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(Fair warning: this post is going to get very long and very heated very fast.) In October, Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan expressed skepticism over the prospect of signing up tribal militias, Anbar Province-style, to fight the Taliban. Over the last several days, it’s become increasingly clear that a Sons-of-Afghanistan style approach — the recruitment of tribal auxiliaries — is nevertheless in the cards, and evidently with the approval of McKiernan and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, his reported criticisms of the idea notwithstanding.
Today Dexter Filkins of the New York Times explores the emerging Sons of Afghanistan plan and injects a healthy dose of skepticism. Apparently a pilot tribal-militia program is on track to start in Wardak in 2009. Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, has a very unhappy history of militias doing their own thing; and also unlike Iraq, where the Anbar Province revolt was a bottom-up response to the perfidies of Al Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate, this program is a top-down directive, through the U.S. military, to get tribal leaders to raise their own militias. Add to that the fact that the plan is a complete reversal of a U.S. and U.N. joint effort in the early days of the war to disarm Afghan militiamen. And the fact that the Afghan parliament voted this plan down already a few months ago.
“There will be fighting between Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns,” said Salih Mohammad Registani, a member of the Afghan Parliament and an ethnic Tajik. Mr. Registani raised the specter of the Arbaki, a Pashtun-dominated militia turned loose on other Afghans early in the 20th century.
“A civil war will start very soon,” he said.
Is that a proposition we really ought to be testing? One that could also inflame sectarianism in Afghanistan, which, at least on the basis of my admittedly short visit, I didn’t see in evidence?
What I did see was an overwhelming desire for security among the population. Lots of people said something to me that boiled down to, “When the Taliban were in power, the roads were safe, food was cheap and gas is cheap. Now the Americans are here and none of that is true.” The major factor that made the tribal revolt in Anbar work was that the population, including the extremists, understood that Al Qaeda offered them a bleaker future than even the occupation. Nothing like that exists in Afghanistan — or, at least, there is an alarming lack of evidence for that crucial proposition.
People need to take a very deep breath. To judge by the available evidence, the Afghan population wants security. It does not want more militias. The Afghan Senate has actually rejected this proposal explicitly. Is there any actual appetite among Afghans for a Sons-of-Afghanistan program? Or is this a case of hubristic Americans coming into Afghanistan and imposing a template from Iraq upon an overwhelmingly different country and overwhelmingly different set of conditions? You can tell what I suspect from the way I framed the question.
One more thing. I get a lot wrong. I believed with absolute certainty that the surge in 2007 had no chance of tamping down violence in Iraq. And I mean absolute certainty — not just that it wouldn’t work but that it couldn’t work. And clearly that was completely wrong. (It was still strategically the wrong thing to do, but that’s a separate argument.) If the tribal-militias proposal in Afghanistan is in fact a set course, I would like to be wrong about that as well.
But notice what we’re doing here by discussing the question in this way. We’re not talking about Afghanistan-qua-Afghanistan at all. Instead we’re talking about a series of meta-propositions and who was right and who was wrong about them, not first-order concerns about the wisdom, feasability, and drawbacks of the idea itself. And that is the sort of debate that in Washington substitutes for considering first-order problems, and it gets people needlessly killed. We cannot think in these terms anymore, because we know exactly where it leads. Merry Christmas.
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Ah, so the “surge” worked. Here I thought the decreased violence had something to do with the ceasefire the Iranians brokered between al-Sadr and the Iraqi government, or the (pre-surge) decision of Sunni tribesmen in al-Anbar province to turn against al-Qaeda, or the successful ethnic cleansing of Sunnis in Baghdad.
Of course, Iraq is still one of the top five humanitarian disasters in the world, with violence still greater than that experienced during the Lebanese civil war, so talk of “tamping down violence” there shouldn’t be discussed in a vacuum.
Yes, and I’ve written about all of that, way before the rest of the pack. The surge — better understood as the application of a population-protection strategy with additional US troops — contributed. Reality-based community, remember?
I think I get the Pashtun v. others as a thread of reality. I’ve often wondered whether Afghanistan really is a nation, or whether the tribes of south and far eastern Afghan plus the tribes in Pakistan along the border are really a separate entity. Apparently the mountainous area between the two is no barrier to them and historically they are the backbone of complete rejection of outside forces. Damn those Brit map makers, again.
Every ethnic group seems to like the idea of “Afghanistan” as an entity, as long as they get to dominate and kill all of the others.
I don’t see how Karzai survives as leader, and if he does, it will consist of the government buildings in Kabul and little else.
I’m afraid Obama (and all of us) are going to get into a tar pit that is even worse than what the Russians had before the Taliban. At least the Russians had a clear path out via the north. We have no clear path to anywhere. Even resupply of our forces may become a critical item over the next year, since the tribes are trying to deny us access via Pakistan and seem to be succeeding.
Obama’s campaign emphasis on getting out of Iraq and beefing up Afghanistan was effective in blunting possible attacks that he was just a weak liberal, but the campaign is over now and I don’t see how we succeed in his plan. I expect NATO to begin to push for non-US troop withdrawals in ‘09 since the writing is on the wall that outsiders are not going to be tolerated much longer.
Somebody needs to think of how we escape Afghanistan with our dignity mostly intact before we are forced into the Russian/British humiliations in the past.
I think you were a little hard on yourself. The increase in troops was a factor in reducing certain types of violence but it was intended to allow the US to win (by some still to be announced standard) and leave. It did not do that. The global recession is limiting Iran’s influence. Does the surge take credit for that too?
Try this one. This plan is not like Iraq. Go over the Filkins article again. Look at the small number of men being recruited. Note that they’re going to get brief training and then only small arms. And communications gear.
This aint a militia. It’s a neighborhood watch program.
You noted from over there that the police were few and totally corrupt. The population caught in a two-way squeeze.
The bad men come, who you gonna call?
911 comes to the land of 9/11
Here’s the problem with this whole deal: Unlike Iraq, which had a strong central leadership (to say the least) under Saddam, Afghanistan after the Russian war evolved into a country made up of the fiefdoms of former Mujahideen warlords. Rather than deal with that issue head-on and push those warlords to give up real power, the US and the Karzai government simply put governors in power locally and gave the most powerful warlords positions in government. The warlords, however, didn’t have to give up any of the money they’d swiped from their citizens, though, so they remain de facto leaders in their regions.
If you doubt this, go to Herat and check out all the paintings of Ismail Khan on the sides of buildings, including the mosque on the hill below the Governor’s mansion. I once watched an American lieutenant colonel chat with a sheriff in that area about the rule of law and the need to embrace the new government while a row of pictures of Khan looked down from the wall of the sheriff’s office.
Trying to start local militias like they did in Iraq will only reinvigorate the warlords’ power. It’s a terrible idea.
Holy shit! Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazeris may fight the Pashtuns in A-stan. A civil war! Stop the presses.
Scratch that. These tribes have been fighting each other for centuries and the United States can do nothing more to stop it than a college police force can stamp out “binge drinking.”
Liberal Internationalists to the rescue.
You need to read some Bacevich.
“Neighborhood watch” program? This isn’t a suburban community we’re talking about. Beware the combination of euphemism and improper parallel.
First, there is a sense of nationalism in Afghanistan that goes beyond tribalism, mostly centered around fallen leaders, religion, and an abundance of people with ties to multiple factions. There is no concerted movement towards genocide in Afghanistan. Second, citing historical military failures in Afghanistan as proof that all military interventions in Afghanistan must fail is fallacious. Afghanistan has been successfully fought in the past(or else there would be no Durand Line); and moreover, when the Soviets failed they were attacking an emerging developing country with a growing infrastructure and high social density, but we are fighting something altogether different: an exhausted country that has experienced nationwide violence almost every year for the past thirty and a society hollowed out by desperation.
I was being a little flip. I will rephrase, but I wasn’t thinking suburban. I was thinking inner-city housing project where the population has been left undefended against predation.
But what I was struggling to say was that this program sounds more like an effort to help people
find a way out from being whipsawed by the Taliban and the corrupt, weak Afghani gov’t.
Build a communication net to help end the isolation imposed by the terrain. Get people to stand up, and if they call for help, have that help be rapidly provided by Americans.
Have the program based locally rather than nationally because there aren’t national leaders worthy of trust.
I realize I’m late to respond but, as a member of the “reality-based community,” I’d like to inject, you know, a little reality, into the debate over whether “the surge worked”:
I also trust the word of Juan Cole — an actual Middle East expert — over some hipster-blogger eager to become a respectable liberal foreign policy pundit by heaping praise on the U.S. military’s “population-protection strategy.”