Ever since the Sunni insurgents of Iraq's Anbar Province broke from al-Qaeda in 2006, the U.S. has strained to find a way to replicate the move in Afghanistan. With remarkable frequency, senior U.S. military officers have approached Hamid Karzai's government and ask if they can set up some structure outside of the formal Afghan army and police to get local auxiliaries to pick up the security slack. And each time, the Karzai government balked, fearing an entrenchment or acceleration of Afghanistan's warlords, power brokers and militias. Until now.
General David Petraeus has persuaded Karzai to set up a new force to supplement Afghan soldiers and police. It's not really Anbar Awakening 2.0, since it doesn't involve insurgents switching sides. And don't use the M-word, Pentagon officials say. "They would not be militias," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters Wednesday. "These would be government-formed, government-paid, government- uniformed local police units." Specifically, the new units will be paid by the Interior Ministry -- or, rather, the foreign money that bankrolls the Afghanistan government will be disbursed to these new units through the ministry.
Except, Morell conceded, they wouldn't be trained, as police units are. ("We don't have enough trainers to do the fundamental job here," Morrell further conceded.) In essence, up to 10,000 fighters -- as an initial tranche, according to the New York Times -- around the country will be rapidly deputized under the auspices of the Interior Ministry, at the behest of the NATO military command, and then relied upon to keep the peace in places with insufficient amounts of Afghan security forces. "A useful bridging mechanism," Morrell called the program, until the Afghan army and police can move in.
Only the potential for short-term contingencies to overtake long-term strategy is acute. It's not like there's some separate pool of potential recruits for this new "Local Police Force." They're the same Afghans that the government's been trying to recruit for the army and the police. The fighters rallied to this new program are most likely to come from local power brokers, whose hold over remote parts of Afghanistan will be accordingly entrenched. Those power brokers won't easily give up the source of that expanded power to army and police recruiters. And that means the "bridging mechanism" could easily turn the expansion of the Afghan security services -- the U.S.'s ticket out of Afghanistan, according to the Obama administration's overall strategy -- a bridge to nowhere.
Then there's the tribal question. While using tribal auxiliaries in Afghanistan has been faddish for the past year, the strategy as it's developing right now doesn't appear to be tribal-based. Petraeus may have balked at embracing one of the pillars of his strategy in Iraq in the much-different environment of Afghanistan.
But that doesn't mean the tribes won't be tapped to raise fighters for the Local Police Force. Indeed, tribal structures might be the first to volunteer their young men -- for a price. And that's something that researchers for the Army's Human Terrain System have explicitly warned against. Afghanistan's amorphous tribal structure makes the tribes "notorious for changing the form of their social organization when they are pressured by internal dissension or external forces," a 2009 Human Terrain System report cautioned.
Indeed, the largest tribal-recruitment experiment, a partnership betweenArmy Col. Randy George's troops in eastern Afghanistan and the large Shinwari tribe, ended this spring after the Nangarhar governor and the U.S. embassy objected that the alliance undermined the already-weak formal government. Not very auspicious.
About that government: strengthening local power brokers through deputizing their security forces cuts directly against the governance efforts that Obama's team has for eighteen months insisted is the key to lasting security in Afghanistan. Indeed, Petraeus helped create a new military task force to ensure that U.S. contracting money doesn't counter-productively bolster those power brokers. One of the best-connected defense think tanks, the Institute for the Study of War, issued a dire report in May about their strength in southern Afghanistan already.
If Morrell's press conference is any indication, the check against the Local Police Force contributing to a fracturing of the very governance and security structures it's supposed to supplement is the Interior Ministry. That ministry just lost its leadership last month. Before, U.S. officials considered Interior among the most capable of Afghan ministries -- which, frankly, is a low bar to clear. Now, it'll be taking on a task that demands a competence and a subtlety that has escaped the far-more-developed Iraqi Interior Ministry, which has developed an adversarial relationship with the Awakening forces that inspire this current plan.
Petraeus barely pulled off the gamble of cultivating the Awakening. With Afghanistan's even-weaker government infrastructure structures, the odds of lightning striking twice are much longer. Lots of things have to suddenly go right that haven't been going right in order for it to work. One of Petraeus' favorite aphorisms is that "hard" isn't "hopeless." We're about to find out if that optimism has been pushed past its prudent limits.
See Also:
- Finding 'Sons of Afghanistan' Ain't Easy
- U.S. to Afghan Militias: Don't Throw Away Your Guns
- Army Researchers Warn Against Tribal War in Afghanistan
- U.S. Will Arm Militias in Afghanistan
- 9 Years In, U.S. Finally Tries to Get a Grip on Warzone ...
- East Afghanistan Sees Taliban as 'Morally Superior' to Karzai ...
