![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
Drawing on my fieldwork on militias in Afghanistan over the past decade, this article explores their security and political effects, with special focus on the Afghan Local Police. It analyzes changes in local security environments, effects on the Taliban insurgency and support for government, and the sustainability of and control over the militias. Key lessons include: Militias have a strong tendency to engage in abusive behavior – itself a new driver of conflict. Militias are least likely to abuse communities when they emerge spontaneously, face an abusive external force, and if major rifts and conflicts are absent from the community. Although militias might be local, their effects are not.
Notes
1. The disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration process (DDR) in Afghanistan has been largely ineffective, despite its multiple incarnations. The various DDR efforts have often been manipulated by influential Afghan powerbrokers seeking to disarm their rivals while they kept their own militias, and often contradicted by US counterterrorism and NATO’s insurgency policies. For a first-rate, detailed examination of the many DDR efforts in Afghanistan and their shortcomings, see Derksen, ‘The Politics of Disarmament and Rearmament in Afghanistan’.
2. Felbab-Brown, Aspiration and Ambivalence.
3. Hughes, ‘The Soviet-Afghan War’, 326–50.
4. Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan; Rashid, Taliban; Davis, ‘How the Taliban Became a Fighting Force’, 43–64; Rashid, ‘Pakistan and the Taliban’, 72–84; Coll, Ghost Wars; and Riedel, What We Won.
5. Since January 2015, NATO’s previous ISAF mission has changed to a more limited training and advising mission known as Operation Resolute Support. For more information, see Felbab-Brown, ‘Blood and Hope in Afghanistan’.
6. For two comprehensive and insightful studies of Afghan militias and their impacts, see Goodhand and Hakimi, ‘Counterinsurgency, Local Militias, and State-building in Afghanistan’; and ICG, ‘The Future of the Afghan Local Police’.
7. For an overview of these various efforts, see Axe, ‘War Is Boring’.
8. For details, see Whitlock, and Miller, ‘U.S. Covert Paramilitary Presence in Afghanistan.’ See also Woodward, Obama’s War.
9. Whitlock and Miller, ‘U.S. Covert Paramilitary Presence’.
10. Interviews with the NDS and ANP officials, Kabul and Baghlan, Afghanistan, September 2010 and April 2012.
11. Münch, ‘Local Afghan Power Structures’.
12. Interviews with ISAF, US Embassy, United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), and Afghan government officials, Kabul, fall 2010 and spring 2012.
13. Derksen, ‘The Politics of Disarmament and Rearmament in Afghanistan’, 7–11.
14. For a background on the historic arbakai, see Tariq, ‘Tribal Security System (Arbakai) in Southeast Afghanistan’.
15. Interviews with high-level ISAF officials and members of the US SOFs responsible for the ALP, Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, and Balkh, fall 2010 and April 2014. For details on the Anbar Awakening and its relationship to the US military surge in Iraq, see Biddle, ‘Lessons Learned in Afghanistan and Iraq’. See also Lynch, ‘Explaining the Awakening’; and McCary, ‘The Anbar Awakening’.
16. That was at least the plan as of 2012. As US forces started reducing their presence in Afghanistan from 2013 on, they also started losing visibility on what was happening with the ALP and other organized or self-generated militias. For more, see Inspector General, Department of Defense, Assessment of U.S. Government and Coalition Efforts to Develop the Afghan Local Police; and Young, ‘The Anatomy of an Anti-Taliban Uprising’. Interviews with senior US military officers, Kabul, October 2015.
17. ICG, ‘The Future of the Afghan Local Police’, 1.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid..
20. Felbab-Brown, ‘A Dispatch from Afghanistan’.
21. Interviews with senior Afghan national security officials, Kabul, October 2015. See also Mashal, ‘Afghan Plan’.
22. Interviews with top-level Afghan government officials and opposition powerbrokers Herat and Kabul, October 2015.
23. Interviews with senior US military officers, Kabul, October 2015.
24. Flynn, ‘Extreme Partnership in Afghanistan’.
25. For a detailed description of their successes against the Taliban, and for a contrast with the problems that have plagued the ALP in the north, see Mogelson, ‘Bad Guys vs. Worse Guys’.
26. Aikins, ‘Our Man in Kandahar’; and Felbab-Brown, Aspiration and Ambivalence, Chapter 5.
27. Interviews with Afghan civil society representatives and Afghan government officials, Herat and Kabul, October 2015.
28. Author’s interviews with Kandahar elder, Kabul, summer 2013 and officers of US SOFs, Kabul, summer 2013.
29. For further details on this uprising, see ‘The Worm Turns’, The Economist.
30. Young, ‘An “Afghan Summer” of Revolt’.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Goldstein, ‘After U.S. Exit, Rough Justice of Afghan Militias’.
34. Lefèvre, ‘The Afghanistan Public Protection Program’.
35. On the positive side, the Wardak APPP militias showed considerable restraint by avoiding involvement in local tribal disputes, such as those between the Hazaras and the Kuchis over grazing lands. See Axe, ‘War Is Boring’.
36. Interviews with ISAF and UNAMA officials, Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Balkh, and Baghlan, fall 2010 and spring 2012. See also House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Hearing on Afghan National Security Forces.
37. Author’s interviews, Baghlan and Nangarhar, fall 2012.
38. ICG, ‘The Future of the Afghan Local Police’, 8.
39. Interviews with senior US military officers, Kabul, October 2015.
40. For an academic military assessment of a similar positive view, see, for example, Green, ‘Retaking a District Center’. For a more critical assessment, see Strandquist, ‘Local Defense Forces and Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan’.
41. Interview with a street vendor in Pul-e-Khourmi who lived in a nearby village, Baghlan, September 2010. This section overall is based on interviews with Afghan officials at all levels of the government, ANP officers, ALP members, maliks, Afghan civil society organizers, businessmen, as well as ordinary Afghans such as shopkeepers, Kandahar, Helmand, Uruzgan, Nangarhar, Baghlan, and Zabul, spring 2009, fall 2010, and April 2012. For a recent, highly visible case of such abuse attributed to the ALP, see Rubin, ‘Rape Case, in Public’.
42. Interview, Kandahar, fall 2010. For a comprehensive documentation of recent cases of abuse by irregular pro-government forces in Afghanistan (both the ALP and others), see Human Rights Watch, Just Don’t Call It a Militia.
43. Apparently, General Stanley McChrystal and General David Petraeus had to spend considerable time persuading Karzai to concede to the efforts. Interviews with ISAF officials, Kandahar, spring 2009, and Kabul, fall 2010. See also Rosenberg and Rubin, ‘Afghanistan to Disband’; and Cloud, ‘U.S. Plans to Beef Up Rural Afghan Forces’.
44. Derksen, ‘The Politics of Disarmament and Rearmament in Afghanistan’, 35.
45. Interview in Baghlan, April 2012.
46. For contradictions within the effort to disarm illegal armed groups (DIAG), see Edward-Poulton, DIAG Evaluation; and Vinay Bhatia and Muggah, ‘The Politics of Demobilization in Afghanistan’.
47. Flynn, ‘Extreme Partnership in Afghanistan’.
48. Interviews with ANP officer in charge of the local ALP, Baghlan, and with political advisers to ISAF, Regional Command-North, fall 2010 and spring 2012.
49. Derksen, ‘The Politics of Disarmament and Rearmament in Afghanistan’, 37–8.
50. IRIN, ‘Afghanistan: Fears over Child Recruitment’.
51. Rubin, ‘Saving Afghanistan’.
52. Interviews with a SOF officer, Herat, April 2012.
53. Human Rights Watch, Just Don’t Call It a Militia: 97–8.
54. ICG, ‘The Future of the ALP’, 3.
55. Author’s interviews with officers of US SOFs responsible for the ALP, Kabul, July 2013.
56. Derksen, ‘The Politics of Disarmament and Rearmament in Afghanistan’, 38.
57. Problems of restraining, disciplining, and disbanding the ALP in other cases and areas, such as Parwan and Langham, are documented in ICG, ‘The Future of the ALP’, 11.
58. I am grateful to Ronald Neumann, former US ambassador to Afghanistan, for the information about the Wardak ALP.
59. ICG, ‘The Future of the ALP’, 10.
60. Interviews with ALP members, ANP officers, civil society representatives, and local residents, Baghlan, April 2012.
61. Author’s interviews with Pashtun leaders and ALP commanders, Baghlan, September 2012.
62. Interviews with former and current political advisers in ISAF’s Regional Command-North, Balkh, April 2012. See also Rosenberg and Rubin, ‘Afghanistan to Disband’.
63. Rosenberg and Rubin, ‘Afghanistan to Disband’.
64. ICG, ‘The Future of the ALP’, 5.
65. For other human rights abuses and acts of crime perpetrated by the ALP and other self-defense militias in other parts of Afghanistan, see Yoshikawa and Pennington, ‘Afghan Local Police’.
66. ICG, ‘The Future of the ALP’, 8.
67. Ibid., 12. Interviews with senior Afghan national security officials, Kabul, October 2015.
68. Interviews with ISAF officials, UNAMA officers, and local community representatives, Uruzgan, spring 2009, and with ISAF and US Embassy officials and US journalists, Kabul, Afghanistan, September 2010. For a more recent example of problems with ALP units in Uruzgan, see Nordland, ‘Afghan Officer Sought in the Killing of 9 Colleagues’.
69. Rubin and Rahimi, ‘Afghan Officials Cite Revenge Killings’.
70. The emerging Islamic State in Afghanistan, so far located in three districts of Nangarhar, all major opium poppy areas, may be an exception. So far, it has not only prohibited the cultivation of poppy, but also refrained from taxing drug smugglers. See also Shinwari and Siddique, ‘Pakistani Militants Lead IS Push’.
71. For an overview of drug trends and policies in Afghanistan since 2001, see Felbab-Brown, ‘No Easy Exit’.
72. Author’s interviews with members of US SOFs, Shindand, Herat, July 2013, and Herat government officials and powerbrokers, September 2014.
73. For a nuanced discussion of how broader insecurity impinges on the determination of local communities to embrace the counterinsurgency effort and generate self-defense forces, see Nagl, ‘A Better War in Afghanistan’.
74. Sultani and Johnson, ‘Stretched Afghan Army Falls Back’.
75. Goldstein, ‘Police Force Is Studied’; and Hewad, ‘Legal, Illegal’.
76. Interviews with Antonio Guistozzi, a prominent expert on the Taliban, Afghan and US military and intelligence officers, and Kunduz politicians and businessmen, Kabul, October 2015.