful
leaders like Badshah Sahib of Swat is inadequate to capture the quality of violence some
notorious commanders wielded in pursuit of their interests. In Afghanistan, ruthlessness some-
times gave way to violence that could be at turns sadistic, capricious, or simply malevolent.
Not all commanders were like this, of course, but even a few men with a reputation for
unpredictable and disproportionate violence can overturn the rational assumptions of the
majority and render political negotiation and compromise exceedingly precarious.
held sway in southeastern Afghanistan. The Taliban won further victories in Ghazni, Wardak,
and Kabul province, until they reached the outskirts of Kabul city in 1995. The forces of Ahmad
Shah Massoud held onto the capital tenaciously, finally giving way before the Taliban assault
in the fall of 1996. Since that time, the Taliban have consolidated their authority over most of
the southern half of the country, extending their rule to western Herat province and into
northwestern Badghis province. They have taken control of the Salang Pass, which is the
principal route linking Kabul with the north, and at the time of this writing were laying siege to
the northern city of Mazar-i Sharif. In a matter of days, they also overran eastern Ningrahar and
Kunar Province, sending the commanders and shura members I had interviewed in 1995 fleeing
once again for Peshawar. This remarkable series of victories has been accomplished by a military
force that did not exist before 1993, a force comprised largely of Afghan religious students
(taliban derives from the term for religious student: talib ul-elm) recruited from madrasas
(religious schools) in Baluchistan and the northwest frontier province of Pakistan. The fact that
this force has managed to do what no other army could accomplish over the last 20 years has
occasioned little interest in the international press. To the extent that anyone has paid much
attention to the events in Afghanistan, it has focused on the Taliban's insistence on women
wearing the veil, its decrees against movies and mixed-sex gatherings, its ritual destruction of
beer cans and liquor bottles, and its demand that men keep their beards untrimmed. What has
been ignored in available reports is information about the movement itself: its origins, its
leadership and structure, and any sense or even speculation on how this recently obscure force
has managed to accomplish so much in so little time. The available information on the Taliban
is inadequate to answer all of these questions, but some preliminary suggestions can be offered
on the background of the movement and the reasons for its success, as well as what the
movement signifies in relation to the other forms of political leadership examined here.
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In analyzing the success of the Taliban, it is important to recognize first that despite the
apparent novelty of the movement, this is not the first time that religious students have played
an important role in political events in Afghanistan. To the contrary, madrasa students have long
supplied one of the principal sources for various political movements since at least the 19th
century, and they were viewed as especially dangerous by the British colonial authorities
because they were so difficult to identify, much less hold accountable (cf. McMahon and
Ramsay 1981:2-3). For all the problems the tribes occasionally brought down on the Raj, they
nevertheless could be located on a map; they had villages that could be razed if need be; they
had leaders with whom to negotiate and from whom to extract promises; and they had practical
and material interests that provided a basis for getting along, once the enthusiasms of any given
moment had passed. Madrasa students, on the other hand, were from everywhere and nowhere,
often destitute, and generally had much more to gain by keeping political upheaval alive than
by letting it fade away. In the context of the frontier at the turn of the last century, it was also
the case that becoming a talib ul-elm was one of the few ways that a man could improve his
life fortunes, gain social respect, and escape the-for some-claustrophobic world of the tribe
and the village (see Edwards 1996:135).
The contemporary situation is very different, of course, but one point of commonality is that
religious education remains an avenue of social mobility, especially for young male Afghan
refugees. In Afghanistan before the war, the government sponsored tribal boarding schools.
Many of the brightest and most ambitious young men from the border areas attended these
schools with the hope of securing employment with the government or with one of the
international agencies then operating in Afghanistan. When the war began, between three and
four million people fled to Pakistan. The vast majority settled in refugee camps scattered up and
down the frontier. Most of these camps had primary schools, and there were even a few
secondary schools set up especially for Afghan refugees. But these schools had more to do with
social control than with education.11
The same was not the case, however, for those who attended madrasas. As in the 19th century,
a religious education was probably the surest avenue to social advancement, other than
obtaining a visa to work abroad. Before the war, madrasa graduates generally ended up in
menial positions teaching children and taking care of village mosques. In Pakistan, with all of
the resistance parties in the hands of religious leaders, madrasa graduates had more numerous
and lucrative options than before. Madrasas were also much more vibrant and lively than secular
schools, which was again undoubtedly due to the fact that Islam was so much more prominent
a part of everyday life in the refugee population than it had been in prewar Afghanistan.
For all the power of the parties, madrasas were by no means simple indoctrination centers.
Although party-supported madrasas tended to adhere to party dictates, many madrasas remained outside the orbit of party politics, found their own financial sponsors, and took radically
independent positions. Consequently, through the 1980s and early 1990s, as the reputations of
the Islamic political parties and their leaders steadily declined, madrasas kept alive the notion
that Afghanistan could still become an ideal Islamic polity. This message held a special potency
to veterans of the fighting, who had become disillusioned with the way the jihad was being
conducted by the parties, as well as to young refugees who had grown up in camps where they
witnessed firsthand the corrupt administration and moral malaise evident in refugee society generally.
Many observers have labeled the Taliban movement as a Pakistani creation, and it undoubtedly is to some degree, but they fail to consider as well that most of the Afghans associated with
the Taliban grew up in Pakistan and are themselves to a large extent hybrids who have
assimilated aspects of Pakistani culture and values. Unlike earlier generations who were tied to
village and tribe, the Taliban generation grew up in camps with people from a variety of
backgrounds. In such a context, loyalties to place, descent group, tribal ancestor, and particular
saints have lost their former saliency. Madrasas reflected and built on this fact, bringing together
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in one place young men from a variety of backgrounds, many of whom had never set foot in
Afghanistan and had only vague preconceptions as to what Afghanistan might have been like
before the war. Most of the madrasa students were disillusioned with the infighting and
corruption of the parties but were still idealistic in outlook. Having spent months and years in
the quasi-monastic communities of the madrasas, the potential recruits were relatively limited
in their understanding of the world and relatively alien to the tribal, regional, ethnic, and party
loyalties that, in their view, had compromised so many outside their own group. Based on my
interviews with madrasa students who later became members of the Taliban, I would also infer
that many Taliban recruits were eager to put into practice what they had been discussing in
theory, and the emergence of the movement offered that opportunity.
One of the most remarkable features of the Taliban's drive to power has been how little
resistance they encountered until the siege of Kabul itself. For nearly 20 years, efforts to establish
a unified movement had failed, and the question that arises is why the Taliban succeeded where
others did not. In answering the first part of this question, one must take into consideration the
fact that the early, easy Taliban successes were all in Pakhtun areas; the Taliban have not made
significant inroads in non-Pakhtun regions without considerable effort and bloodshed. Even
with this caveat, however, the Taliban accomplishment is still considerable. While Pakhtuns
made up something under 50 percent of the prewar population of Afghanistan and are
traditionally the most powerful ethnic group in Afghanistan, they are also famously fractious,
and no party or movement had previously managed to bring so much of this large and disparate
of what might be called "village identity." As a Taliban spokesman stated to a Reuters reporter,
"Our culture has been greatly changed over the past 40 or 50 years, particularly in Kabul. In
the villages the culture has not changed much .... The Taliban are trying to purify our culture.
We are trying to re-establish a purist Islamic culture and tradition."12 In identifying purist culture
and tradition with the Islam of the village, the Taliban indirectly condemn the Islam of the parties,
since most of the party leaders are products of Kabul University and other state-sponsored
institutions. They also put themselves on a par with the people who must support the movement
if it is to be successful. Over 20 years of war, Islamic parties almost as much as the Kabul
government have gained the reputation for imposing themselves on the people. The Taliban
believe they are building the popular base that has eluded politicians since the Khalqis took
power in 1978.
A second reason for the Taliban success has been simple exhaustion. A 20-year-long conflict
is something I associate more with premodern warfare than with the present. The lethal efficacy
of modern technology would seem to preclude such long-running engagements, yet the fighting
continues. The Taliban have not ended the fighting, but the roads are relatively safe in
Taliban-controlled areas. For the first time in two decades, people in Taliban areas have been
able to ride buses with far less fear of being searched at roadblocks, and trucks can carry goods
without drivers having to pay exorbitant road taxes. As the Taliban movement began to escalate
in 1995, an important reason was that their reputation for keeping security preceded them into
each new area. Thus, for example, when they launched their attack on eastern Ningrahar
Province, where roadblocks had become a fixture of everyday life, local people failed to support
local commanders, even when they were from the same tribe or ethnic group, reportedly
because they were tired of the status quo. Informants indicated to me that they were willing to
accept new leadership (even if it came with certain austerities and purist doctrines that deviated
from established custom) because the new leadership promised a degree of stability absent for
a generation.
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A third factor in explaining the Taliban success has been the invisibility of its leadership.
Nominally headed by a rarely seen and seldom heard Mulla Umar, most decisions emanate
from a council of Islamic clerics headquartered in Qandahar. The public knows little about
these men, and they appearto have made their low profile a point of policy. I can only speculate
on the motivation behind this strategy, but I infer that their preference for quasi-seclusion is a
lesson learned from people's disillusionment with-and even hatred for-the leaders of the
established religious parties who have done so much to divide the country. In this sense, the
Taliban seem to represent something like an anticharismatic movement, in which the emphasis
is not on leaders and their promises but on the movement itself. The movement claims roots in
an idealized sort of ordinary village existence that has been absent for 20 years and that is longed
for all the more for that reason.13
In trying to make some larger sense of the present situation, none of the paradigms under
review provides an easy fit. Although future research might provide additional facts and points
of comparison, for the present it would appear that Asad's (1972) class analysis does not really
help to explain contemporary Afghan politics, and Meeker's (1980) would be relevant only if I
were to cast the emergence of the Taliban as "peasant" revenge against the predatory abuses
of "heroic" commanders, which seems to stretch Meeker's vision a good bit beyond the breaking
point. Barth's (1959, 1981, 1985) work, too, appears to be of value only in a very general sense
in that it is not clear whether the Taliban have popular support or whether people are refusing
conclusion
Despite their apparently limited relevance to the most recent stage of Afghan political h
Barth and his critics have provided a useful basis for understanding the formative stag
Afghan conflict, and that fact brings us back to the concern I express at the beginnin
article over the lack of attention paid to anthropological studies outside of the discipl
is surely not the only situation in which anthropologists have found their work neglec
I want to conclude with the speculation that perhaps we may have brought the conditi
The 20 years of civil war in Afghanistan-20 years that have also seen an Islamic rev
in Iran, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and myriad tribal and ethnic conflicts-ha
time in which cultural anthropology has immersed itself in a series of insular debates
nature and validity of the anthropological enterprise. And while the discipline as a wh
authority, the debates about how anthropologists create texts have had the pernicious
first, of isolating anthropology from other disciplines and larger international conce
declaring anything in too authoritative a manner for fear of representing those amon
they have lived and about whom they write in a way that others might deem cul
insensitive, politically suspect, or simply naive.
The debates I have been discussing in this article predate the postmodern turn in an
ogy, and I must admit that I have found it bracing to reread these works that I last read in
school in the early 1980s. There is a seriousness about anthropology's ability to analyz
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in the world, as well as a quality of nonironic engagement-with the people being studied and
the potential larger significance of the debate itself-that I find missing in much anthropology
today. In revisiting this debate and applying its lessons to the civil war in Afghanistan, my goal
has been not only to elucidate some of the underlying dynamics of that tragic conflict, but also
to remind myself and others that anthropology's way of knowing the world is as valuable now
as it has ever been.
notes
Acknowledgments. I wish to thank Michael Herzfeld, Mary Steedly, and other members of the De
of Anthropology at Harvard University who commented on the preliminary draft of this article when
presented at a departmental colloquium in April 1997. I also wish to acknowledge the financial as
provided by Fulbright-Hays and National Science Foundation doctoral dissertation fellowships, as
later grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew
Foundation, and Williams College.
1. My examination of the work of Barth and his critics is based on ethnographic research and in
conducted on the conflict in Afghanistan since 1982. Most of my research has been among Afghan
living in Pakistan, but it has also included two trips inside Afghanistan in 1984 and 1995.
2. Barth has published three books dealing with Swat. The first is his ethnography, Political Le
among Swat Pathans (1959); the second is a collection of essays, Features of Person and Societ
(1 981); and the third is The Last Wali of Swat (1985), the autobiography of Miangul Jahanzeb, wh
edited and for which he wrote an extended epilogue. It should be noted that in this article I have
important research on the Swat Pakhtun produced by Charles Lindholm. Lindholm's ethnography
(1982), which is arguably the best study of a Pakistani or Afghan social group in recent years, and his
essays on political leadership (1980, 1981, 1986) represent a substantial body of independent resea
stands on its own apart from Barth and his critics.
3. On the origins of the anti-Marxist rebellion see Edwards 1987, Roy 1986, and Shahrani and Canfiel
4. For an overview of the socioeconomic conditions in several Pakhtun areas of eastern Afghan
Anderson 1975, Barfield 1981, Christensen 1980, and Shahrani and Canfield 1984.
5. For Afghan attitudes toward revolutionary portrayals of peasant suffering, see Edwards 1987
6. On poets and poetry in the Afghan conflict, see Edwards 1993.
7. For a discussion of the use of Islamic martyrdom by Afghan political parties, see Edwards 1
8. Among the negative features of state centralization that are found in the Peshawar par
mechanisms for maintaining internal security and suppressing dissent, keeping the party faithful
through the creation of numberless bureaucratic structures, indoctrinating the young, and using
ensure pious observance of Islamic rituals in the general population.
"mercenary," the former being one who still maintains a strong cultural and moral connection to soci
all the disruptions he brings down upon it, the latter being one who operates independently of so
its moral strictures in the pursuit of self-interest. Unlike the mercenary who is understood to be out fo
the hero is capable of caring too much and taking the moral precepts of society beyond the tolera
of other men or society itself. See Edwards 1996:ch. 2 for a discussion of the role of the "hero" in
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