In Afghanistan's Wardak Province, the U.S. military has overseen a modest experiment in giving Kalashnikovs, cash, and power to local militias to keep insurgents out of rural communities.
Now the Afghan government and the U.S. military are set to try the experiment on a much larger scale. Reporting from Kabul, Jim Michaels of USA Today describes the Community Defense Initiative, a program to create "neighborhood watch"-style militias in more villages throughout Afghanistan.
At first glance, it looks like a replay of the "Sons of Iraq" program that helped restore order in Iraq’s Anbar province. But unlike Iraq, where local guards got a $300-a-month paycheck, funds for this program will be channeled through villages. Michaels, quoting a tribal adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, said communities that participate in the program will get roads, health care, fuel, and other other incentives.
Could it work? In Iraq, the SoI program did not happen in isolation: The troop surge, a ceasefire by the Jaish al-Mahdi, segregation and the culmination of sectarian cleansing, among other factors, helped contribute to a drop in violence. A community order program would have to work in parallel with political reconciliation. Without it, you might end up rearming for a possible civil war.
The scale of the Community Defense Initiative, its cost and are not clear at this point. But it could work in parallel with Afghanistan’s National Solidarity Program, or NSP, a block grant project to channel development money to to local communities. We've covered the NSP before, and Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times has an interesting write-up of how the program is working in one part of northeastern Badakhshan Province.
Billions of dollars in international assistance, Tavernise notes, have been squandered by an incompetent and often corrupt central government; billions more have gone to Development Inc., which redirects as much as half of every aid dollar to expat salaries, security and overhead.
Not so with the NSP, Tavernise writes. Before the grants program was introduced, "this valley had no electricity or clean water, its main crop was poppy and nearly one in 10 women died in childbirth, one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world," she writes. "Today, many people have water taps, fields grow wheat and it is no longer considered shameful for a woman to go to a doctor."
Devolving security and development to the village level sounds appealing, but it's not a one-size-fits-all solution, either. The "neighborhood watch" approach, for instance, has potential to reverse earlier efforts to disarm and demobilize former combatants. In Afghanistan's increasingly violent Kunduz Province, German troops have watched the re-emergence of local militias with some unease.
"From a distance," one German officer tells Spiegel, "all we see is that there are armed men. But how are we to know whether they are Taliban or other criminals – or whether they will attack us?"
ALSO:
- Iraq's Militia Clash Could Bode Ill for Afghanistan
- U.S. Will Arm Militias in Afghanistan (Updated Again)
- Finding 'Sons of Afghanistan' Ain't Easy
- Danger Room in Afghanistan: Defending Bagram (Part I)
- Time for a Civilian 'Surge' to Afghanistan?
- Baghdad Cracks Down on 'Awakening' Militias
- Novel Solution for Saving Afghanistan: Tax the Expats
