Learning from the Swat Pathans: Political Leadership in Afghanistan, 1978-97 Author(s): David B.

Edwards Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Nov., 1998), pp. 712-728 Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/645862 . Accessed: 17/03/2014 06:57
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learningfrom the Swat Pathans: political leadership in Afghanistan, 1978-97

DAVID B. EDWARDS-Williams

College

FredrikBarth'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 structureas the key to understandingpolitical relationships in tribal societies, Barth emphasized the role of individual initiative and choice in the creation of political authority. In shifting attention from social structureto the individual, Barth'swork 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'swork (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 traditionsconsist of the same range of diverse formsas in the northwestfrontierregion 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 primarilygood for novelty value, for producing human intereststories ratherthan 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. Intrying 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 fromjournalists, policy analysts, and political scientists, but the literature on the conflict includes few references to the work of FredrikBarth on political leadership among the Swat Pakhtuns of neighboring Pakistan. Here I explore the relevance of Barth'swork to an analysis of the war in Afghanistan. In particular, I examine Barth's "methodological individualism" and compare his approach with alternative approaches advanced by three of his principal critics: TalalAsad, Akbar S. Ahmed, and Michael Meeker. [Afghanistan, Pakistan, political authority, Islam]
American Ethnologist25(4):712-728. Copyright ? 1998, American Anthropological Association.

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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 civil war that continues today. In this article, I argue that our understanding of the Afghan conflict can be considerably improved by considering it in light of Barth'swork 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'sstudy and the critiques put forward by Talal Asad, Akbar S. Ahmed, and Michael Meeker.2 The central problem of Barth's study was "to explore the kinds of relationships that are established between persons in Swat, the way in which these may be systematically manipulated to build up positions of authority, and the variety of politically corporate groups which result" (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. Fromthis 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, Barthindicated that there was considerable flux in the composition of differentfactions because of the changing fortunesof 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'swords, a reputation for holiness amongthemorepiousorgulliblesectionsof the population, givestheiropinionsgreatweight,particularly a verballyfacile Saintcan to theirpoliticalinfluence.Utilizingsuch a reputation, and thus contributes influencecommunityopinion, both amongthe body of villagers,by settingthem up very profoundly and amongthe landlords the dominant themselves, landlords, by changingtheirpointof view or against themwith accusations of heterodoxy. [1959:102] threatening 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'sfocus 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 has been obtained.Itis the systemdoes not regulateitselfas it were afterthe consentof all participants classstructure who exploitthe landless.Once the agrarian classof landowners regulated by a dominant the political is recognized as the basicpoliticalfact... itbecomesno longerpossibleto represent system of a systemwhich is simplythe result made up of opposingblocs in dynamicequilibrium, as essentially of choices. [Asad1972:82] a multitude Pakhtun khans acquire their political authority through their control of scarce land and their membership in a dominant class, not by persuading freely consenting individuals to become their political followers. The key to Swat political life, then, is not, as Barth has argued, the transactions of individual leaders and followers and the dyadic contracts that emerge out of those transactions. Barth'sindividualistic, 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'sportraitof the Swat Pakhtun appears in Millennium and Charismaamong Pathans, published in 1976. Ahmed's main criticism is that Barth'swork 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, distinguishes 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 patternsof social interaction are asymmetrical and structured less by Pakhtunwali (the Pakhtun code of honor) than by the economics of patron-client relations. According to Ahmed, ... tribalcategory treatsSwatlargelyas if it were in the acephalous, Barth's "nang" segmentary analysis andpyramidal areasbecauseof thestratified was possibleonly inthe"qalang" theWali'semergence [but] natureof Swat"qalang" natureof society.... The stratified society enabled a homologousbut vastly Stateto be imposedon it withoutmuchfriction.[1976:81] enlargedpaternalistic Ahmed also criticizes Barthfor his treatmentof 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: workwithinthe villagesocialorganization, the orthodox"mullah" Saints") Whereas (andalso "Barthian and and in practicewith the good will of the Khan,the Sufiworksoutside the village organization of social behaviour. normative established [Ahmed1976:55] patterns In contrast to "Marxistand Barthianman (as 'maximizing entrepreneur')"who "confront[s]the material world, comprehend[s] it and wish[es] to possess it,"the "Sufiis 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 traditionsof Islam, Barthprecluded 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 firstdecades of the 20th century. The third critic I will discuss here is Michael Meeker, whose article "TheTwilight of a South Asian Heroic Age: A Rereadingof Barth'sStudy 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, arguingthat "Barthcorrectly insists on the role of pragmatic and rational strategies in connexion with the use of force and a resortto coercion" (1980:685). Ifanything, Meeker contends, Barth"underplaysthe disruptiveness of a quest for personal advantage in the political history of Swat," by seeing perduring conflict "as partof a working system of leaders and groupings ratherthan as a calamity that left its mark on Swat political experience" (1980:685). In Meeker's view, political leadership in Swat is shaped by the historical experience of a "heroic people"-the Yusufzai Pakhtun-whose cultural idioms were shaped by "a progressive rationalisation of popular political traditions around the organised exercise of force." "Heroic identity," according to Meeker, "turns upon personal strategies and personal instruments devoted to force and coercion" (1980:682-683). As such, the hero "has no place in a highly developed agrarian society. He is a disruptive element in a situation where wealth is derived from diligence and cooperation" (Meeker 1980:687). Meeker's position, it should be noted, has some kinship with Ahmed's ideal-type dichotomy between nang and qalang Pakhtuns, but he disagrees with Ahmed's argument that Barth has inaccurately characterized Swat Pakhtuns as representative of the nang category and thereby confused the issue of how it was possible for a state system to develop in this context. "Heroic"or nang values were superimposed upon agrarianor qalang society, Meeker argues, which is the reason Swat is prone to violence. And, in contrastto Ahmed's portraitof 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). ForMeeker, Barth'sprincipal mistake is not in having conflated ideal-type categories but in having resorted to established paradigms of social integrationwhen the evidence would supportthe 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 Evans-Pritchard,Barth was limited by a vision of society as a "self-balancing structure with inter-locking functions" (Meeker 1980:683). "Unable to perceive degenerative processes in political experience that are out of control, [Barthhas] not fully appreciated the darker side of institutionsas a temporarystabilisationof injustice in the form of organised violence" (1980:684).

political leadership in Afghanistan

I will change venues now, from Swat to Afghanistan, while keeping one eye focused on Barth 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 particularhistorical events, I will elucidate what happened and why and assess the applicability of Barth'sand 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.Inexamining 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 primarilyon 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 the conditions of political action and social life. The third stage, lasting roughly from 1989 until the rise to preeminence of the Taliban militia 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 primarilyto 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 Barthand his critics.

first stage: class mobilization and popular dissent, 1978-79

The Marxist Khalq Partytook power in Afghanistan on April 27, 1978, via a military coup d'etat. At the time of the coup, the party's support was limited almost entirely to cadres in the government, university, and militaryofficer corps. This situation requiredthat the partyexpand 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 naturalconstituency, such as tenant farmersand landless agricultural laborers. Among the reformswere measures to redistributelarge landholdings and eliminate mortgages and other instrumentsby 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 Afghanmasses 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 partnershipthe partyand the people would revolutionize Afghan society. Insteadof 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 Khalqiswas premised on an understanding of Afghan society congruent with Asad's analysis of Swat, and ethnographic descriptions from before the war indicate that wealth differentialsof 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 partyafterthe 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 firstwas to brand landowners, of even modest means, as "feudals" in order to separate them from the larger number of landless peasants, tenant farmers,and agriculturalworkers. This was to be the primarymeans by which the party would jump-startthe revolution, the assumption being that there was a widespread underlying antagonism against the wealthy that few were willing to express openly. Revolutionary 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 Barfieldhas noted, were few, [theKhalqi took landfromlocal owner-operators. Since . . . absenteelandlords government] violentopposition, fora man'slandis his livelihood.Insmallkin-based Thisgenerated great,sometimes or bringing inoutsiders of thevillageandgivingitto another, communities, takinglandfromone segment runsafoulof the complexweb of social relations thatbindthe 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 farmersin the form of hospitality, ritualexpenditures, and salaries. In most partsof Afghanistan in the 1970s, the economy was not heavily monetized, and though Jon Anderson and others have written that the practice of big landowners taking their profitsout 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 ruralpoor-terms such as "exploited masses," "strugglingpeasantry," "long suffering toilers"-carried an ignominious connotation 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," "bloodthirstyexploiters," 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 returninga 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 Pakhtunsociety (formsof class stratificationcertainly did exist), they would appear to contradict his argument as to the absence of free will among those subject to the authorityof 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 Marxistrhetoric. Inthis 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'semphasis on individual initiativefor 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'ssynchronic 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 patternsof class division might have become more evident and decisive in Afghanistan is a question overtaken by subsequent events; however, I agree with Asad's reservations as to 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.

second stage: the ascendancy

of Islamic political parties, 1980-89

Following the Soviet invasion in December 1979, the antigovernment resistance movement changed in fundamental ways, especially with regardto the importance of Islam. The ideological dimension of this change became apparentto me when Istartedexamining poetry composed 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 nonhierarchicaland segmentaryin structure.Overtime, these formsof militaryorganization

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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. In making sense of these developments, Ahmed's analysis of Islamic transformationsin Swat 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), "fromthe patriarchaltraditional authority of the . . . Khans to the emergence of charismatic leadership . . . and the institutionalization 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 administrativeorgans 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 transformationfrom 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 stirringof 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 largersignificance 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 warfarewas dramatic. Perhapseven more destabilizing was the indiscriminate 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 promise of immortalityand eternal paradise. Poems of honor also promised that those who died in battle would earn the immortalityof 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. Itwas 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 partiesthat 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 authorityof the partyas moral arbiterof value and meaning in the conflict.7 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 Barthianfashion) a rational calculation of which partycould 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 creation of such an apparatus because of the difficulty of convincing a tribesman to accept a nonbattlefield assignment that would preclude his participation as a full equal of his tribal cousins. Additionally, the egalitarian nature of Pakhtuntribes stood in the way of any centralization of command, as members from collateral branches rarely acquiesced to the authorityof any one of their number. While the need for weapons, ammunition, and supplies persisted, tribesmen in the mountains heard radio reportsover the BBC about the political parties then forming in Peshawar. Rumors reached the frontsthat the parties were distributingweapons to those who joined. At first,many tribesmen-particularly those with established influence-resisted this path, being unwilling to accept the leadership of a mulla (low-level religious leader). But not everyone felt this way. In particular,rivals of those with established influence saw the parties in Peshawar as a means for 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 fightingthe Soviets to gaining an advantage over old rivals. Tribalunity was thus disrupted, and the endemic factionalism that characterized the parties in Peshawar was transferredto 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, contraryto 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 authoritariancontrol. Authorityin 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 Barthascribe 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 supportersand savaging rivalsthan 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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third stage: warlords and commanders,

1989-95

When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, there was a widespread expectation 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 durabilitydemonstrated 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 bitterrivalrybetween 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 aircraftto 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 representatives in the provincial capitals. When the government collapsed in 1989, the transition was altogether anticlimactic. Predictions of a bloodbath once the Islamic resistance took over the cities never came to pass. To the contrary,the transition between old and new regimes was smoother than in many democracies, 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 aircraftand artilleryessentially 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 departureof the Soviets). On the road between Kabuland 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 (machine guns) at the ready. Ningrahar Province, where I spent most of my time during my visit in 1995, was nominally run by a provincial shura, or council, but the main function of the shura appeared to be less running the government than divvying up the spoils of war, with the more powerful officials 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 opportunityto 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 partythey 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 opportunities that would otherwise be hard to come by. In making sense of this stage of the conflict, Meeker's thesis concerning the role of "heroic peoples" provides an interesting angle of approach. For Meeker, "heroic identity turns upon personal strategies and personal instrumentsdevoted to force and coercion." As such, there is associated withthe disruption of polity, an individualistic dimension to the herowho is oftenspecifically whose As an idealof folkepics, he was a member of a smallbandof adventurers societyandeven family. and pillaging. And, in fact,such companionsin veryway of life involvedextortion, kidnapping, raiding of polityand society,uprooted fromtheirhomelands adventure were oftento be foundon the margins and separated fromtheirfamilies.[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 instrumentsof 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 Leadershipamong Swat Pathans, Meeker is particularlyharsh in his criticism of Barth'streatment 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 Saintsto 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. Barthunderstood 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 Barthis ultimately directed toward a positive and benevolent project. What is absent in Barth's analysis but more readily identifiable in Meeker's is the irrationalmalevolence 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 fracturedthe 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, prestateera 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 restrainingties of kinship or social obligation other than their loyalty to individual commanders. Meeker's article provides a useful supplement and partial corrective to Barth'swork, especially in the way that it opens Barth'sanalysis to larger historical patterns, especially patternsof disruptive forces.10As much as any contemporary anthropologist, Meeker is sensible to the role of violence in culture and to "the darkerside of institutions that stabilize injustice by organised violence" (1980:682). Meeker's analysis challenges Barth'sassumptions by stressingthe importance of irrationalaspects of political experience that are relatively muted in Barth'swork. 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 relationto 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"Barthattributesto 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 sometimes 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 majorityand render political negotiation and compromise exceedingly precarious.

fourth stage: the rise of the Taliban militia, 1995-present

The Taliban militia first came to international attention in the fall of 1994 when they scored the firstof a series of victories against tribal militias and local party commanders who had long held sway in southeastern Afghanistan. The Taliban won furthervictories in Ghazni, Wardak, and Kabulprovince, until they reached the outskirtsof Kabulcity 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 Kabulwith the north, and at the time of this writing were laying siege to the northerncity of Mazar-i Sharif. In a matterof days, they also overran eastern Ningraharand KunarProvince, sending the commanders and shura members I had interviewed in 1995 fleeing once again for Peshawar. This remarkableseries 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 frontierprovince 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 importantrole in political events in Afghanistan. To the contrary, madrasastudents 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). Forall 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 intereststhat provided a basis for getting along, once the enthusiasms of any given moment had passed. Madrasastudents, on the other hand, were fromeverywhere 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 Edwards1996:135). 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 majoritysettled 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. Butthese schools had more to do with social control than with education.11 The same was not the case, however, forthose 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 lucrativeoptions than before. Madrasaswere also much more vibrantand 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 partypolitics, 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 administration and moralmalaise evident in refugeesociety generally. the corrupt witnessed firsthand Many observers have labeled the Taliban movement as a Pakistanicreation, 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 Pakistaniculture 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, tribalancestor, and particular saints have lost their formersaliency. Madrasas reflected and built on this fact, bringingtogether

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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 recruitswere 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 Kabulitself. Fornearly 20 years, effortsto establish a unified movement had failed, and the question that arises is why the Taliban succeeded where others did not. In answering the first partof 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 partyor movement had previously managed to bring so much of this large and disparate population under one political umbrella. Although the Taliban are recognizably Pakhtun and most of the leadership comes from southern Qandahar Province, their success in moving from a madrasa to a military movement stems in the first instance from their tendency to downplay tribal or regional identities in favor 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, particularlyin Kabul. In the villages the culture has not changed much .... The Taliban are tryingto purifyour culture. In identifying puristculture We are tryingto re-establish a purist Islamic culture and tradition."12 and traditionwith the Islamof the village, the Taliban indirectly condemn the Islamof 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 supportthe 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. Forthe firsttime 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 importantreason 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 fixtureof 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. Informantsindicated to me that they were willing to accept new leadership (even if it came with certain austerities and puristdoctrines 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. Ican 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 sortof ordinaryvillage 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 to become involved. Ahmed's (1976) conception of charismatic leadership is closest in some ways, but as indicated, the Taliban movement is radically different from the classic Weberian charismatic movement that Ahmed identified in Swat. The problem here is not simply the absence of a charismatic leader, or miracles, or millennial claims. More profound, it is the lack of enthusiasm with which the movement has been greeted by its constituents. The Taliban are a product of exhaustion more than excitation, of nostalgia for an uncomplicated past more than hope for a glorious future.

conclusion
Despite their apparently limited relevance to the most recent stage of Afghan political history, Barthand his critics have provided a useful basis for understanding the formative stages of the Afghan conflict, and that fact brings us back to the concern I express at the beginning of this article over the lack of attention paid to anthropological studies outside of the discipline. This is surely not the only situation in which anthropologists have found their work neglected, and I want to conclude with the speculation that perhaps we may have broughtthe condition of our general irrelevance on ourselves through our own disciplinary self-absorption. The 20 years of civil war in Afghanistan-20 years that have also seen an Islamic revolution in Iran,the collapse of the Soviet Union, and myriad tribal and ethnic conflicts-have been a time in which cultural anthropology has immersed itself in a series of insular debates over the nature and validity of the anthropological enterprise. And while the discipline as a whole has gained by being more self-conscious about modes of representation and how it ascribes authority, the debates about how anthropologists create texts have had the pernicious effects, first, of isolating anthropology from other disciplines and larger international concerns and, second, of constricting research within anthropology by making some researchers leery of declaring anything in too authoritative a manner for fear of representing those among whom they have lived and about whom they write in a way that others might deem culturally insensitive, politically suspect, or simply naive. The debates I have been discussing in this article predate the postmodern turn in anthropology, and I must admit that I have found it bracing to rereadthese works that I last read in graduate school in the early 1980s. There is a seriousness about anthropology's ability to analyze events

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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
Iwishto thank MichaelHerzfeld, of the Department andothermembers Mary Steedly, Acknowledgments. on the preliminary of thisarticlewhen it was at Harvard who commented draft of Anthropology University the financialassistance at a departmental presented colloquiumin April1997. I also wishto acknowledge and NationalScience Foundation doctoraldissertation fellowships,as well as provided by Fulbright-Hays for the Humanities,the Andrew Mellon later grantsand fellowshipsfrom the National Endowment andWilliamsCollege. Foundation, andhis criticsis basedon ethnographic research and interviews of the workof Barth 1. Myexamination hasbeen amongAfghan since 1982. Mostof myresearch conductedon the conflictinAfghanistan refugees in 1984 and 1995. but it has also includedtwo tripsinsideAfghanistan livingin Pakistan, PoliticalLeadership 2. Barth has publishedthreebooksdealingwith Swat.Thefirstis his ethnography, of Miangul which Barth (1981);andthe thirdis TheLastWaliof Swat(1985),the autobiography Jahanzeb, editedand forwhich he wrotean extendedepilogue.Itshouldbe notedthatin thisarticleI have reliedon Lindholm's of Swat on the SwatPakhtun research by CharlesLindholm. ethnography important produced orAfghan socialgroupin recentyears,andhisseveral the beststudyof a Pakistani (1982),which is arguably a substantial research that (1980, 1981, 1986) represent bodyof independent essayson politicalleadership and his critics. standson itsown apartfromBarth andCanfield 3. Ontheorigins rebellion see Edwards 1984. of theanti-Marxist 1987, Roy1986,andShahrani in severalPakhtun areasof eastern see 4. Foran overviewof the socioeconomicconditions Afghanistan, andCanfield1984. Anderson 1980, and Shahrani 1981, Christensen 1975, Barfield of peasant 1987 and1993. attitudes towardrevolutionary see Edwards 5. For Afghan portrayals suffering, 1993. 6. On poetsand poetryin the Afghanconflict,see Edwards see Edwards 1995. 7. Fora discussionof the use of Islamic martyrdom by Afghanpoliticalparties, that are found in the Peshawarpartiesare 8. Among the negative featuresof state centralization faithful formaintaining internal and suppressing mechanisms dissent,keepingthe party security employed bureaucratic the young, and usingthem to structures, indoctrinating throughthe creationof numberless in the generalpopulation. of Islamicrituals ensurepiousobservance of Afghanresistance see Roy1986. 9. On the machinations leaders, of Meeker's use of the termhero(1980). Someof the characteristics 10. I questionthe appropriateness seem moreusefullyand accurately attributable to the categoryof thatMeekerassociateswith the "hero" the former a strong andmoralconnectionto societyfor cultural "mercenary," beingone who stillmaintains all the disruptions he bringsdown upon it, the latter of societyand beingone who operatesindependently inthepursuit of self-interest. Unlike themercenary who isunderstood itsmoral strictures to be outforhimself, the moralprecepts of societybeyondthe tolerablelimits the herois capableof caringtoo muchand taking 1996:ch.2 fora discussionof the roleof the "hero" in Pakhtun of othermen or society itself.See Edwards 1981. article,see Lindholm critiqueof Meeker's society.Fora comprehensive 11. Formore information on conditionsin the refugee 1986 and 1990. camps,see Edwards with MaulawiRafiullah 12. Interview Muazin.C-reuters@clari.net. March 29, 1997. 13. WhileWestern havefocusedon theTaliban's of women,mostof thewomen pressreports suppression who have been affectedby Talibanedicts live in Kabul and otherurbanareas.Tribal and villagewomen, of Pakhtun control,have long lived underthe kindsof especiallyin the majority provincesunderTaliban constraints the Talibanleadership is tryingto imposein-what areto them-the "impure" city centers.
among Swat Pathans (1959); the second is a collection of essays, Features of Person and Society in Swat

references cited
S. Ahmed,Akbar 1976 Millennium and Charisma London: and KeganPaul. amongPathans. Routledge Jon Anderson, 1975 TribeandCommunity 70:576-600. Anthropos amongGhilzaiPashtun. 1978 ThereAre No Khans MiddleEast Journal 32:167-183. Anymore. Asad,Talal 1972 Market A Reconsideration and Consent: of Swat PoliticalOrganization. Model, ClassStructure Man(n.s.)7(1):74-94.

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submitted July 3, 1997 accepted October 8, 1997

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