Afghanistan

  After the failure of the ANAP program, among the alternatives proposed have been the formation of expanded and regularized arbaki (tribal deputies, normally temporary) and the creation of lashkars (traditional Pushtun tribal armies). GEN Petraeus said “There exists tribal elements in some areas that can be built on. . . . Local or tribal elders or mullahs have said, we want to protect our territory.”582 The need to have local Afghans do this was once again apparent. People in arms, rather than regular militaries, have been effective counter-insurgency forces worldwide, most recently in Iraq, but also in previous conflicts including Malaya, Algeria, Kenya, and Guatemala. In the words of Massoud Kharokhail, “Community policing is possible with less money, more commitment, and better governance. We need arbaki in the east; we may need lashkars in the south.”583

  The result was the organization of the Afghan Public Protection Force (APPF). In the words of Mohammed Hanif Atmar, Minister of Interior, “These are not militia but a state force, regular, full-time, uniformed; they will be US and ANA trained and not report to their commander. The local community will have a chance to nominate and vet candidates for this force as well as the government.”584 British retired LTG Graham Lamb was, in 2009, working to set out how the force would be organized. Previous failures have limited the scope of the program, which in 2009 aimed to arm some 6,000 Afghans in groups of 100–200 in 40 districts, mainly along major roads. APPF personnel go through a three-week training process.

  In early 2009, as a pilot project, APPF units were formed in Wardak province, with mixed results. There, the provincial governor, Mohammed Halim Fidai, was quoted as saying “We don’t have enough police to keep the Taliban out of these villages and we don’t have time to train more police—we have to fill the gap now.”585 Corruption has slowed and undercut their formation and, in Pushtun areas, many who would be willing to serve alongside their kinsmen are reluctant to join a force that could be seen as anti-Pushtun and pro-Kabul, fighting not to defend their families from outsider insurgents but defending an unpopular government. In Wardak in 2009, the strongest APPF recruitment was among non-Pushtun groups, Tajik and Hazara, which organized APPF units in conjunction with the US Army’s TF Spartan, based on the 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division.

  While Atmar saw the limited number of APPF that were operational in 2009 as doing good work, he was concerned that there was still opposition to the force among Afghans, especially in the parliament, that saw the APPF as really just a separate Pushtun force. However, he believes that, looking ahead to a time when Kabul will have to take over a greater security role and foreign forces pull back, armed Afghans will have to play a role: “The ANA is a strike force to shape and clear areas. The ANP and APPF will then have to hold.”586 In response, the US and other coalition forces have helped organize other Afghan militia forces; while the foreigners do not provide arms, the Afghans have access to them from Afghan government sources. This has included Uzbek and Turkmen groups in Kunduz province, although Pushtuns have proven more difficult to recruit.587 The 2009 experience in Wardak did not demonstrate how this could be done successfully.

  Yet the reality of Afghan politics, especially in Pushtun areas, is that if one group gets money and weapons from the government and another does not, the local balance of power will shift and there will be a strong impetus for extractive behavior. Given the lack of predictable non-narcotics sources of income in much of rural Afghanistan, the motivation for a tribe or local group armed by the government to resolve its fiscal crisis through violence and extracting resources from less well-armed neighbors is significant if neither the government nor a local or regional warlord has the potential to prevent such behavior. The insurgents will be able to use that situation to their own advantage by preying on those who feel oppressed by these forces. There is also concern among non-Pushtuns that local protection forces, being concentrated in the Pushtun areas where they are needed to defend their villages against insurgents, would make these local Pushtuns more willing to join with the Taliban to fight for Pushtun power, tipping the political balance in Afghanistan in favor of Pushtuns even more. Saleh Registani, member of parliament from Panjshir, said: “Arming Pushtun tribes on this or the other side of the border will backfire. If the ultimate goal is modernization, security, and democratic government, they are not an appropriate instrument. Tribal militias would certainly use guns against each other.”588 The strong Ministry of Interior involvement in the formation of the ANPP is an attempt to mitigate these concerns.

  Such forces will likely have to be part of any improved security situation in Afghanistan. GEN Petraeus said “You have to have local solutions to local problems, not just secure but mobilize Afghan civilians.”589 The future of the security situation in Afghanistan has to be with the Afghans. LTC Cavoli saw that the role of foreign forces must be in “providing security and benefits in a way that does not impose religious or cultural costs.”590 This includes countering the “culture of dependency” that the fallout from decades of conflict and reconstruction together has fostered. Afghans may have few resources, but they can still invest themselves and stand up, with their kin, for their own security. BG Hainse observed that “local Afghans can provide security better than allowing foreign forces to take responsibility for it.”591

  But many issues, political, material, and cultural, continue to stand in the way of Afghan self-defense. The foreign military presence has been costly; a million dollars buys four to eight infantrymen deployed in Afghanistan for a year, depending on nationality. Rahim Wardak claims he can deploy 70 ANA solders for the cost of one of their coalition counterparts, and these Afghan soldiers are “politically less complex; we will not run into the international politics of foreign countries.”592 Former US Ambassador James Dobbins noted that in Afghanistan, “indigenous forces are more likely to have trust and access to the population.”593 There will never be enough foreign troops in Afghanistan to live among the people—the key “human terrain” in an insurgency—and to provide a presence at the district and local level. GEN McChrystal wrote: “Pre-occupied with the protection of our own forces, we have operated in a manner that distances us—physically and psychologically—from the people we seek to protect.”594 The combination of coalition lack of understanding and will, along with Kabul’s emphasis on centralized power, has too often meshed with grassroots Afghans’ desire to avoid responsibility and let others fight for them. Yet these are the same Afghans that, a generation ago, fighting the Soviets, became a people in arms, carrying out the greatest national rising of the twentieth century. Tapping into the spirit and motivation that made that possible and enlisting it into building the future for Afghanistan is required to turn the situation around.

  Ending the Insurgency

  If the battle in Afghanistan is to be won, a critical mass of insurgents are going to have to be won over and allowed to profit from their decision to reenter Afghan life and politics. The way is dangerous, as the tentative contacts between Kabul and insurgent leaders in 2008–09, both direct and through Saudi Arabia, showed. Saudi-mediated attempts have generally proven unsuccessful.595 The way these were conducted seemed to hint at Kabul’s reaching out to insurgent Pushtuns through a deal that would reduce the political and economic power of non-Pushtuns. Even though Kabul has little autonomous capability as of yet, Afghan leaders, in and out of government, may be better able than any other interlocutor to deal with the Afghan Taliban’s central leadership, the Haqqanis, Hekmatyar, or even individual insurgent leaders scattered throughout the countryside. The insurgents’ ideology, which includes an implicit demand that state power in Kabul be in the hands of Pushtuns, is one that would be difficult to reconcile with Afghanistan’s other ethnic groups, who are already convinced that the Pushtun insurgency has been met by too much appeasement and excessive allocation of resources to Pushtun areas. But Kabul cannot turn off Pakistan’s sanctuary for the insurgency in Afghanistan. Nor can Kabul prevent anyone who crosses over from becoming a target for assass
ination.

  Similarly, reconciliation with insurgent groups that have brutal human-rights records and leaders with blood on their hands will be hard for the US and its coalition partners to accept. Kabul cannot deal at all without the support of its foreign backers, as it depends on foreign aid for its income and foreign troops for its security. This foreign dependence hurts legitimacy in a country where nationalism and suspicion of outsiders, including Muslims, is as strong as the tradition of hospitality than welcomes and shelters them. It allows the insurgents to portray themselves as defenders of Afghanistan’s culture and values, and makes reconciliation difficult.

  Limiting the insurgents’ willingness to negotiate is their perception that they are winning the conflict, that the US will withdraw and that their Afghan supporters will go into exile or switch sides when insurgent victory appears inevitable. The Taliban’s goal is restoration of their emirate and its associated totalitarian regime, not participation in elections or compromise with other groups. Their connections to Al Qaeda and radical Islamic groups in Pakistan and worldwide push them toward a continued struggle even if Kabul uses Afghan-to-Afghan links to look for peace. The large number of Afghans that depend on narcotics, which, in turn, depends on the lack of security and the reach of the state, is a potentially powerful force against any successful settlement of the insurgency. The Taliban has portrayed itself as the avenger of the rights of Pushtuns against usurpers in Kabul, as defenders of the national integrity, protectors of those that depend on the poppy crop, and bulwark of all Islam against a worldwide war of aggression by the infidels; it will be hard for it to reach an agreement that compromises these principles. The Taliban has demanded first the pullback of all US and coalition forces to garrison and, within 18 months, their complete withdrawal from Afghanistan as the first step in any negotiations they might participate in. Other demands for negotiations include the immunity of Taliban leaders from the ANSF and being allowed to retain their weapons. These demands have proven impossible to reconcile with Afghan government and US insistence that renouncing violence and accepting the constitution is required for any negotiations.

  Success on the ground in Afghanistan is, almost by definition, the sum total of local successes, understandings, and truces, all enabled by a flow of money and resources, capped by the creation and maintenance of patronage relationships. But this locally based approach to countering the insurgency will still not solve the larger threat emanating from Pakistan. Current Afghan Taliban fighters and their allies from other insurgent groups are largely directed from sanctuaries in Pakistan, which makes it hard to deal with their leaders on an Afghan-to-Afghan basis.596 In most areas, local insurgent leaders are less important than those from across the border in Pakistan, and removing them from the conflict through negotiation will not slow the insurgency too much and may instead lead to their assassination or replacement.

  While the remote insurgent leadership in Pakistan may lack an interface with Afghan constituents that could persuade them to create a ceasefire, they do care about grassroot Afghan opinion and their own reputations. However, the insurgency has metastasized into an indigenous conflict in a number of areas in recent years, including districts throughout the south, east, and, increasingly, northern provinces including Badghis and Kunduz. What this means is that the insurgents were able to fill the vacuum in governance, either already nonexistent or filled by extractive police and officials that had existed since 2001. The insurgents may not have gained ideological allegiance in these areas, but are in a position to offer employment where there would otherwise be none. They can use money, tribal, personal kinship, or family connections to sway local Afghans. It does not necessarily means that the locals like or approve the Taliban—indeed, many in these areas resent or fear them and consider them outsiders—but to the extent that they can provide work and security for the local population, they have the opportunity to legitimate their control and garner a modicum of loyalty in the absence of any real alternative. This situation makes local negotiations difficult, for the insurgents are unlikely to agree to terms that do not leave them in control of the governmental functions in an area: otherwise they would find themselves competing with Kabul, with its greater access to outside support and resources.

  In 2009, GEN McChrystal identified as a current need “ISAF requires a credible program to offer eligible insurgents reasonable incentives to stop fighting and return to normalcy, possibly including the provision of employment and protection.”597 Yet while many of the insurgents are fighting for money and because there are no other jobs available, simply providing more money and better jobs is not going to be sufficient to win over sizable numbers unless they enable Afghans to legitimate their decision to switch sides in national and Islamic terms. The Soviets offered money and jobs to Afghans willing to switch sides and found few takers. Kabul has created programs to try to create a way to help insurgents switch sides while still appearing good Afghans and Muslims. The National Reconciliation Program (NRP) has aimed to bring former Taliban into alliance with Kabul through the Program Takhim-e-Sohl (PTS, strengthening peace), directed by Dr. Sibghatullah Mojadidi, the respected Naqshabandi Sufic figure and first ISA president. It allows former insurgents room for political participation and to get the “certificate of amnesty,” known in Kabul as the “get out of jail free card.” Yet, partially reflecting a lack of resources, it was estimated that perhaps only one in ten of those eligible to participate in the NRP have taken advantage of it. Those that have done so appear, at least in their public statements, to retain a great deal of sympathy toward, if not loyalty to, their former comrades, making their support sound rather empty. Lack of resources, along with the insurgents’ belief in ultimate victory, has made the NRP’s task difficult. By 2009, the US was planning to reenergize this program.598

  Other times when significant numbers of the insurgents might have come over to join with the government, either at the time of the Bonn conference in 2001 or in 2003–04, they were either not invited in or there was no agreement within the Afghan government and with the coalition as to who would receive amnesty.599 It is possible that at those times, insurgent leaders such as the Haqqanis and Hekmatyar could have been persuaded to come over to the side of Kabul if they were suitably rewarded and treated as heroes. Neither the Afghans who had experienced their violence nor the US and its allies who would have to pay the bills for bringing them over saw this as an attractive option, nor did they wish to have to justify it to their constituents.

  So these men continue doing what has been their life since 1978: fighting against other Afghans and foreigners with the support of Pakistani intelligence services and outside Arab allies. To these Afghans, they are waging jihad, just as they did against the infidel Soviets and the takfir Islamic State of Afghanistan. It will require strong actions to alter this powerful and well-financed continuity.

  Former interior minister Ali Jalali asked fundamental questions about negotiations: “What is the end state? Will the opposition accept the constitution? Denounce violence? They will do so only when they can see they cannot win through violence.”600 But the insurgents are unlikely to come to this conclusion in the absence of a long-term US security commitment or trends showing that their Afghan opponents are becoming more effective and united in preventing their return to power. Otherwise, insurgent anticipation of victory will continue to prevent effective negotiations.

  Ending the insurgency is likely to require having to deal with the attitude of potential spoilers in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The government of Pakistan has acted as a spoiler in the past, preventing Afghans reaching possible agreements in the 1980s and 1990s that might have ended or limited Afghanistan’s conflicts yet did not satisfy Pakistan’s strategic objectives. Therefore, they encouraged and funded rivals and proxy conflicts to spoil such agreements. This applied both to local agreements, such as when Pakistan acted to prevent the Afghan resistance from dealing with the Kabul regime in Kandahar province in 1988, or at
a national level, as when they enabled HiH to attack rather than join a coalition with the ISA government in Kabul in August 1992, providing the rockets that eventually leveled much of the city. However, Pakistan declined to play the spoiler role in the 2001 Bonn agreement or throughout the political process in Afghanistan that followed, and so there is hope that Islamabad will help and not spoil any potential progress.

  Since Bonn, the regional consensus when all Afghanistan’s neighbors could talk together on how best to move forward has been lost, but other processes—perhaps a new conference like Bonn—could aim to identify common grounds for cooperation. If Pakistan sees peace is needed, it may not block an agreement between Afghans. Getting Pakistan to act affirmatively to stop harboring the Afghan insurgency would be a difficult but not impossible requirement and one that would alleviate so many current problems. But in 2008–10, despite an increasing willingness to treat Pakistan’s own insurgents as a threat to the future of the country, there still remains a perception that the Afghan insurgents are less a threat to Pakistan than are the US and the government in Kabul.

  CHAPTER TEN

  AID AND DEVELOPMENT

  “Above all, it behooves us Americans, in this connection, to repress, and if possible to extinguish once and for all, our inveterate tendency to judge others by the extent to which they contrive to be like ourselves.”