Aid Agencies Beg Obama Not To Arm Afghan Militias

By Steve Hynd

I'm thinking that the folks at Oxfam, Save the Children and the International Rescue Committee understand counter-insurgency warfare at the sharp end, from the perspective of those who suffer it, rather better than Petraeus, Odierno and the rest.

In a report published in Kabul, a group of 11 development groups attacked two flagship programmes intended to extend the reach of government into Afghan villages. One scheme involves establishing local militias, known as Afghan Public Protection Forces, whose members are given weapons after just three weeks of training. Under a second scheme, local power brokers are selected to join a community council and to provide intelligence about Taliban activity.

... A Nato spokesman said both schemes were the responsibility of the Afghan government and would be tightly controlled. But western diplomats say the APPF plan was pushed on an unwilling government by the US general in charge of Nato forces in Afghanistan. They also fear it will re-create some of the tribal militias that the international community has spent hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to disarm.

Mohammad Mayar, deputy director of Acbar, the umbrella group representing nearly 100 NGOs in Afghanistan, said the scheme would be destabilising and repeat previous failures.

"I am from Wardak. There are three different ethnicities [in the province] so there are a lot of complications. We have had the experience in the past where people have changed sides and people have escaped with weapons."

The report was signed by a number of organisations, including ActionAid, Save the Children and the International Rescue Committee.

As Fester wrote on Wednesday, it's looking like empowering local warlords by arming them then bribing them not to attack the occupiers has become the military's "best case scenario" for counter-insurgency operations in foreign countries. That papers over the cracks for a while - only a while, as matters in Iraq are revealing - but leaves a bunch of armed groups with no ties to central government ready to raise havoc as soon as the occupier begins to withdraw.

The NGO's also objected to the Af/Pak "stratergy" on the basis that any surge in troops will mean a parallel counter-productive surge in Afghan civilian casualties.

In a report titled Caught in the Conflict, 11 aid groups including Oxfam, ActionAid and Care called on Nato to change the way it operates.

"The troop surge will fail to achieve greater overall security and stability unless the military prioritise the protection of Afghan civilians," Matt Waldman, head of policy for Oxfam International on Afghanistan, said.

"Despite taking steps to reduce civilian casualties, and repeated calls for restraint, too many military operations by foreign troops involve excessive force, loss of life and damage to property.

"This is causing anger, fear and resentment among Afghans, and is steadily eroding popular support for the international presence."

A surge that keeps to current US and allied military tactics in Afghanistan will be almost exactly the wrong way to win over the population. Regular Newshoggers commenter Geoff pointed out to a Reuters Blogs post that explains: "Garrisons and force protection crowd out other objectives in Afghanistan".

It is a cliché that, in counterinsurgency, one must be among “the people”.

...A rural insurgency is a devil’s game. It is difficult for a foreign counterinsurgent force to concentrate itself to maximize effectiveness, in part because the insurgency itself is not concentrated. When there are no obvious population clusters, there are no obvious choices for bases. Bagram Air Base, the country’s largest military base, is in the middle of nowhere, comparatively speaking - dozens of miles north of Kabul, and a 45-minute drive from Charikar, the nearest city in Parwan Province. FOB Salerno, a large base in Khost Province, is miles away from Khost City, the province’s capital-and the road in between is riddled with IEDs.

...There are other ways in which Coalition Forces are separated from the people of Afghanistan beyond their heavily fortified bases. Most transit - on patrol, on delivery runs, or on humanitarian missions - is performed through Mine Resistance Ambush Protection, or MRAP vehicles. These enormous trucks, thickly plated with metal blast shields on the bottom with tiny blue-tinted ballistic glass, make it near-impossible to even see the surrounding countryside from another other than the front seat.

On the narrow mountain roads that sometimes collapse under the mutli-ton trucks, soldiers drive, too, in up-armored Humvees, which are similarly coated in thick plates of armor and heavy glass windows they aren’t allowed to open.

When soldiers emerge from their imposing vehicles, they are covered from head to groin in various forms of shielding: thick ceramic plates on the torso, the ubiquitous Kevlar helmets, tinted ballistic eye glasses, neck and nape guards, heavy shrapnel-resistant flaps of fabric about the shoulders and groin, and fire-resistant uniforms. A common sentiment among Afghans who see these men and women wandering in their midst is that they look like aliens, or, if they know of them, robots.

The aid agencies have already worked out that a combination of empowering warlords, increasing civilian casualties and occupiers seen as distant aliens is a recipe for COIN disaster. I wonder why none of the COINdinistas so enthusiastic about Obama's plan have?

Comments

[zenpundit]

"As Fester wrote on Wednesday, it's looking like empowering local warlords by arming them then bribing them not to attack the occupiers has become the military's "best case scenario" for counter-insurgency operations in foreign countries"

A village warlord?

The Afghan warlords are warlords because they already have a) armies with Soviet model weapons, including tanks, artillery and APCs, and b)some senior position in either the tribal structure of the province, the Karzai regime, political party or all three. Warlords are already better armed than the Karzai government and run provinces and large towns like Khost.

Dudes at the village level are poor villagers, relatively vulnerable to intimidation by small bands of Taliban fighters who would be far less likely to bully or loot if the villagers were armed. Many of the older villagers have experience in the Afghan war and are more than willing to defend themselves. Handing out AK-47's will not make villagers into the Afghan Wehrmacht.

[Steve Hynd]

Zen, you're restricting terms to make a point? Hardly fair debate.

A warlord, practically, is the leader of any non-government armed group that has an ability to get the locals to do what he wants because he has the use of the preponderance of force. Arming militias will create hundreds of mini-warlords across Afghanistan because the militias will not be every village, every villager.

Regards, Steve