Afghanistan (52 page)

Previous attempts to create self-defense forces by enlisting former anti-Taliban fighting men, who were often, especially in Pushtun areas, pro-Taliban militia members until just before the end, had some success, especially when partnered by US Special Forces units. But these forces often ended up badly, disintegrating or turning against neighboring groups or the local population. These “private militias” had no claim on state money and had to fund themselves locally, and thus were extremely vulnerable to corruption or carrying out crimes. These groups were seen as being more concerned with extracting revenue for themselves and doing their local patrons’ bidding (which often included land grabs) than effectively combating the insurgents or protecting the local populations. In non-Pushtun areas, without the threat by insurgents, the Taliban background, and the tribal divisions, such groups had less opportunity or motivation to create their own security problems and so were more likely to keep the local Afghans, with whom they shared ties of loyalty or kinship, secure.

A plan developed in 2006 to deploy the Afghan National Auxiliary Police (ANAP), a force of 11,000 formed from village militias, was a failure. “The auxiliary police asked local strongmen to form a force, paid them, and gave them weapons,” Atmar explained, but neither Kabul nor the coalition wished to create a force independent of the central government that would undercut the highly centralized constitutional order that
emerged from the Bonn process. Many were concerned that the ANAP reversed the effects of the DDR program with its potential human-rights abuses.
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Some non-Pushtun observers thought what Kabul really feared was the creation of local armed forces in non-Pushtun areas that would serve as a counterweight to Pushtun power.
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The ANAP members received only a few days’ training but received a monthly stipend, envied by ANP members whose pay was often in arrears. ANAP personnel, in practice, still gave their primary loyalty to local officials or warlords. In Pushtun areas, ANAP ranks included many insurgent infiltrators. The ANAP was disbanded in May 2008.

After the failure of the ANAP program, among the alternatives proposed have been the formation of expanded and regularized
arbaki
(tribal deputies, normally temporary) and the creation of
lashkars
(traditional Pushtun tribal armies). GEN Petraeus said “There exists tribal elements in some areas that can be built on. . . . Local or tribal elders or mullahs have said, we want to protect our territory.”
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The need to have local Afghans do this was once again apparent. People in arms, rather than regular militaries, have been effective counter-insurgency forces worldwide, most recently in Iraq, but also in previous conflicts including Malaya, Algeria, Kenya, and Guatemala. In the words of Massoud Kharokhail, “Community policing is possible with less money, more commitment, and better governance. We need arbaki in the east; we may need lashkars in the south.”
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The result was the organization of the Afghan Public Protection Force (APPF). In the words of Mohammed Hanif Atmar, Minister of Interior, “These are not militia but a state force, regular, full-time, uniformed; they will be US and ANA trained and not report to their commander. The local community will have a chance to nominate and vet candidates for this force as well as the government.”
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British retired LTG Graham Lamb was, in 2009, working to set out how the force would be organized. Previous failures have limited the scope of the program, which in 2009 aimed to arm some 6,000 Afghans in groups of 100–200 in 40 districts, mainly along major roads. APPF personnel go through a three-week training process.

In early 2009, as a pilot project, APPF units were formed in Wardak province, with mixed results. There, the provincial governor, Mohammed
Halim Fidai, was quoted as saying “We don’t have enough police to keep the Taliban out of these villages and we don’t have time to train more police—we have to fill the gap now.”
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Corruption has slowed and undercut their formation and, in Pushtun areas, many who would be willing to serve alongside their kinsmen are reluctant to join a force that could be seen as anti-Pushtun and pro-Kabul, fighting not to defend their families from outsider insurgents but defending an unpopular government. In Wardak in 2009, the strongest APPF recruitment was among non-Pushtun groups, Tajik and Hazara, which organized APPF units in conjunction with the US Army’s TF Spartan, based on the 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division.

While Atmar saw the limited number of APPF that were operational in 2009 as doing good work, he was concerned that there was still opposition to the force among Afghans, especially in the parliament, that saw the APPF as really just a separate Pushtun force. However, he believes that, looking ahead to a time when Kabul will have to take over a greater security role and foreign forces pull back, armed Afghans will have to play a role: “The ANA is a strike force to shape and clear areas. The ANP and APPF will then have to hold.”
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In response, the US and other coalition forces have helped organize other Afghan militia forces; while the foreigners do not provide arms, the Afghans have access to them from Afghan government sources. This has included Uzbek and Turkmen groups in Kunduz province, although Pushtuns have proven more difficult to recruit.
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The 2009 experience in Wardak did not demonstrate how this could be done successfully.

Yet the reality of Afghan politics, especially in Pushtun areas, is that if one group gets money and weapons from the government and another does not, the local balance of power will shift and there will be a strong impetus for extractive behavior. Given the lack of predictable non-narcotics sources of income in much of rural Afghanistan, the motivation for a tribe or local group armed by the government to resolve its fiscal crisis through violence and extracting resources from less well-armed neighbors is significant if neither the government nor a local or regional warlord has the potential to prevent such behavior. The insurgents will be able to use that situation to their own advantage by preying on those who feel
oppressed by these forces. There is also concern among non-Pushtuns that local protection forces, being concentrated in the Pushtun areas where they are needed to defend their villages against insurgents, would make these local Pushtuns more willing to join with the Taliban to fight for Pushtun power, tipping the political balance in Afghanistan in favor of Pushtuns even more. Saleh Registani, member of parliament from Panjshir, said: “Arming Pushtun tribes on this or the other side of the border will backfire. If the ultimate goal is modernization, security, and democratic government, they are not an appropriate instrument. Tribal militias would certainly use guns against each other.”
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The strong Ministry of Interior involvement in the formation of the ANPP is an attempt to mitigate these concerns.

Such forces will likely have to be part of any improved security situation in Afghanistan. GEN Petraeus said “You have to have local solutions to local problems, not just secure but mobilize Afghan civilians.”
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The future of the security situation in Afghanistan has to be with the Afghans. LTC Cavoli saw that the role of foreign forces must be in “providing security and benefits in a way that does not impose religious or cultural costs.”
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This includes countering the “culture of dependency” that the fallout from decades of conflict and reconstruction together has fostered. Afghans may have few resources, but they can still invest themselves and stand up, with their kin, for their own security. BG Hainse observed that “local Afghans can provide security better than allowing foreign forces to take responsibility for it.”
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But many issues, political, material, and cultural, continue to stand in the way of Afghan self-defense. The foreign military presence has been costly; a million dollars buys four to eight infantrymen deployed in Afghanistan for a year, depending on nationality. Rahim Wardak claims he can deploy 70 ANA solders for the cost of one of their coalition counterparts, and these Afghan soldiers are “politically less complex; we will not run into the international politics of foreign countries.”
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Former US Ambassador James Dobbins noted that in Afghanistan, “indigenous forces are more likely to have trust and access to the population.”
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There will never be enough foreign troops in Afghanistan to live among the people—the key “human terrain” in an insurgency—and to provide a
presence at the district and local level. GEN McChrystal wrote: “Pre-occupied with the protection of our own forces, we have operated in a manner that distances us—physically and psychologically—from the people we seek to protect.”
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The combination of coalition lack of understanding and will, along with Kabul’s emphasis on centralized power, has too often meshed with grassroots Afghans’ desire to avoid responsibility and let others fight for them. Yet these are the same Afghans that, a generation ago, fighting the Soviets, became a people in arms, carrying out the greatest national rising of the twentieth century. Tapping into the spirit and motivation that made that possible and enlisting it into building the future for Afghanistan is required to turn the situation around.

Ending the Insurgency

If the battle in Afghanistan is to be won, a critical mass of insurgents are going to have to be won over and allowed to profit from their decision to reenter Afghan life and politics. The way is dangerous, as the tentative contacts between Kabul and insurgent leaders in 2008–09, both direct and through Saudi Arabia, showed. Saudi-mediated attempts have generally proven unsuccessful.
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The way these were conducted seemed to hint at Kabul’s reaching out to insurgent Pushtuns through a deal that would reduce the political and economic power of non-Pushtuns. Even though Kabul has little autonomous capability as of yet, Afghan leaders, in and out of government, may be better able than any other interlocutor to deal with the Afghan Taliban’s central leadership, the Haqqanis, Hekmatyar, or even individual insurgent leaders scattered throughout the countryside. The insurgents’ ideology, which includes an implicit demand that state power in Kabul be in the hands of Pushtuns, is one that would be difficult to reconcile with Afghanistan’s other ethnic groups, who are already convinced that the Pushtun insurgency has been met by too much appeasement and excessive allocation of resources to Pushtun areas. But Kabul cannot turn off Pakistan’s sanctuary for the insurgency in Afghanistan. Nor can Kabul prevent anyone who crosses over from becoming a target for assassination.

Similarly, reconciliation with insurgent groups that have brutal human-rights records and leaders with blood on their hands will be hard for the
US and its coalition partners to accept. Kabul cannot deal at all without the support of its foreign backers, as it depends on foreign aid for its income and foreign troops for its security. This foreign dependence hurts legitimacy in a country where nationalism and suspicion of outsiders, including Muslims, is as strong as the tradition of hospitality than welcomes and shelters them. It allows the insurgents to portray themselves as defenders of Afghanistan’s culture and values, and makes reconciliation difficult.

Limiting the insurgents’ willingness to negotiate is their perception that they are winning the conflict, that the US will withdraw and that their Afghan supporters will go into exile or switch sides when insurgent victory appears inevitable. The Taliban’s goal is restoration of their emirate and its associated totalitarian regime, not participation in elections or compromise with other groups. Their connections to Al Qaeda and radical Islamic groups in Pakistan and worldwide push them toward a continued struggle even if Kabul uses Afghan-to-Afghan links to look for peace. The large number of Afghans that depend on narcotics, which, in turn, depends on the lack of security and the reach of the state, is a potentially powerful force against any successful settlement of the insurgency. The Taliban has portrayed itself as the avenger of the rights of Pushtuns against usurpers in Kabul, as defenders of the national integrity, protectors of those that depend on the poppy crop, and bulwark of all Islam against a worldwide war of aggression by the infidels; it will be hard for it to reach an agreement that compromises these principles. The Taliban has demanded first the pullback of all US and coalition forces to garrison and, within 18 months, their complete withdrawal from Afghanistan as the first step in any negotiations they might participate in. Other demands for negotiations include the immunity of Taliban leaders from the ANSF and being allowed to retain their weapons. These demands have proven impossible to reconcile with Afghan government and US insistence that renouncing violence and accepting the constitution is required for any negotiations.

Success on the ground in Afghanistan is, almost by definition, the sum total of local successes, understandings, and truces, all enabled by a flow of money and resources, capped by the creation and maintenance of patronage relationships. But this locally based approach to countering the
insurgency will still not solve the larger threat emanating from Pakistan. Current Afghan Taliban fighters and their allies from other insurgent groups are largely directed from sanctuaries in Pakistan, which makes it hard to deal with their leaders on an Afghan-to-Afghan basis.
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In most areas, local insurgent leaders are less important than those from across the border in Pakistan, and removing them from the conflict through negotiation will not slow the insurgency too much and may instead lead to their assassination or replacement.

While the remote insurgent leadership in Pakistan may lack an interface with Afghan constituents that could persuade them to create a ceasefire, they do care about grassroot Afghan opinion and their own reputations. However, the insurgency has metastasized into an indigenous conflict in a number of areas in recent years, including districts throughout the south, east, and, increasingly, northern provinces including Badghis and Kunduz. What this means is that the insurgents were able to fill the vacuum in governance, either already nonexistent or filled by extractive police and officials that had existed since 2001. The insurgents may not have gained ideological allegiance in these areas, but are in a position to offer employment where there would otherwise be none. They can use money, tribal, personal kinship, or family connections to sway local Afghans. It does not necessarily means that the locals like or approve the Taliban—indeed, many in these areas resent or fear them and consider them outsiders—but to the extent that they can provide work and security for the local population, they have the opportunity to legitimate their control and garner a modicum of loyalty in the absence of any real alternative. This situation makes local negotiations difficult, for the insurgents are unlikely to agree to terms that do not leave them in control of the governmental functions in an area: otherwise they would find themselves competing with Kabul, with its greater access to outside support and resources.