Costs of war: No to tribal militias

US Ambassador to Afghanistan William Wood told a 30 December press conference in Kabul about plans for new tribal militias, dubbed the Community Guard program - a move he said was "meant to strengthen local communities and local tribes in their ability to protect what they consider to be their traditional homes."

Traditional local councils known as shuras will recruit volunteers to defend their villages against Taliban insurgents under the plan, Wood said, according to news agencies.

"Once the group has been identified, they will receive training and clothing and other support," he added. The militias would be given communications equipment to call in support from Afghan and US forces in the event of a Taliban attack.
Wood did not answer questions about who would arm the new militias, but emphasized that the US would not do so.

Most Afghan households own firearms and even relatively heavy weapons like rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launchers are quite common.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier last month that the program would be rolled out first in Wardak province, through which runs the main road between Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar. The road has recently been the focus of insurgent attacks that have threatened to make it impassable.

The Journal, citing US officials, said the militias would be paid by US forces through the local shuras. It also quoted Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as calling the US focus on building a strong central government in Afghanistan "overstated." He said the US would now focus more on "enabling” local communities and their leaders.

"How strong the central government will be in the future, I think, is yet to be determined," he told reporters.

Although Wood was careful to say that the plans had been proposed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, there is little doubt that in reality it is an extension of the US counter-insurgency strategy employed in Iraq; and promoted by military experts like Colonel John Nagl, who developed the US Army's counter-insurgency strategy alongside General David Petraeus, who currently commands US forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Buying off your enemies is  [...] a time-honored tactic in counter-insurgency with a proven track record of success," Nagl said last year.

"Over time, you try to incorporate those people into the government security organizations," he added. "I absolutely think that there are tribal organizations in Afghanistan who could be incorporated. … It would be a way to rapidly increase the size of [the Afghan National Police and National Army] with cohesive units."

But even in Iraq, the strategy of forming and paying Sunni tribal militias (called Awakening Councils) to maintain security has been criticized as storing up problems. And there is opposition to extending it to Afghanistan

"The tribal militia idea that has been around for some time now is controversial; we are not onboard with that," Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay said in a year-end interview with The Canadian Press. He said the proposal had been debated at a 19 November meeting of countries leading the fight in southern Afghanistan, and there was "no agreement around the table.

"Our preference is to continue with [a] more formal training process that leads to a more reliable, more professional [...] Afghan national security force," MacKay concluded.

And many of those who are more familiar with the reality on the ground in Afghanistan - though perhaps less acquainted with military theory - have grave doubts about the Community Guard program, warning it would risk the fragile gains of the state-building strategy that the international community has been pursuing there.

"At best, it would be a tactical gain, but also an immense strategic loss," said Ali Jalali, a former Afghan interior minister and now a visiting professor at the US National Defense University, noting that by fragmenting power and undermining the authority of the central government, the strategy in the long run could actually worsen the instability it sought to ameliorate.

He called this "effort to gain peace through manipulating tribal dynamics" a "colonial approach."

Levels of corruption and instability were already much too high in the volatile border regions of the country, said retired Marine Colonel Daniel Curfiss, also a professor at the National Defense University.

"My concern is, it would be throwing kindling on this [fire] [...] to pay people who are already unwilling to relinquish power," he said.

"There are precedents, and the precedents are not terribly hopeful," said former US ambassador to Afghanistan James Dobbins, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and author of a recent study of state-building efforts in the war-ravaged country.

In the period immediately after the ouster of the Taliban government at the end of 2001, Dobbins said, the US and its allies attempted to limit their military commitment by restricting peacekeeping troops to Kabul and using "tribal militias and warlords" to maintain security in the rest of the country.

"Over time it was found that that was not an adequate policy," said Dobbins, with dry understatement.

Jalali said continuing efforts by coalition nations to work directly with tribal and other local leaders had been "one of the problems when I was interior minister" from 2003 to 2005. "They gave them weapons, money and vehicles."

In 2006, he said, the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai tried itself to use tribally based militias - with unhappy results.

Most of the 12,000 members of the militias, formally titled the Afghan National Auxiliary Police, "either deserted with their arms and equipment or were more or less forced to join the insurgents," he said, adding that the force was scheduled to be finally phased out of existence by the end of the current year.

He also pointed out that years of war and insurgency in the tribal areas of Afghanistan had physically decimated the tribal leadership and eroded their influence. "Over the past 30 years, the influence of the traditional leaders has waned," he said, adding that it was warlords and extremists who had replaced them.

Jalali said a strategy of working through local militias was putting the cart before the horse. "The tribes will only stand up [against the extremists] if they see that the government had authority in their areas [...] that is not the case today."

The priority should be building the capacity of the central government, Jalali said. "Capacity-building is the central challenge in Afghanistan today."

Even those who support the proposal are wary about possible unanticipated side-effects.

Vikram Singh, of the think tank Center for a New American Security, was briefed on the plan last year.

"No one is thinking at the strategic level [...] if this is the right answer," he said, adding there was "no analysis by the coalition of how this would play out.

"There's a lot of downside," he concluded.

Indeed. Several of Singh's colleagues at the Center for a New American Security are advising the transition team of President-elect Barack Obama. He should call them and get the idea stymied.