The Long War by David Loyn

Author:David Loyn [Loyn, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

ARMING THE MILITIAS

As so often during the long war, support by villagers for international troops was conditional on them being able to provide security. Knowing they would be leaving before long, U.S. troops did deals with local power brokers who were not necessarily connected to the central government. In Kandahar, this meant working with “General” Abdul Raziq Achakzai, a militia leader, who had effective control of the Spin Boldak border post, Afghanistan’s southern gateway to Pakistan. There was a simple calculation: “Raziq can beat the Taliban,” said U.S. Special Forces lieutenant colonel James Hayes. Raziq was appointed to head the Kandahar police, although U.S. forces knew he was a player in the opium trade, and had a ruthless reputation for not taking prisoners. “The first priority is to beat the Taliban,” said Hayes. “Once this is done, we can shift our attention to these illicit actors.”40

And there was now active promotion of the Afghan Local Police (ALP), drawing on an Afghan tradition of Arbakai, local militias. If villages could be supported to stand up and protect themselves against the Taliban, then the war would be easier to win. The U.S. tried to stand up local militias on several occasions after 2001, in various iterations, Local Defense Initiative, Auxiliary Police, Public Protection Police, and now the Afghan Local Police. None succeeded in making Afghanistan a safer place. The several attempts might have been an alert that this was a hard thing to do. To Petraeus, the new Afghan Local Police initiative was “arguably the most critical element in our effort to help Afghanistan develop the capacity to help itself.”41 He saw it as essential to provide security as the surge forces drew down.

The creation of local paramilitary forces where necessary was in his counterinsurgency manual, although there was a caution. “If militias are outside the HN [host nation] government’s control, they can often be obstacles to ending an insurgency.”42 American willingness to work with informal armed groups, militias, was not shared across the NATO alliance, nor inside the Afghan government itself. They were not the minutemen of American Revolutionary legend but often predatory gangs, infiltrated or easily turned by the Taliban. Human Rights Watch found that the local police were “a government-backed militia that has raped, killed, and robbed.”43 While every Afghan rural home had a weapon, after forty years of uninterrupted warlordism, Afghanistan had seen enough of informal militias. A senior official in the Afghan Ministry of the Interior, Major General Esmatullah Dawlatzai, said the local police were “made for the warlords. They were given uniforms and salaries, but they were the same people, committing the same crimes, with more power.”44

The hold of warlords on local security nine years into the war was a consequence of the support given to the Northern Alliance forces who had assisted in removing the Taliban from power in 2001. It became clearer every year that acknowledging the legitimacy of these forces rather than marginalizing them at the start was the founding cause of so many of the problems that followed.

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