Security strategy

Winning a war is one thing thing; establishing lasting peace is another - that's an age-old lesson the alliance of Western military powers in Afghanistan are learning the hard way.

Eight years on from the US-led military defeat of the Taliban government, military strategists are calling for greater cooperation with local Afghan militia in an attempt to stamp out insurgency and establish law and order in a country that is notoriously difficult to control.

"It's exactly what the Americans did in Iraq…that is what we need to do here," the commander of British Forces in Helmand, Brigadier James Cowan, told The Times newspaper in London in a recent interview. "Nobody wants foreign soldiers here. What they want is to be living in peace with their own people protecting them."

Turning security over to the groups drawn from people to be protected is an idea with a lot of advantages, including the prospect it opens up for Western powers to be able to withdraw their own troops.

The only problem, say experts, is that it probably won't work.

Contradictory signals

Afghanistan is an extremely diverse country, in terms of ethnicities, languages and loyalties. It also has a relatively short and tenuous history as a nation-state. So pursuing a local strategy could totally cripple the central government in Kabul and actually make Afghanistan less secure.

"It's not up to us to form militia," the Afghanistan spokesperson for the German military's (Bundeswehr's) Operations Command told Deutsche Welle. "They might be able to temporarily take over some functions, but the danger could arise that they would be ethnically or criminally instrumentalized."

Conrad Schetter, a senior researcher at the Center for Development Research in Bonn, shares those concerns:

"Using militias is problematic for a number of reasons, firstly because it would send a signal that the allies have given up on the Afghan state," Schetter told Deutsche Welle. "It also would mean distributing large numbers of weapons without knowing whose hands they would end up in and possibly increase violence."

Schetter added that cooperation with militia would likely only work in a few parts of eastern Afghanistan, where tribal structures are intact.

On the ground, power in Afghanistan is shared between complex networks of tribal leaders, Taliban forces, so-called warlords and outright criminals. And since the 2001 invasion, US-led troops have constantly tried to work with many of these entities - drawing criticism from human-rights groups.

"For the past eight years, the US has done business with known drug lords, held high-level meetings with notorious war criminals, and employed unregistered armed militias to guard their bases," Rachel Reid, the Afghanistan researcher for the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch, wrote in a recent essay for the US public broadcaster NPR.

In other words, the surge in violence and resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan has happened perhaps not despite, but partly because of Western cooperation with local powers.

Different kettle of fish

The emphasis on local militia has come as countries like the US are looking for ways to bring their own troops home, and advocates of the strategy point to its alleged success in Iraq.

But the Iraq template, say critics, won't necessarily fit Afghanistan - not the least because the West is dealing with fundamentally different types of states.

"The allied forces in Iraq could build upon strong central state structures," Schetter said. "But we have to remember that we don't know how the Iraq story will end. And Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, has a 30-year history of war, which means that wartime structures have been created. And they need to be addressed."

The formation of local community police forces, together with a temporary surge in the number of foreign troops, has been credited with de-escalating violence in Iraq. But the insurgents in Iraq were by and large foreigners, while Taliban fighters battling coalition troops in Afghanistan are often themselves locals.

And, as detailed in an article by Dexter Filkins in The New York Times from last April, many of the tribal and militia leaders whom US-led forces would like to win over have cooperated with the Taliban in the past and are unsure which side they should ally themselves with.

A fundamental choice

If militia are not an ideal option, what is? The alternatives in Afghanistan are limited.

"The allies should stick with the police and not undermine police legitimacy by casting their lot with militias," Schetter said. "Security decisions should not be made solely in the interest of relieving the pressure on one's own troops."

The German military contingent in Afghanistan has indeed been training Afghan police in basics such as the use of weapons and communications. But it's difficult to ensure that police forces receive the full instruction, including legal instruction, needed for them to be equal to a difficult and sensitive job.

"New police recruits get just a few weeks of paramilitary style training," Rachel Reid wrote in an article published in Britain's Guardian newspaper last week. "If there's no time to teach them the law, the potential for serious human rights abuses is large. Unrealistic goals for building up the security forces are likely to fuel the lawlessness that everyone now accepts underlies much of the government's unpopularity and the growing insurgency."

Ultimately, the strategy the allies choose to adopt will involve the larger, fundamental question about whether there should even be an Afghanistan.

"It's legitimate to debate whether one should give up on this state," Schetter told Deutsche Welle. "The main argument against it is terrorism, but there are no indications of an absolute connection. It's very difficult to build up a state from the outside. On the other hand, some state structures have developed in Afghanistan in the past years, but their further development can only happen internally."

Author: Jefferson Chase
Editor: Rob Mudge