BACHELOR THESIS the Political Roots of Armed Conflict and Its

BACHELOR THESIS The Political Roots of Armed Conflict and its Geographical Dimensions in Afghanistan and Pakistan Christopher Moik Student number: 0917610 University of Innsbruck Department of Political Science ao.Univ.-Prof. Mag.Dr. Gerhard Mangott 29.11.2013 Eidesstattliche Erklärung Ich erkläre hiermit an Eides Statt durch meine eigenhändige Unterschrift, dass ich die vor- liegende Arbeit selbständig verfasst und keine anderen als die angegebenen Quellen und Hilfs- mittel verwendet habe. Alle Stellen, die wörtlich oder inhaltlich den angegebenen Quellen entnommen wurden, sind als solche kenntlich gemacht. Datum, Unterschrift Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Theoretical Framework 2 2.1 Related Work . .2 2.2 Research Design, Questions and Hypotheses . .4 3 Methodological Background 6 3.1 Basics and Coding . .6 3.2 Statistical and Geographical Analysis . .7 4 Political, Military and Social Context 8 4.1 The Cold War and the Radicalization of Islam . .8 4.2 The Afghan Civil War and the Rise of the Taleban . 12 4.3 The Answer of the West: From Bush to Obama . 14 4.4 The Pivot to Counterinsurgency . 17 4.5 Overview of Battle-related Deaths since 1989 . 19 5 Armed Conflict in Centers and Peripheries 22 5.1 Social Structure in Pakistan . 22 5.1.1 General Imbalances between Rural and Urban Areas . 22 5.1.2 Political, Ethnic and Economic Structure . 24 5.2 Social Structure in Afghanistan . 27 5.2.1 General Imbalances between Rural and Urban Areas . 27 5.2.2 Ethnic and Social Structure . 27 5.3 Patterns of Violence in Centers and Peripheries . 30 5.3.1 Empirical Results of Violence on the Macro Level . 30 5.3.2 Empirical Results of Violence on the Micro Level . 32 6 The Durand Line and Armed Conflict 40 6.1 The Origins of the Border . 40 6.2 The Border and the Taleban . 41 6.3 Violent Events and their Distances to the Border . 43 7 Armed Conflict in the Mountainous Areas 46 7.1 The Geography of Mountains in Afghanistan and Pakistan . 46 7.2 Military Warfare and the Mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan . 48 7.3 Violent Events on Mountains . 49 8 Discussion and Conclusion 51 Appendix 53 References 55 Figures 62 1 INTRODUCTION 1 Introduction Twelve years ago the original mission to overthrow the Taleban government by the United States and its allies was quickly carried out. However, Afghanistan is still in chaos today. President Bush and his comrades got themselves into a region which had been the theater of the Great Game, the Cold War, regional power seeking, a bloody civil war and the rise of militant Islamism. The neighbouring territory Pakistan has also been playing an important role in Afghanistan in these periods, especially since the 1980s. But Pakistan did not only cause problems in Afghanistan but also had problems with India and within its own borders. Today, we know that the broader region, especially the Pashtun areas, is characterized by a huge complexity and a mixture of Islamic terrorists and militants, warlords, criminal networks and other local militias. Militant groups, such as Al-Qaida fighters, the Afghan Taleban conducted by Mullah Omar, the Haqqani network, militants around Hektmatyar or Mehsud’s Tehreek- e Taleban Pakistan (TTP), are frequently tracking through the tribal areas and engaging in armed conflicts with government authorities (Wagner 2010: 106). The primary epistemological interest of this paper is the political and geographical dynamics of physical violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan between 2008 and 2009,1 especially violence in the context of the internationalized intra-state conflict between government authorities and Taleban and other militant groups. This paper argues that a focus on geographical factors might give, in fact, interesting insights into the fundamental dynamics of violence. From a scientific perspective I try to examine the intensity of violence on three theoretically important planes and its geographical extent, particularly (1) the distance between periphery and center, (2) the international boundary between Afghanistan and Pakistan and (3) the impact of rough terrain on violence intensity. Not only battle-related deaths, but also violence against civilians and terrorist attacks should be included in the analysis. Based on the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset (ACLED)2 I will examine approximately five thousand cases of violent incidents and their political, military and social extent. First of all, I will provide a theoretical approach of my line of argumentation that includes a short overview on the current state of research and the specifications of my research questions and hypotheses. Subsequently, in section 3 the empirical procedure and statistical and geographical categories are described in detail. Section 4 portrays the historical context of the conflict in political and military manners. For this I will deduce the rise of Islamic terrorists and militants from historical events and political and social backgrounds. After that I will con- cretize the aggravation of the situation in the whole region, especially the counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations since 2001. Sections 5 - 7 will be the main part of the empirical analysis, which contains the validation of the hypotheses. Finally the conclusion summarizes the essential findings of the analysis and gives a short assessment of future prospects of the violent dynamics in the region. 1Thanks to Prof. Gerhard Mangott, my supervisor and one of my intellectual paragons, for engaging my scientific interest in this topic. 2composed and published by the Trinity College Dublin, the University of Colorado and by the Centre for the Study of Civil War, a sub-research group of the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO). 1 2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 2 Theoretical Framework The following subsections introduce the theoretical framework of my study. For this I will point out different research papers which deal with violence in Pakistan, its geographical and social contexts and other general observations about geographical factors and wars. Thereby I will emphasize some important connecting points of the studies limiting my own research questions and approaches. Derived from these considerations are my research questions and hypothesis, which are specified in the next subsection. 2.1 Related Work There are several researchers who focus on the geographical dimension of physical violence. For instance, the geographers Daanish Mustafa and Katherine E. Brown did not indicate military and political reactions to terrorism, in contrast to this work, but they expose specific responses in the every day life of the population based on the same dataset as my study. They raised the interesting question of how terrorist actions fill public space and in which way they depend on cultural and religious factors. As a result they point out that on the one hand public spaces are influenced by ”the predominant syncretic Sufi tradition entailed public carnivals, parades and procession” at different places and, on the other hand, affected by terrorist violence that is ”linked to their project to seek a ’perfected humanity’ and to the performance of ’civilian life’ ” (2010a: 1-22). The same authors in a different study analyze terrorist incidents and the correlations with them and public space and economic and social indicators. They argue that efforts ”to neutralize TTP control depend in no small measure on the population’s understanding of the limited vision of life the Taleban offers and, upon that recognition, their ability to freely communicate these views without fear” (Daanish, Brown 2010b: 496-512). Consequently, they propose an extensive strategy to fight terrorism and counterinsurgency incorporating political and cultural communication in a public space protected by security forces. A study by O’Loughlin, Witmer and Linke, based on the same dataset, provides a human geographical analysis of the locations of violence, temporal dimensions and other general observations. In summary, the most important rationales of the comprehensive study are that (1) violence is still concentrated in the mountainous areas and in the southern part of Afghanistan, which can be assigned to the Pashtun territory (71 % of the incidents); (2) that the number of violent attacks located in urban areas increases, such as Kabul and Peshawar, and (3) that between the years 2008 and 2010 the conflict spread over the Tribal Areas of Pakistan (2010: 437-471). In addition to the substantial findings, the study contains empirically relevant tools to observe the geography of violence that could also be applied in this work. Another trial of Pakistani violence and its social background is presented by the economist Sadia Mariam Malik (2011). Based on data from the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies in Islamabad she examined statistical correlations between violent incidents, food insecurity, the number of Madrasas, employment rate, literacy rate and so on. She had found out that landlessness and food insecurity positively correlate with violent attacks. But this result does not mean that it is the main reason for violent conflict although poverty can create a spiral of violence. It is possible that landlessness and food insecurity are effects and not the primary motives of the conflict. All that these investigations into social and economic indicators have in common is that they might explain psychological dispositions and aggressions, but they do not 2 2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK describe the basic process of recruitment and violence. But an interesting outcome of this topic, contrary to general assumptions and studies, is that Malik did not find a significant coherence between violence and the number of Madrassas. These results supports the result of a study by Christine Fair (2008), who tried to answer the question under which conditions recruitment of militants occurs. She figured out that a ”singular focus upon madaris as recruiting grounds for militants is inadequate” and that Madrassas ”may be more important for other kinds of militants such as sectarian terrorists and suicide attackers”.

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