Musa Qala

Adapting to the Realities of Modern Counterinsurgency

by Thomas Donnelly and Gary J. Schmitt, Small Wars Journal

Musa Qala (Full PDF Article)

This SWJ article is an excerpt from a forthcoming American Enterprise Institute study on the war in Afghanistan and NATO's future.

The town of Musa Qala is, in many ways, a typical Afghan market town. "I saw no obvious concessions to modern living," reported James Holland of his spring 2008 visit to Musa Qala.

In fact, I was reminded of a picture book of ancient Persia I had as a boy. I suspect the scene would not have appeared unfamiliar to Alexander the Great, who passed through here in 329 B.C. My first sight of Musa Qala was of a gray, sprawling mass that far side of a 200-year wadi [or river bed]. It was raining, the skies were leaden and the concrete and mud-built building appeared monochrome and somber.

The town sits on the Musa Qala River, an often-dry tributary of the Helmand River, the geographic feature -- along with the Highway 1 ring road that ties Afghanistan together and connects the capital, Kabul, to the rest of the country -- which defines Helmand province. It also links the ring road and lowland Helmand to the mountains of central Afghanistan. It is the last stop before the town of Baghran, in the northernmost tip of Helmand and near the border with the rugged Oruzgan and Daikundi provinces, which has been a Taliban redoubt since the initial U.S. invasion.

The town also gives its name to Musa Qala District, but two other factors contribute to it real importance: it is the hometown of the Alizai tribe, Helmand's largest Pashtun group -- though the tribal politics are devilishly complex: the Alizai are comprised of six major clans, but are a sub-tribe of the Noorzai, which is one of the five major tribes that make up the Durrani Pashtuns, one of the two main Pashtun grouping in the Afghan-Pakistan border regions; altogether there may be as many as 400 clans among the Pashtun peoples. Musa Qala is also a crossroads in the opium trade. And these two factors -- tribal politics and the drug trade -- are linked.

Musa Qala (Full PDF Article)