The Eye of the Storm: Cities in the Vortex of Afghanistan’s Civil Wars

The relationship between the urban and rural world is examined here from the standpoint of the role of local leaders and their retinues of armed men, their impact on the cities and the impact of the cities on them. In periods of state weakness or disintegration, Afghan cities were unable to resist the ‘solidarity groups’ which had coagulated in the countryside under the pressure of constant conflict. The domination of the cities over the countryside, therefore, was reversed and the cities were conquered. However, the relationship was not just one way. The cities were necessary to the ‘warlords’ who had emerged in the countryside to run the polities that they tried to establish and had some influence in shaping them. However, after 2001 the developing relationship between cities and ‘warlords’ was cut short by foreign intervention, which re-empowered the cities and encouraged urban strata to distance themselves from the power groups which came from the villages. Introduction: the ‘men from the mountains’ and the city Ibn Khaldun famously analysed the relationship between cities and rural areas in the Arab Middle East from the seventh to fourteenth centuries in his work, Al-Muqaddima (Ibn Khaldun, 2004). A key role, in Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the formation of new polities, is played by the solidarity group, ‘asabiyya. This is because, Royal authority...[is] attained only through a group and ‘asabiyya. This is because aggressive and defensive strength is obtained only through group feeling which means (mutual) affection and willingness to fight and die for each other. (Ibid: 123). ‘Asabiyya ‘gives protection and makes possible mutual defence...’ and is centred around an individual who has ‘superiority over the others in the matter of group feeling’ and can ‘act as a restraining influence and mediator [...] in order to keep its members from (fighting) with each other’ (Ibid: 107).’ This is what we could today call a charismatic leader. Such solidarity or ‘group feeling’, with the ‘energy and rapacious habits which go with it’, can emerge only during what Ibn Khaldun calls ‘desert life’ or, in wider terms, ‘bandit’ life in the mountains. The Bedouins of the desert are ‘more disposed to courage’ because, they provide their own defence [...]. They always carry weapons. They watch carefully all sides of the road. [...] Fortitude has become a character quality of theirs. (Ibid: 95). 1 From the title of an as yet unpublished poem of Suleiman Laeq, Mord az kohistan, about the life of a mujahid in 1980s Afghanistan. 2 This Arabic term is not used in Afghanistan; the closest Afghan equivalent to the term is qawn, whose meaning however is far from coincident. Hence I decided to stick to Ibn Khaldun’s terminology here and throughout the text.