Local Interests and American Foreign Policy: Why International Interventions Fail by Karl Sandstrom

Author:Karl Sandstrom [Sandstrom, Karl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781135041649
Google: VqOFHV39tXgC
Goodreads: 18014065
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

The Afghan national security forces

The social situational logics and geographical challenges of Afghanistan run through the state project and are exemplified in the situation surrounding the security forces. The Afghan National Army (ANA) faces a number of issues relating to ethnicity and the memories of atrocities committed between factions.20 In the South of the country, the large presence of Tajik officers has created problems, exemplified by the 2005 reported refusal of Tajik commanders in Kandahar (Pashtun area) to speak Pashto (Giustozzi 2007, 187). However, the ANA has nevertheless managed to develop what appears to be a positive relationship with the population and is generally seen as ethnically balanced and the least corrupt of the government institutions. In the Asia Foundation 2011 survey of Afghanistan (The Asia Foundation 2011, 41), 64 percent responded that they “strongly agree” that the ANA is “honest and fair with the Afghan people,” and 29 percent “somewhat” agreed. In the same survey (ibid., 40), 49 percent “strongly” agreed and 36 percent agreed “somewhat,” that the same applied to the Afghan National Police (ANP). This is still surprisingly high given that the ANP has a reputation for corruption and inefficiency.

One response to the lacking reach and capacity of the Afghan security forces has been the multiple attempts at forming local pro-government militias in a strange echo of recent times and distant history alike. It seems that this type of plan seeks to replicate the modes of social force mobilization that are prevalent in Afghanistan in an attempt to extend government reach. The various Local Defense Initiatives (LDIs) work on the principle that by giving employment and responsibility to villagers they will no longer support or tolerate insurgents (Lefèvre 2010, 1). The Afghan Local Police (ALP) is the latest in this line of strategies and seeks to formalize the relationship but is also fraught with problems.21 The program has been surrounded by many allegations of abuse, crime, and even some units alternating between the government and the insurgency.22

A potentially crucial problem related to the arbaki-style23 militias is the removal of their traditional mobilization basis. Instead of being an honor and shaped by social expectations, the payment scheme of these groups relates their formation directly to the provision of funds, something that has proven itself to be highly unreliable (Ruttig 2010, 10). When the funding stops, a number of armed and trained individuals are left behind whose “human security” has become reliant on state-supplied resources that they are no longer getting. This was the situation after the fall of the Communist government and it is the situation in Iraq with the “Awakening” movement.24 There have also been several occasions of local jihadi commanders, and presumably non-jihadist local interest-groups, subverting the Auxiliary Police program (ANAP) for resource access (Lefèvre 2010, 7) and local government and non-government power-holders getting their own militias set up and legitimized as part of programs. General Dostum claimed in a 2012 interview with a Swedish journalist to have a personal “army” of 4,000 fighters trained in the Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) program.

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