Hearts and Minds: Islam and Afghanistan's Moral Center of Gravity

Amid counterinsurgency theory’s focus on protecting the population and providing essential services to demonstrate the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan’s (GIRoA) legitimacy, the international community and GIRoA have lost sight of a key element that drives and sustains Afghan’s rural populations‟ hearts and minds. We—the Afghan elites of Kabul and the Coalition Forces—have assumed, through our Western, developed-nation lens, that if the government is functioning as we think a government should function (even in an Afghan-Good-Enough model), the population will perceive it as legitimate and support its activities and objectives to stabilize and secure Afghanistan. However, some of our assumptions are too secular or incorrect. Among them, we have not fully understood or addressed the core importance that religion plays in the lives of rural Afghans, especially in the Pashtun belt of Regional Command-East (RC-East) and Regional Command-South and Southwest (RC-S/RC-SW). As a result, we may have improved the quality of peoples‟ lives, but their hearts still view our objectives—and their government’s actions—with suspicion and distrust.

This research began with the hypothesis that religious leaders in rural Eastern Afghanistan represent a moral center of gravity, which, if swayed to support the government (or at least discourage passive support of the insurgency) could help to decrease the insurgency’s informal base of support and weaken their efforts. However the research indicated that it just wasn’t that straight a line. The Afghan religious community and the society as a whole are still determining the roles and responsibilities for religious leaders in a post-Taliban Afghanistan. Instead, I suggest that Islam (and its defense) is the moral center of gravity which sustains resistance of the government by a portion of the population. For the Afghan government to be seen as legitimate, it must be seen as reflecting and embodying the Islamic values of its population. This is not to say that GIRoA cannot also promote the values of modernity, but it must determine how to include and value a range of Islamic voices. So far, in the Pashtun areas, its success rate is low.