The Unintended Consequences of US Support on Militia Governance in Kunduz Province, Afghanistan

Abstract

How do militias use the external support provided to them by powerful foreign actors? In Kunduz province, Afghanistan, a wide range of militias have received money, weapons, training and political support through several US-funded militia programmes. While labelled as ‘local self-defence forces’, the observable behaviour of these militias ranges from providing local governance services in the areas they control to preying upon the people they are supposed to guard. Through the analytical lens of multi-layered governance this article investigates how the external support of the United States has been adopted, manipulated, and/or diverted by local militias in Kunduz to serve their own agendas. While the militia support yielded short-term counterinsurgency gains, in the mid to long term, it has unintentionally undermined both the security needs of local populations in Kunduz and US strategic interests.

Introduction

How do militias use the external support provided to them by powerful foreign actors? The provision of money, weapons, training and political support can significantly affect the behaviour of militias, and the governance of groups fighting a civil war. Militias can operate both on behalf of, or independently from the state, and sometimes are supported by powerful foreign actors. This article focuses on instances in which militias are supported by such foreign actors, in particular the United States. While the term ‘militia’ is applied to a wide range of non-state armed groups, the most fundamental characteristic of militias is their fight against rebels (Kalyvas 2006, p. 107, Jentzsch et al. 2015, pp. 755–756). Paradoxically, these groups of ‘anti-rebels’ are sometimes portrayed as a root cause of insecurity, while others see them as a vital part of local rule and state-building (Kalyvas 2006, p. 107). In some cases militias prey upon local populations, while other examples illustrate that militias provide governance services, or do both (Jentzsch et al. 2015, Staniland 2015, Dirkx and Terpstra 2016). It is unclear however, how militia behaviour changes under the influence of external actors.

The US army has long recognised that militias can protect local communities and furthermore isolate rebels from the population they claim to represent. Conventional doctrine suggests that for counterinsurgency to be effective, US forces should work closely with local forces to build an ‘indigenous security capability’ that can win the precious ‘hearts and minds’ of the local population. ¹ However, US-backed militias have sometimes undermined this doctrine and consequently US strategic interests.

Afghanistan is a particularly relevant case, because of extensive US support to militias since the 2001 US-led invasion (Giustozzi 2009, Peceny and Bosin 2011). This article analyses the behaviour of US-backed militias in the northern Kunduz province where the arming and funding of militias accelerated in 2009 amid growing concerns about the rise of Taliban activity. This support led to the establishment of several US-funded militia programmes in Kunduz, including, the ‘Afghan Local Police’ (ALP) and the ‘Critical Infrastructure Police’ (CIP). Some of these US-backed militias in Kunduz have protected local populations, others have preyed upon the people they were supposed to guard, and some have done both (Human Rights Watch 2011, Münch 2013, Goodhand and Hakimi 2014). In the wake of the post-2014 drawdown of US troops, some militias even defected to the Taliban. It remains unclear however, how the external support of the United States to these militias – ranging from political support to the provision of money, weapons and training – has been appropriated, or misappropriated. This article investigates how local militias in Kunduz, in particular militia commander Nabi Gechi and local power broker Mir Alam have adopted, manipulated, and/or diverted the external support of the United States. The unintended consequences of US support on militia governance in Kunduz included militias assaulting, harassing, taxing and extorting local populations. Contrary to US strategic interests, the militias the US supported became a prime source of insecurity that indirectly contributed to a resurgence of the Taliban in 2015.

When the goals of militias and their external supporter are incongruent, external support can be appropriated in ways that contradict intended outcomes and strategic interests of the supporter. These goals are forged in the context of an ongoing civil war in which short-term gains on the battlefield generally overshadow longer term strategic interests of external supporters. At the same time, militias may opportunistically use external resources to serve their own agendas. Especially where the central government’s ability to influence and control militia behaviour is limited, the insertion and (abrupt) withdrawal of external resources by powerful foreign actors can significantly affect how militias govern. While the insertion of external support helps to empower militias, the withdrawal of external support often results in militias taxing local populations through the use or threat of force. In some cases, militias have some degree of popular support of the people they claim to govern, while in other cases, militias prey upon local populations along and across tribal, ethnic and political fault lines. To explain this variation it is vital to understand the social and political networks in which external support ‘lands’.

In Kunduz, Pashtuns have been disproportionately affected by predatory behaviour of US-backed Tajik, Uzbek, and Turkmen dominated militias. Indirectly, the US militia support led to incentives among Pashtuns that fuelled rather than countered the insurgency. This was foreseen in 2010 by the US political leadership in Kabul and numerous analysts, but a short-sighted counterinsurgency strategy persisted. While in the short term the US support for militias helped to marginalise the Taliban in Kunduz, in the mid to long term these militia policies have unintentionally undermined both the security needs of local populations and US strategic interests. The case of Kunduz demonstrates that while the US army has the power and the resources to subject militias to projects of security governance, militias can redirect the influence of US political interventions by manipulating external support at the local level. The different layers of security governance in Kunduz thus constitute a complex interplay between US attempts to modify the actions of militias to achieve certain goals, and Afghan militias that may not align with these goals.

This argument is based upon the analysis of policy documents and speeches, diplomatic cables, extensive fieldwork in 2013, and 2016. In 2013, in cooperation with Afghan research assistants, more than 100 structured interviews were held with civilians, militiamen, local elders, shura members, civil society representatives, ALP members and ANP officers in Kunduz. In addition to this, I conducted in-depth interviews with police trainers, military staff, diplomats and NGO workers at the German-led Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Kunduz. During additional fieldwork in 2016, various analysts, NGO workers, diplomats, military staff and informants from Kunduz were also interviewed.

Multi-layered Governance and Militias

External intervention can significantly influence the behaviour of militias and the ways they govern. In recent years, a growing body of literature has emerged on the fluid nature of militias, and non-state armed groups more broadly. Militias can for example transform into rebels, criminals, or even be incorporated in the state’s security apparatus (Schneckener 2006, Staniland 2015, Dirkx and Terpstra 2016, Jentzsch, this issue). Within the literature on non-state armed groups, studies on ‘rebel governance’, and more recently ‘militia governance’, analyse the interactions and relations of rebels and militias in civil wars with civilians and the state (Mampilly 2011, Arjona et al. 2015, Gutiérrez-Sanín 2015, Terpstra and Frerks forthcoming). How powerful foreign actors influence the ways these groups govern remains understudied however.

Beyond the incumbent government, rebels and militias, powerful foreign actors need to be taken into account in the analysis of civil wars. Together, these different actors have intersecting influences on the governance of civilians. To capture the complex relations between them, analysts need to disentangle multiple layers of governance (Kasfir et al. this issue). While for some research questions a single-layered analysis may suffice, understanding how militias govern in the case of the Afghan civil war requires a broader analytical framework to examine the complex relations between a multiplicity of actors and strategic interests.

In Afghanistan, from the start of the US-led invasion, the CIA and the US army have tried to influence militia governance in order to align it with US political-military goals through the provision of money, weapons, training and other resources. Inserting as well as (abruptly) withdrawing external support constitutes an additional ‘layer’ of multi-layered governance together with interactions of the militias with civilians, rebels and the Afghan state (Kasfir et al. this issue). My argument is that combinations of these layers influence militia governance during civil war. Sometimes the influence of external intervenors is positive (at least from their own perspectives) in the sense that the militia conform to objectives and expectations of the funders. In other instances their influence is negative in that militia governance pursues goals that undercut the intentions of its sponsor. As will be demonstrated, the result from these interactions can undermine the larger strategic objectives of both external intervenors and the central government.

Instead of viewing Afghan militias as passive ‘proxies’, I approach them as actors who have historically played dynamic roles under different geopolitical configurations (the cold war, the 1990s, and the War on Terror). In doing so, I counter the dominant narrative, spearheaded by a plethora of Western policymakers and analysts that present militias as static, ahistorical and apolitical entities. Paradoxically, this prevailing discourse lacks an accurate understanding of the key role that external support has had in enabling the establishment of an elite of warlords, militia commanders and other power brokers who govern through patron–client networks and their control of opium, arms and foreign resources (Rubin 2000, Hussain 2012).

The attempts of the US government to modify the actions of Afghan militias to fight the Taliban and provide security in rural areas essentially consist of discursive and material forms of support. The discursive level encompasses moral and political support to anti-Taliban militias through the adoption of a language that sounds both state-like and locally owned, with words such as ‘police’, ‘village defence guards’ and ‘community watch’. ² In doing so, US officials use particular ‘frames’, which function to interpret and organise individual and collective experience, thereby guiding, inspiring and legitimating their own activities, as well as those of other socio-political actors (Benford and Snow 2000, p. 614). Above all, these frames project legitimacy on certain Afghan militias at the expense of other armed groups (e.g., the Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Islamic State). US officials have for example consistently refrained from calling the local forces the US supports ‘militias’. Instead, they insist that their ‘self-defense programmes’ are based on ‘Afghan traditions’ (Felbab-Brown 2016, p. 262). These frames provide the rationalities for specific forms of material support.

This material support consists of the provision of money, weapons, ammunition and training to militias, but also of logistical support, communication technologies, shelter and food (O’Neill 2005, pp. 111–124, see also Office of the Secretary of Defense 2016, p. 40). Since 2001, the US government has spent billions of dollars on material support for militia programmes, as well as wider efforts to build up the Afghan army and police. More than half of all US reconstruction dollars have been used to build, equip, train and sustain the Afghan National Security Forces, thereby far outweighing the Afghan government’s investments in the security sector (SIGAR 2017, p. 2). These material forms of support are intimately connected to, and enabled by, the frames that legitimise and justify support. The multi-layered approach to militia governance in this article serves to understand how these various forms of external support have facilitated specific types of militia behaviour when they ‘hit the ground’ in Kunduz. However, this third layer of external intervention has both intended and unintended consequences.

The Militia Dilemma

A central dilemma for the international community in Afghanistan has been what to do with or about the militias (Giustozzi 2009, Perito 2009, Edwards 2010, Barfield 2010, Jones and Muñoz 2010, Suhrke 2011, Braithwaite and Wardak 2013, Mukhopadhyay 2014, Malejacq 2016). Demobilise them in order to centralise the means of coercion, or support them in the fight against the Taliban insurgency? The move to give US money, arms and training to militias in Afghanistan was controversial from the onset for various reasons (Boone 2009; Partlow and De Young 2010). It largely contradicts the dominant view of international organisations and most Western governments that claim a state monopoly of force to be a prerequisite for security and stability (Dirkx and Terpstra 2016). This Weberian notion of the state as the only actor who can control the legitimate use of force has resonated particularly well with Western states, whose own history is generally characterised by a transition from fragmented political power towards more economically, politically and militarily consolidated and centralised states (Tilly 1990). However, since the start of the 2001 US-led intervention in Afghanistan there has been a tension between the international community’s ambition to stabilise Afghanistan by helping the government to centralise the means of coercion, and powerful foreign actors that support local militias, strongmen and warlords that operate autonomously in spaces outside the reach of the Kabul government.

Foreign forces tried simultaneously to centralise and fragment the means of coercion through different logics, justifications and approaches, turning militia programming, and the US-led intervention at large, into a contradictory endeavour (Suhrke 2011, 2013, Goodhand and Hakimi 2014, p. 6). On the one hand, interventions focused on centralising the means of coercion through security sector reform (SSR), judicial reform, counter narcotics and disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programmes. On the other, foreign forces continued to support and fund warlords, local power brokers, militias and private security companies, who as Goodhand and Hakimi (2014, p. 6) put it ‘operated either above or below the law’. Various local policing and community defence experiments followed one after the other, including for example the Afghan National Auxiliary Police, the Afghan Public Protection Program (APPP or AP3), the Community Defense Initiative (CDI) and eventually the Critical Infrastructure Police (CIP), and the Afghan Local Police (ALP) (Friesendorf and Krempel 2011, p. 27, Goodhand and Hakimi 2014, p. 9). From the early days of the intervention onwards, US policymakers made critical choices that ‘contradicted and undermined the liberal focus’ of the state-building project, which ‘inadvertently weakened the capacity of the Afghan state’ (Peceny and Bosin 2011, p. 607). This resulted in a complex security marketplace consisting of formal actors and informal actors that shaped, and at times trumped, the security concerns of local populations (see also Luckham and Kirk 2012, p. 47). US support to Afghan militias has furthermore affected the Afghan government’s ability to influence and control militia behaviour. The case of Kunduz province is emblematic of these ominous dynamics.

The Strategic Importance of Kunduz

Kunduz is a strategically important ethnically heterogeneous province in the north of Afghanistan. Since the 1850s, several waves of migration altered the ethnic makeup of the province, which induced conflicts about land, resources, as well as political representation. The province’s strategic location has also been an important source of conflict. With the completion of the Salang tunnel in 1964, Kunduz came to lie at the intersection of the roads connecting Mazar-e Sharif with the northeast of the country, and Kabul through the Hindu Kush Mountains to Tajikistan. It contributed to the establishment of the province as a significant drug trafficking hub, and control of the province became a precious military asset. Especially during the civil war of the 1990s, Kunduz became a major battleground. The ethnic diversity and strategic location of the province provided all major mujahedeen factions with support bases and stakes in Kunduz. ³ The provincial capital switched hands five times, after which it was controlled by the Taliban from June 1997 until November 2001 (Wörmer 2012, Münch 2013, pp. 10–11). The movement successfully bribed some commanders of opposing Northern Alliance factions, but most defections to the Taliban followed ethnic lines. Wörmer points out that the Taliban’s rule over Kunduz was characterised by a ‘Pashtun domination of the provincial administration’ (2012, p. 43).

When by October 2001 the US Air Force started to bomb Taliban positions, and US Special Forces supported Northern Alliance factions on the ground, the power structure was about to change once again. Taliban fighters in the north retreated to defend their stronghold in Kunduz, but after a bloody battle and series of negotiations, the province fell in the hands of the Northern Alliance by late November 2001. Kunduz retained a strong potential support base for the Taliban however, because of its large Pashtun population. The following section outlines how, when the Taliban came back as an insurgency, a combination of local efforts, actions of the Afghan government, and US interventions shaped the mobilisation of anti-Taliban militias in Kunduz.

The Mobilisation of Anti-Taliban Militias in Kunduz

Militia formation in Kunduz initially started as a predominantly local initiative with little direct American involvement. Later, as shown below, when US Special Forces started to fund, train and equip local militias, already existing militias were able largely to co-opt the US-funded programmes (Münch 2013, p. 40, Goodhand and Hakimi 2014, pp. 36–37). The mobilisation of anti-Taliban militias started in the summer of 2009. In the lead-up to the presidential elections of August 2009, the provincial authorities were highly concerned about the rise of Taliban activity in Kunduz. When the Kabul government did not grant the request of the provincial governor Engineer Mohammad Omar for additional police and military forces and the German-led ISAF forces were unwilling to fight the Taliban, the governor started to equip local jihadi commanders, many of whom, including himself, had fought against the Taliban in 2001 alongside US forces ⁴ (Wörmer 2012, p. 40, Münch 2013, p. 36, Goodhand and Hakimi 2014, p. 33).

At the provincial level, local Northern Alliance commanders, who also opposed the Taliban, took advantage of the insecure situation, and started to activate their old networks along and across tribal, ethnic and political lines. ⁵ At the time, General Mohammad Daud, the Kunduz chief for the National Directorate of Security (NDS), ⁶ was put in charge of recruiting local commanders and militias to fight the Taliban. This was a significant development because in addition to being the local NDS chief, Daud was the brother-in-law of Mir Alam, a powerful Tajik commander of the Jamiat party who also fought against the Taliban in 2001. ⁷ Daud, nearly without exception, relied on Mir Alam to recruit local commanders loyal to him (Koelbl 2010, Hewad 2012). At the national level Mir Alam was backed by the Tajik and Jamiat affiliated Vice-President Mohammad Qasim Fahim until his death in 2014 (Human Rights Watch 2011, p. 30, Human Rights Watch 2015, p. 49).

Another commander that set up a militia at the time was Nabi Gechi, an ethnic Turkmen from the Qala-e-Zal district in Kunduz who earned a reputation during the 1980s when he fought with the mujahedeen against the Soviets. It was during this time that he earned his moniker ‘Gechi’ (Turkmen for ‘goat’), because of his quickness in fighting and moving around in the mountains (Nazar and Recknagel 2009, Raghavan 2015). After 2001 he reportedly laid down his weapons, opened a fish and kebab restaurant in the neighbouring Balkh province, but returned to Qala-e-Zal in 2009 when local elders and the provincial authorities asked him to come back to prevent the Taliban from overrunning the district (Münch 2013, p. 15, Sites 2013, Raghavan 2015). The local council of Qala-e-Zal raised money from its citizens to equip Gechi’s militia with Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenades and a portable mortar. It also paid the militiamen 6,200 afghanis ($124) per month, and 2,000 afghanis ($40) more for food (Nazar and Recknagel 2009). Soon thereafter the militia also received additional weapons and funding from the NDS. ⁸

The anti-Taliban militias in Kunduz were almost exclusively comprised of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Turkmen, even though in the ethnically heterogeneous province as a whole Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group. One of the few Pashtun commanders that also set up a militia was Mir Alam’s rival, Mohammad Omar, a Sayyaf loyalist and Ittihad ⁹ commander also known as ‘Pakhsaparan’, the ‘Wall Breaker’ (Bleuer and Ali 2014, Goodhand and Hakimi 2014, p. 33, Baczko and Dorronsoro 2016, p. 6). Other local power holders involved in setting up militias were the Uzbek Ibrahimi clan in the Imam Sahib district, and, as mentioned, Nabi Gechi in Qala-e-Zal. None of them were as influential as Mir Alam however (Hewad 2012, Münch 2013, p. 36, Goodhand and Hakimi 2014, p. 33). ¹⁰

Through this mobilisation of anti-Taliban militias, the Taliban were ousted from most parts of Kunduz, but an even stronger blow for the Taliban came when after the assassination of Engineer Mohammad Omar in October 2010, ¹¹ Abdul Rahman Sayedkhaili became the new provincial chief of police. With money provided by the interior minister Besmillah Khan, Sayedkhaili started to fund militias to fight the Taliban while he simultaneously bribed Taliban commanders to switch sides. The MoI sponsored efforts of the provincial chief of police were further advanced by the deployment of US Special Forces to Kunduz who were tasked with killing and capturing insurgents. By January 2011, Sayedkhaili declared Kunduz to be cleared of the Taliban (Goodhand and Hakimi 2014, p. 34). Up until then, the anti-Taliban militias had thus been funded through a complex mix of formal and informal channels of the Afghan government, including local councils, the provincial authorities, the NDS and the MoI.

Arbaki

The militias that were set up, or in some cases reactivated, are often referred to as ‘arbaki’ (Bruno 2008, Tariq 2008, Schmeidl and Karokhail 2009, Human Rights Watch 2011, Hakimi 2013, Goodhand and Hakimi 2014, International Crisis Group 2015, p. 4). In theory, arbaki are a tribal community police force that protects their community from outside threats, and implements the decision of the local Jirga (village council) (Jones and Muñoz 2010, p. 27).

In practice however, the behaviour of arbaki and the way they are perceived by local populations differ greatly among localities. An elder in the Ali Abad district of Kunduz explained that arbaki: ‘have no clear and defined activity. They are different in each area, since arbaki are the residents of that place’. ¹² Paradoxically, in some areas, arbaki are seen as predatory militias rather than a customary police force. While initially, US officials were rather hesitant of supporting groups with such ambiguous track records, as the security situation deteriorated the idea of supporting ‘local’, ‘indigenous’ and ‘tribal’ security actors increasingly inspired those involved in the development of local policing programmes (Hakimi 2013, p. 393, see also Gant 2009, Jones and Muñoz 2010, Rector 2012, Moyar 2014).

The ALP programme

Probably the most well-known US-sponsored militia programme in recent years has been the ‘Afghan Local Police’ (ALP). The programme originated in Kabul, where the Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command – Afghanistan (CFSOCC-A), led by Brigadier General Edward Reeder, was developing plans to deploy US and Afghan Special Forces to villages where they would train and support ‘village defense forces’ to resist the Taliban (Moyar 2014, pp. 9–15). General Stanley McChrystal, ¹³ who took command of ISAF in June 2009, was eager to back the initiative, while the US political leadership in Kabul feared that setting up militias could undermine efforts to build the Afghan National Security Forces, and thwart the limited achievements of the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programmes ¹⁴ (Goodhand and Hakimi 2014, pp. 11–12).

In August 2010 the programme was established nevertheless after President Karzai was persuaded by General David Petraeus to sign a presidential decree, authorising its establishment. Once the US-funded ALP programme got underway, its long-term strategy was formulated as providing ‘sustained security, permanent stability, expand governance and increase development in the areas where the ALP will be established’ (NATO/ISAF 2011, p. 7). A US official of NSOCC-A ¹⁵ later pointed out to me that the ALP programme seeks ‘to broaden the security reach of the Afghan government in a cost-effective manner by supporting local communities to defend themselves against insurgents. (…) [It] helps to prevent insurgents from controlling a broader swath of rural areas that lack ANP [Afghan National Police].’ ¹⁶

Between 2010 and 2015 the US Department of Defense (DoD) spent 469.7 million dollars to fund the ALP through the Afghan MoI. The US DoD estimated that it would cost approximately 121 million dollars annually to sustain the programme based on the authorised strength of 30,000 ALP personnel (SIGAR 2015a). After it was first piloted in other parts of the country, ALP units were formed in Kunduz province in the first half of 2011, leading to a force of 1,125 ALP officers by June 2012 (Münch 2013, p. 40, Goodhand and Hakimi 2014, p. 35). The training for ALP officers consists only of three weeks in which the recruits are educated in the basic handling of small firearms, the delivery of first aid and communication with US Special Forces. The programme envisioned that the US trainers would embed themselves in a village, develop knowledge of the power structure and political actors, vet recruits and then supervise the ALP units in action. While this worked out in some areas, in Kunduz the supervision of US Special Forces amounted to a visit once a week even though close monitoring was crucial, especially in the complex power structure of Kunduz (Felbab-Brown 2016, pp. 266–267).

The CIP programme

A lesser-known US-funded militia programme, the ‘Critical Infrastructure Police’ (CIP) established in 2011, ran parallel to the ALP for some time. ¹⁷ Apart from Kunduz, it operated in other northern provinces such as Balkh, Jowzjan and Faryab, and possibly also in Sar-i-Pul (Felbab-Brown 2016, p. 269). While the word ‘police’ may suggest otherwise, the CIP programme essentially consisted of militias that quickly developed a reputation for predatory behaviour towards local populations (Ibid). ¹⁸ These police numbered in the low thousands, were officially unpaid, although the commanders and militiamen did receive monthly payments of $200 and $150, respectively from an American discretionary fund called the ‘Commander’s Emergency Response Program’ (CERP) (Rosenberg and Rubin 2011, Sites 2013, Goodhand and Hakimi 2014, p. 34, Felbab-Brown 2016, p. 269). ¹⁹

The purpose of the CERP fund was to enable US military commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq to support a broad range of small humanitarian relief and reconstruction projects. The eligible categories included ‘protective measures to enhance the durability and survivability of a critical infrastructure site (oil pipelines, electric lines, etc.)’, which is probably how the CIP programme was justified (SIGAR 2015b). It was run by US Special Forces under ISAF’s Regional Command-North with the aim of using local forces as a ‘temporary solution’ to protect strategically important locations such as bridges and roads (Stahnke 2012). It remains vague however how much money was spent on the CIP programme. In an audit of CERP spending in Afghanistan from 2004 until 2014 only 890 million dollars of the total of 2.2 billion dollars could be accounted for. It is unclear what the other 1.3 billion dollars of CERP funding has been spent on, but the US DoD did indicate that CERP funds have also been used as a tool for counterinsurgency efforts (SIGAR 2015b, p. 18).

After a short training course and an oath sworn to the Afghan constitution the CIP members were recorded biometrically, and given a yellow armband with a CIP logo (Stahnke 2012). Part of the CIP militiamen used to be members of the Taliban, which according to some gave them an advantage in identifying Taliban infiltrators in their communities while others questioned their commitment to the CIP programme precisely because of their past membership in the Taliban (Lawrence 2012). The US started to arm CIP forces in northern Afghanistan in the spring of 2011, ‘probably as a counterweight to the arbaki programme of the NDS (…)’, which in Kunduz, was managed by Daud and his brother-in-law Mir Alam (Münch 2013, p. 43). In Kunduz the CIP forces numbered a little over 500 spread across three districts.

The Afghan State Influence on Militia Governance

The Afghan national government was in a much weaker position than the US armed forces, but still managed to influence the ALP and CIP programmes that intended to create militia governance. President Karzai himself initially opposed the idea of setting up the ALP, ‘warning that such groups could become militias in a country already plagued by warlordism’ (Lawrence 2010; Partlow and De Young, 2010). Only after extensive discussions with General David Petraeus, who took command of ISAF in July 2010, did Karzai authorise the programme ²⁰ (Belcher 2013, p. 73). The result of the discussions was a compromise solution, allowing the US to legitimise and legalise its existing militia programmes, while the Afghan government, at least in theory, managed to extend its control over those programmes by bringing the ALP under the Afghan Ministry of Interior (Goodhand and Hakimi 2014, p. 13).

However, at the same time that efforts to establish ALP units were well under way with approval of the Afghan government, the CIP programme was implemented by ISAF without Karzai’s consent. When Karzai found out about the CIP programme – at least three months after it had started – he issued a decree in December 2011 to disband it, fearing that it would impede his aim of centralising the means of patronage (Münch 2013, p. 43, Goodhand and Hakimi 2014, pp. 34–35, Felbab-Brown 2016, p. 269). The US DoD reported that by November 2012 all CIP forces throughout Afghanistan had been demobilised or incorporated in the ALP (DoD 2013, p. 101).

Militia Governance in Kunduz

Although the CIP programme was eventually disbanded by Karzai, for some time in 2011 and 2012 the two distinct US-funded militia programmes ran in Kunduz at the same time. The situation regarding militia programmes was further complicated when the earlier mentioned Afghan MoI funding stopped after the provincial police chief Sayedkhaili was killed by the Taliban in March 2011 (Münch 2013, p. 41). His successor was unable to continue payment of the arbaki militias that Sayedkhaili had been funding. As a result, these militias that previously received MoI-funding started to extort local populations. While the Afghan government tried to disarm some of them, the Germans at the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) incorporated a part of these militias in Kunduz in the by then still running US-funded CIP programme (Goodhand and Hakimi 2014, p. 34). Some militias thus initially received funds from the Afghan MoI through police chief Sayedkhaili, but when he was killed and the money stopped flowing from Kabul, they were ‘transferred’ to the American CIP programme. Altogether, inserting and abruptly withdrawing various external resources affected militia governance in Kunduz in complex ways, as the cases of militia commander Nabi Gechi and local power broker Mir Alam demonstrate.

Nabi Gechi

One of the militias that received US support through the CIP programme contained the approximately 225 militiamen of commander Nabi Gechi in the Qala-e-Zal district of Kunduz province (Raghavan 2015). Prior to receiving US money, weapons and training, Nabi Gechi’s militia was commended in a leaked US Embassy cable for being ‘the most organised and disciplined of the various militia groups operating in Kunduz province.’ ²¹ It assessed that Gechi’s forces ‘proved themselves in fighting insurgents’, and that ‘the local population expressed strong appreciation for the improvement in security Nabi’s forces have brought.’ ²² The cable concluded that:

(…) the inclusion of the community into the process, their benign behavior toward the population (not collecting taxes), and the (comparatively) clear chain of command have all helped to make the force in Qala-e-Zal a success. ²³

US officials saw Nabi Gechi’s way of governing in Qala-e-Zal as aligned with US strategic interests of fighting the Taliban and protecting the local population. His good reputation helped him to secure US support when the CIP programme was implemented in Kunduz. In October 2012, when the programme had ended, the US military stated it had the ‘greatest respect and appreciation’ for Gechi’s ‘leadership’ (quoted in Raghavan 2015).

In May 2013, almost a year after the CIP programme had ended, Nabi Gechi managed to retain his influence in the district. During that time, several respondents expressed themselves content with Nabi Gechi’s militia, which they regarded as a force protecting them against the Taliban. A shop keeper, for example, expressed his happiness with the security situation, because the help came from one of his own people and not from foreigners or the government. He said: ‘The security situation is very good. When I lock my shop I sleep well without any problem (…) The reason of the good security is commander Nabi (…) When he came to our village the security got better.’ ²⁴ He explained that Nabi Gechi: ‘has power because he has a good relationship with the people and the community supports him.’ ²⁵ Another person claimed that Gechi is involved in resolving disputes, and that unlike many government officials ‘Nabi is not a corrupted person’ (quoted in Terpstra 2013, p. 34).

Respondents mainly referred to the Taliban as the most important security threat in their daily lives. One community member said: ‘the people in our village had a very hard life when there were Taliban (…) in our area. Thus, our people, and our leader Nabi, decided to fight against them.’ ²⁶ A resident of Kunduz City reiterated Nabi Gechi’s remarkable capabilities during an interview in 2016. He stated: ‘Nabi Gechi is an exceptional commander. He is honestly fighting against the Taliban. The people are very happy. The area under his control are all Turkmen, and all his arbaki are Turkmen, so there is support of the people.’ ²⁷

Gechi himself said: ‘(…) this power has been given to me by my people (…). Whatever they say I will do. I will even commit suicide for my people if they ask.’ ²⁸ A militia member explained that the responsibilities of his militia are: ‘to provide security in the village, and when the Taliban come to the village we secure the area until the Afghan Local Police or Afghan National Police get to the location.’ ²⁹ Some Taliban members even switched sides to Gechi’s militia, after it took control of Qala-e-Zal (Sites 2013). ³⁰ All of Gechi’s militiamen interviewed in 2013 claimed they had previously received support from US forces in the form of money and weapons to assist them in the fight against the Taliban. In fighting the insurgency, Gechi cooperated with the Afghan National Police (ANP). An ANP officer working in the district confirmed that: ‘(…) some operations happened through cooperation of ANP and arbakis against Talibs in this district. The area was cleared from them.’ ³¹

After US support ended, Gechi’s militiamen were able to sustain their control of the district mainly through illegal taxation. From then on, Gechi started to take matters into his own hands by taxing local communities for food, fuel and money to support his own fight against the Taliban (Münch 2013, p. 43, Baczko and Dorronsoro 2016, p. 5). ³² He even taxed weddings to support his militia (Felbab-Brown 2016, p. 269). Stopping the CIP programme thus made Gechi use his acquired power to let the people instead of the Americans pay for his governance. As a journalist states, Gechi ‘is not just the general. He is the judge, the police chief and the tax collector’ (Raghavan 2015). This behaviour directly contradicted the prior US assessment that claimed Gechi was ‘not collecting taxes’. People unwilling to pay the taxes allegedly were tortured by Gechi’s men to force them to pay (Raghavan 2015). One respondent that lived in Kunduz City at the time mentioned that Gechi also set up ‘his own prison’. ³³ However, ‘the ethnic homogeneity and economic marginality of the district’ spared Gechi from clashing with other commanders, as happened in other parts of the province (Baczko and Dorronsoro 2016, p. 5). Conjointly, these factors seem to have contributed to the consolidation of Gechi’s militia governance of Qala-e-Zal.

The consequences of external support through the CIP programme for Gechi’s militia are ambiguous. For some respondents, Gechi was a hero-like figure who protected them against the Taliban, in line with the envisioned goals of US support. At the same time however, Gechi has taxed local communities in return for security and justice services, outside the formal control of the Kabul government, but with informal connections to provincial police and government officials. Using his power to collect taxes and resolve disputes when the CIP programme ended, he simultaneously weakened the reach of the Afghan government, and redirected the implementation of US political intervention, from the objectives that the US forces had envisioned. The external support to his militia facilitated securing territorial control of the district, which in turn made a rudimentary form of governance possible (tax collection, security provision, dispute resolution) (see Kasfir 2015, p. 28). Abusing those who refused to pay taxes was unlikely to have won their hearts and minds. Gechi’s case also shows that while the US army undeniably has the power and resources to subject militias to projects of security governance, at the local level, militias can redirect the influence of powerful foreign actors, and find possibilities to manipulate external support to serve their own agendas.

Mir Alam

The implications of the US-funded ALP programme on militia governance in Kunduz are even more complex. As mentioned, from September 2011 onwards, the ALP programme ran in several districts in the province with the aim of setting up ‘local self-defence forces’ to protect communities against the Taliban. Mir Alam’s militias had gained strength through the support of the NDS in the two years prior to the establishment of the ALP programme in Kunduz, but were not officially integrated into the ALP forces. However, most, if not all, ALP commanders were either linked to Mir Alam or rival militia commander Pakhsaparan (Hewad 2012, Goodhand and Hakimi 2014, p. 35, Human Rights Watch 2015, p. 50). ³⁴ Mir Alam’s influence was especially far-reaching through his network of Jamiat-affiliated Tajik and Uzbek commanders. As one respondent explained: ‘Every local police commander in Kunduz belongs to Mir Alam. They are all under his control. When Mir Alam says something they accept it. (…) He is the secret governor of the province.’ ³⁵ Thus, while Mir Alam himself was not directly supported by the ALP programme, through his position as most important local power broker he did manage to acquire influence over the ALP units and the resources the programme brought to the province.

The influence of the ALP programme on Mir Alam has been significant for various reasons, not least because of his history of assaulting, harassing and exploiting local populations. A cable of the US Embassy in Kabul from 2006 for example stated that when Mir Alam was the chief of police in the neighbouring Baghlan province (2005–2007), he acted as a mujahedeen commander, rather than a professional police officer, abusing his position of authority ‘to engage in a broad range of criminal activity, including extortion, bribery, and drug trafficking’. ³⁶ Mir Alam’s control over ALP commanders and the money and weapons that were brought to Kunduz as part of the programme enabled him to continue his predatory behaviour, and strengthened his position as power broker.

ALP units, on which Mir Alam exerted influence, engaged in especially predatory behaviour in zones of contested territorial control. Many respondents found it difficult to distinguish between the arbaki militias that were paid by the NDS and the US-funded ALP forces. Often the two names were used interchangeably. A civil society member in an area with a relatively strong Taliban presence in the Ali Abad district stated that ‘arbaki are responsible for every violence and illegal activity. They are not useful for us. They are bullying, harassing and they commit armed robberies (…)’ ³⁷ In another contested area of the Ali Abad district a respondent said: ‘people are afraid of them (…) Arbaki will do harm, so people are looking to the government.’ ³⁸ A civil society member from this area stated: ‘arbaki are rebellious people and cause more problems in this area. They are supported by powerful people and the government cannot do anything in this part.’ ³⁹ Apart from physical violence towards civilians, many respondents said ALP units were also involved in bachabazi, which literally means ‘boy play’. It involves wealthy or powerful commanders keeping boys to be dressed up as girls, and ordered to dance, which may often entail sexual abuse (Human Rights Watch 2011, p. 41). This practice was regularly mentioned by respondents, and explicitly condemned as bad behaviour of militias.

Furthermore, militias loyal to Mir Alam have been implicated in a long list of violent incidents towards local populations, including killings, cases of rape and extortion. As noted by Kunduz expert Lola Cecchinel (2014, n.p.) ‘It is hard to say who the local people fear more (…): their ‘defenders’ – ALP and other militias – or the Taleban themselves.’ For example, ALP commander Qadirak, an ethnic Aymaq loyal to Mir Alam, was infamous for his predatory behaviour towards Pashtuns across Kunduz province. In September 2012 he was involved in the ‘Konam killings’, where in the pre-dominantly Pashtun village Konam-e-Kalan 12 villagers were killed by his militiamen and others loyal to Mir Alam (Human Rights Watch 2015, pp. 51–58). Another infamous case is the former Taliban commander Ishaq Nazami who switched sides to the ALP, and was then – after the intervention of Karzai – put on trial with his militia and convicted for the rape of Lal Bibi, an ethnic Kuchi (Pashtun nomad) (Goodhand and Hakimi 2014, p. 36).

Similar to the short-lived CIP programme, the US support to ALP forces initially helped to marginalise the Taliban, and expand the territorial control of militias in Kunduz, as the programme intended. Yet, instead of providing security to all civilians, the ALP units and other militias loyal to Mir Alam became a prime source of insecurity. While Nabi Gechi managed to maintain some form of popular support from his Turkmen community after the external support had ended, the ALP units loyal to Mir Alam increasingly lacked popular support because of their predatory behaviour.

Pashtun Marginalisation from Militia Governance

An important feature of militia governance in Kunduz that violated ALP objectives has been the marginalisation of Pashtuns. Ethnic Pashtuns have been targeted disproportionately by predatory behaviour of the Tajik, Uzbek and Turkmen dominated militias. A Pashtun respondent told me that ‘with the selection of men for the arbakis, they only called the non-Pashtuns tribes’ and that ‘Pashtun people have no leaders like Mir Alam and Nabi Gechi’. ⁴⁰ Another Pashtun respondent said that Mir Alam’s ALP commanders ‘were all thieves’ that were solely focused on ‘personal benefit for themselves.’ ⁴¹ He furthermore explained that because most government positions were going to Tajiks, Uzbeks and Turkmen, the Pashtuns – who make up the largest part of the population – ‘do not feel represented. Their voices are not heard.’ ⁴² Protocols were in place to safeguard against ethnic imbalances in the ALP recruitment process, but in the Dashti Archi district for example, they were circumvented by US Special Forces because they were unable to find any Pashtun volunteers to join the programme. Pashtun elders were allegedly unwilling to send their sons to fight for a local government they considered to be dominated by Uzbeks (International Crisis Group 2015, p. 16).

To illustrate the abusive behaviour of ALP forces towards Pashtuns, a Pashtun respondent from Kunduz City reported his outrage at ALP forces in the Chardara district:

People who join the local police are not good people. The common people are fed up with them. (…) One of my relatives is a tailor in the city. He has a shop in Kunduz City, but he lives in a rural area. Two years ago in a rural part of Chardara he went out of his home and passed a local police post. The local police had a dog. When my relative crossed the road, there was an accident with their dog, [and] because of that the local police fired mortars at my relative. Another relative of mine that was there lost his leg because of this. The people will never accept the local police. ⁴³

The risk of marginalising Pashtuns through militias loyal to Mir Alam was no surprise to the Americans. Already in January 2010, US officials reported in a leaked US Embassy cable that:

Unlike in Qala-e-Zal, where the population is overwhelmingly Turkmen, Khanabad district, like the province as a whole, comprises a plurality of Pashtuns as well as smaller numbers of Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks. As the militias loyal to Mir Alam are mostly Tajiks, there exists a real risk that conflict between the population and militias or among the militias themselves will take on an ethnic dimension, in which the militias are perceived by Pashtuns as not anti-Taliban but anti-Pashtun. ⁴⁴

Moreover, another leaked Embassy cable from two months earlier warned that the ‘ethnically divisive’ militia of Mir Alam ‘exemplifies a quick fix with dangerous implications: tactical gains at strategic costs’. ⁴⁵ In the years following the implementation of the CIP and the ALP programmes, the strategic costs of the ‘ethnically divisive’ militias were becoming increasingly visible.

In late 2013, German and American forces were gradually drawing down from Kunduz. Meanwhile, a resurging Taliban increasingly challenged the Afghan National Security Forces and the militias the US was supporting. During 2014 and 2015, the Taliban launched several offensives, and by late September 2015, it managed to take control of Kunduz City. For the first time since the removal of the Taliban regime in 2001, the Taliban managed to temporarily takeover one of the major cities of Afghanistan (Cooke and Urwin 2015). The multiple reasons for the Taliban’s resurgence are explained in detail elsewhere (Cooke and Urwin 2015, Fisher and Mercado 2016, Terpstra 2017). For the purpose of this article it is important to point out that the Pashtun marginalisation from militia governance is likely to have impeded broad-based support against the Taliban surge in 2015. A Kabul-based analyst explained that the bad behaviour of ALP forces has driven Pashtuns ‘into the hands of the Taliban’ and contributed to its resurgence. ⁴⁶ A Pashtun respondent from Kunduz City said:

For fifteen years, all the provincial government directorates belonged to non-Pashtuns. Now, [after the fall of Kunduz City] many Pashtuns are happy with the Taliban, because they pressure the government. The Taliban pressure the government to work for the Pashtuns now. ⁴⁷

Arguably, many Pashtuns in Kunduz are better off with the Taliban than the militias (Cooke and Urwin 2015, International Crisis Group 2015).

In short, Northern Alliance factions that mainly consisted of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Turkmen had managed to maintain their power when US-funded militia programmes came to Kunduz (Goodhand and Hakimi 2014, p. 37). The US programmes were co-opted, manipulated and redirected by commanders such as Nabi Gechi (who had received direct US support), and Mir Alam (who as a local power broker managed to exert control over ALP units that had obtained US resources). Because the mostly non-Pashtun arbaki militias and ALP forces were preying upon Pashtuns, many Pashtuns did not feel represented by the militias. This contributed to the Taliban’s resurgence in 2015. Paradoxically, the militias indirectly fuelled rather than countered the insurgency, directly undermining US strategic interests.

Conclusion

From the start of the 2001 US-led intervention in Afghanistan, the US military repeatedly tried to use Afghan militias to advance US political-military interests. The US military applied a counterinsurgency doctrine that relied on local forces to gain popular support and fight the Taliban. They chose existing militias as their instrument. The Americans had their own ideas about how militias should govern. While they exercised influence on militia governance by supplying resources, it often had opposite effect from what they expected. In addition, US intervention complicated, but did not eliminate Afghan governmental influence on the militias. My argument is that both external intervention and state interests influence militia governance during civil war. Sometimes this influence is positive in the sense that the militia conform to objectives and expectations of their funders. But in other instances the influence is negative in that militia leaders pursue goals that undercut their funders’ intentions and undermine the larger strategic objectives of both external intervenors and the government.

The case of Kunduz demonstrates that while the US army has the power and the resources to subject militias to its choice of projects of security governance, militias can redirect the influence of US political interventions by manipulating external support at the local level. In turn, this affects the relations and interactions between militias, rebels, civilians and the state. The different layers of security governance in Kunduz thus constitute a complex interplay between US attempts to modify the actions of militias to achieve certain goals, and Afghan militias that may or may not go along with these goals. Within the complicated power structure of formal and informal security actors in Kunduz, I have particularly analysed how the militia of Nabi Gechi, and militias loyal to local power broker Mir Alam, have appropriated external US support.

The mobilisation of anti-Taliban militias in 2009 started as a mostly local initiative in response to the rise in Taliban activity in the province. During the recruitment process Pashtuns were largely excluded from the Tajik, Uzbek and Turkmen dominated anti-Taliban militias. When later, US-funded militia programmes came to Kunduz, the already existing militia commanders managed to maintain their power, and largely co-opted external support. As such, US-funded programmes have mainly amplified and reinforced the existing power structure in the province. In the case of Nabi Gechi, the CIP programme has helped to marginalise the Taliban and to increase territorial control, but when external funds were withdrawn, it also indirectly facilitated illegal taxation. Based on the evidence available, the most convincing explanation why supporting Gechi’s militia has worked out relatively well compared to other commanders in the province is that his militia enjoys some degree of popular support from the Turkmen community he claims to protect. Militias loyal to Mir Alam, including US-trained ALP units, often lacked this popular support and have instead assaulted local populations, especially Pashtuns. The marginalisation of Pashtuns in turn fuelled the insurgency and eventually contributed to a resurgence of the Taliban in 2015.

Following this analysis of the implementation and aftermath of the CIP and ALP programmes, I have demonstrated how the external support to militias in Kunduz has undermined US strategic interests. The intended goals of the programmes – fighting the Taliban and protecting civilians – were only partly attained, and came with the price of many unintended consequences. In essence, the cases show that when the ultimate goals of militias and their external supporter are incongruent, external support can be appropriated in ways that directly or indirectly contradicts the intended outcomes and strategic interests of the actor providing the support.

Notes on Contributor

Toon Dirkx is a PhD candidate at the University of Basel and a PhD fellow at the swisspeace Statehood programme. His main research interests include the relationships between powerful military actors and militias, the governance of armed groups in civil wars, and the interconnections between violence, interventionism and state formation processes. After obtaining his MA degree in International Relations (Cum Laude), he worked on several research projects in Afghanistan that were funded by, amongst others, the EU’s Horizon 2020 funding scheme and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Nelson Kasfir at Dartmouth College, and Georg Frerks, Mario Fumerton, Niels Terpstra, and Nora Stel at the Centre for Conflict Studies, Utrecht University, for their profound theoretical and methodological advice, interesting discussions, and valuable support. I would also like to thank Katja Starc, who did a great job at managing the research team during the fieldwork in 2013. Within the research team Tamim and Sami were of tremendous help. I am grateful for the constructive feedback that was provided by two anonymous reviewers as well as the editors of Civil Wars. Finally, I am indebted to all respondents who enabled me to collect data for this article by sharing their thoughts and experiences.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See: US Army/Marine Corps 2006. The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 3–24).

2. For examples, see how the US Generals David Petraeus, John Allen, and Joseph Dunford spoke about the Afghan Local Police in their addresses to the House Armed Services Committee. See: C-SPAN 2011. "Operations in Afghanistan"; C-SPAN 2012. "Military Operations in Afghanistan"; C-SPAN 2013. "Troop Withdrawal from Afghanistan".

3. These mujahedeen factions included Jamiat-e Islami, Jombesh-e Melli, Hezb-e Islami and Ittehad-e Islami.

4. See: US Embassy Kabul, 2009a. "Unconventional Security Forces -- What's Out There?" Cable No. 09KABUL3661_a.

5. For an elaborate discussion of these networks from 1992 to 2001 see Wörmer (2012).

6. The National Directorate of Security (NDS) is Afghanistan’s State intelligence service. It has mainly been funded by the US government since its establishment in 2002.

7. Jamiat is short for Jamiat-e-Islami Afghanistan (Islamic Society of Afghanistan). It is an ethnic Tajik dominated movement, and was one of the main parties fighting against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s (Human Rights Watch 2015, iii).

8. See: US Embassy Kabul 2010. "Militias in Kunduz; A Tale of Two Districts" Cable No. 10KABUL12_a.

9. Ittihad is short for ‘Ittihad-e-Islami Bara-yi Azadi Afghanistan’ (the Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan), a predominantly Pashtun military and political group that was founded by Abdul Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf, which fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s (Human Rights Watch 2015, p. iii).

10. In a 2010 US Embassy cable Mir Alam is described as ‘the most powerful power broker in the province.’ See: US Embassy Kabul 2010. "Militias in Kunduz; A Tale of Two Districts" Cable No. 10KABUL12_a.

11. See: Rubin, A. J., 2010. Afghan Governor Is Killed in Blast at Mosque. Also see: BBC 2010. Head of Afghanistan's Kunduz province killed in bombing.

12. Structured interview with an elder in the Ali Abad district of Kunduz province, 3 June 2013.

13. General McChrystal was an adherent of a new counterinsurgency doctrine that emphasised the importance of understanding Islamist insurgencies as networked organisations, rather than hierarchical structures. During his years in Iraq and Afghanistan it became clear to him that ‘it takes a network to defeat a network’ (2011), thus requiring the US military to create opposing networks to insurgencies in Afghanistan and beyond (Knoke 2013, p. 6).

14. See for example: US Embassy Kabul, 2009b. ‘Kunduz Authorities Turn to Militias as Security Deteriorates’ Cable No. 09KABUL3366.

15. NSOCC-A stands for ‘NATO Special Operations Component Command – Afghanistan’.

16. Email correspondence with an official of NSOCC-A on 30 May 2016.

17. The programme is also referred to as ‘Critical Infrastructure Program’ and ‘Critical Infrastructure Protection’.

18. See also Matta (2011).

19. See also a leaked email by Melanne Verveer to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in which a message is forwarded of Brian Nichols of the State Department that asserts that CIP forces in Kunduz were paid with CERP funding. See: Verveer (2012).

20. Interior ministry Decree P-3196, 16 August 2010. See page 83 of US Department of Defense (DOD) 2012. Special Plans and Operations: Assessment of U.S. Government and Coalition Efforts to Develop the Afghan Local Police. Alexandria, VA: US Department of Defense, Inspector General.

21. See: US Embassy Kabul 2010. "Militias in Kunduz; A Tale of Two Districts" Cable No. 10KABUL12_a. [Online] Available at: https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/10KABUL12_a.html [Accessed 5 June 2016].

22. Ibid.

23. See: US Embassy Kabul 2010. "Militias in Kunduz; A Tale of Two Districts" Cable No. 10KABUL12_a.

24. Structured interview with a shop keeper in the Qala-e-Zal district of Kunduz province, 5 June 2013.

25. Structured interview with a shop keeper in the Qala-e-Zal district of Kunduz province, 5 June 2013.

26. Structured interview with a community member in the Qala-e-Zal district of Kunduz province, 5 June 2013.

27. In-depth interview with a resident of Kunduz City in Kabul, 4 April 2016.

28. Structured interview with Nabi Gechi in the Qala-e-Zal district of Kunduz province, 5 June 2013.

29. Structured interview with an arbaki member in the Qala-e-Zal district of Kunduz province, 1 June 2013.

30. A leaked US Embassy cable notes in this vein that ‘according to the Governor and NDS, Gechi’s forces (…) convinced a Taliban commander to join the government side.’ See: US Embassy Kabul, 2009b. ‘Kunduz Authorities Turn to Militias as Security Deteriorates’ Cable No. 09KABUL3366.

31. Structured interview with an ANP officer in the Qala-e-Zal district of Kunduz province, 6 June 2013.

32. Structured interview with Nabi Gechi in the Qala-e-Zal district of Kunduz province, 5 June 2013. See also the journalistic account of Sites (2013), in which he describes his meeting with Nabi Gechi in Qala-e-Zal in June 2013. According to Baczko and Dorronsoro (2016, p. 5) Nabi Gechi’s militia was also funded by the German army.

33. In-depth interview with a former resident of Kunduz City in The Hague, 22 June 2017.

34. While there was hardly any Taliban activity in 2013 in the Khanabad district – the home ground of both Mir Alam and Pakhsaparan – clashes did occur between the militias of the two power brokers (Münch 2013, p. 37, Baczko and Dorronsoro 2016, p. 6).

35. In-depth interview with a resident of Kunduz City in Kabul, 3 April 2016.

36. See: US Embassy Kabul 2006. "PRT/Kunduz: New Police Chiefs Raise Hopes for Fundamental Improvements in Norteast" Cable No. 06KABUL2862_a.

37. Structured interview with a civil society member in the Ali Abad district of Kunduz province, 1 June 2013.

38. Structured interview with a housewife in the Ali Abad district of Kunduz province, 8 June 2013.

39. Structured interview with a civil society member in the Ali Abad district of Kunduz province, 1 June 2013.

40. In-depth interview with a resident of Kunduz City in Kabul, 3 April 2016.

41. In-depth interview with a resident of Kunduz City in Kabul, 4 April 2016.

42. In-depth interview with a resident of Kunduz City in Kabul, 4 April 2016.

43. In-depth interview with a resident of Kunduz City in Kabul, 3 April 2016.

44. See: US Embassy Kabul 2010. "Militias in Kunduz; A Tale of Two Districts" Cable No. 10KABUL12_a.

45. See: US Embassy Kabul, 2009a. "Unconventional Security Forces -- What's Out There?" Cable No. 09KABUL3661_a.

46. In-depth interview with a German analyst in Kabul, 31 March 2016.

47. In-depth interview with a resident of Kunduz City in Kabul, 3 April 2016.