US plan to arm tribal militia runs into problems

Reporting from Achin, Afghanistan, Anand Gopal offers examples of how conflicted, or potentially conflicted, Afghan tribes can be. (See Gopal's article below.) Tribes are divided into clans and sub-clans. And tribal elders, representing various clans, may not always cooperate with one another. The US military had the idea of rewarding tribes with money and promised development projects that created militia to fight off "Taliban" in their areas. Their notion was that these militia would eventually work with regular Afghan police or troops and expedite the removal of "Taliban" from their areas.

Gopal gives examples of how this has not worked out as planned. He identifies two problems. First, not all clan leaders are consulted about or willing to agree to creating anti-Taliban militia. When one clan goes along with the US authorities and some do not this can heighten inter-tribal conflict and vitiate the viability of a militia. Second, Gopal found that when tribal militias were put in place, they were sometimes viewed by local Afghans as worse than the Taliban.

One implication of Gopal's report is that the US military authorities don't really understand tribal dynamics. It may be that, as an occupying force, they never will obtain such understanding or acceptance.

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U.S. plan to arm Afghan militia founders on tribal rivalries
Anand Gopal McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: April 27, 2010 07:56:04 PM
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/27/92976/us-plan-to-arm-afghan-militia.html


ACHIN, Afghanistan — The detritus of tribal war litters the road that leads into this quiet mountain hamlet in eastern Afghanistan. The charred bodies of vehicles and the skeletal remains of destroyed houses fill the desert that flanks the road. Most of the shops in the main bazaar are shuttered, and some residents have packed up and left.

Achin district, a home of the Shinwari tribe, is part of an ambitious countrywide U.S. push to fund tribal militias to stand against the Taliban and stabilize the violence-plagued region. A months-long feud between Shinwari clans has brought Achin to a standstill, however, threatening to undermine the effort and illustrating the difficulties in enlisting tribes to combat the insurgency.

The initiative encourages tribes and other community groups in a number of areas around the country to defend their territory from the Taliban. A similar effort in Iraq is widely credited with diminishing the violence there.

The groups don't receive weapons — which already are plentiful in Afghanistan — but U.S. Special Operations Forces provide money and in some cases training. The militias are meant to complement uniformed Afghan forces and Western troops.

Locals say that tribal dynamics complicate such initiatives, however. "We want to solve the Taliban problem, but not cause a whole series of other problems in the process," said Moyen Shah, the deputy head of the provincial council, which helps govern the eastern province of Nangarhar.

The drive began last summer in the rugged, mountainous district of Achin. Insurgents and smugglers regularly crossed the nearby Pakistani border into the area, which consists of a small bazaar and clusters of homes behind mud-brick walls.

In July, two Shinwari leaders raised a militia to attack these insurgents. The tribal force killed a key Taliban commander and expelled a small band of insurgent fighters from its territory.

The rare uprising sparked a series of meetings between some tribal leaders and U.S. troops, according to Shinwari elders, after which the leaders pledged early this year to bar the Taliban from Achin.

It was one of the clearest anti-Taliban stances that any Afghan tribe had taken in recent years. "If we catch anyone harboring Taliban, we will fine him and burn down his house," said Malek Osman, one of the elders who made the pledge. "The Shinwaris are a huge tribe. We can make a major difference."

U.S. military officials rewarded the tribe with $200,000 and promised more development funds to come.

With the funds and newfound prestige, however, came infighting. Like most other Afghan tribes, the Shinwari are subdivided into a tangle of clans and sub-clans, each with its own leaders. Only one of the clans, the Shobli, had made the pledge against the Taliban.

"We haven't participated in that decision," said Muhammad Nabi, an Achin resident and member of another Shinwari clan, the Ali Sher Khel. "Those tribal elders don't represent us, and they don't speak for all Shinwaris." A number of others who were interviewed agreed with this sentiment.

Shortly after the decision to expel the Taliban was announced, the Ali Sher Khel claimed that the Shobli had occupied part of their land on the outskirts of the Achin bazaar, and launched an attack. Thirteen people were killed and 35 injured, and most of the houses there were reduced to rubble.

Many Shobli fled, leaving behind smoldering ruins and heightened tensions. Locals said life still hadn't returned to normal. "Look around," Achin resident Abdul Habib said, pointing to a gaunt, nearly deserted central bazaar. "There is fear everywhere. The (clans) don't trust each other and they think fighting will start again at any minute."

The Shobli that remain in the area don't patrol or otherwise attempt to enforce the Taliban ban, for fear that it would further stoke tensions. Moreover, the police rarely venture far from the main bazaar into the patchwork of farms and orchards in the countryside or the nearby barren flatland, where many Ali Sher Khel live.

As a result, the Taliban still roam openly in parts of Achin, according to locals and government officials.

Tensions also are brewing between Shobli elders and the Afghan government. "The government is made up of thieves and mafia men," Osman said. "We prefer to work for the Americans."
The Afghan government, in turn, is wary of tribal groups that are beyond its control, something that it said could undermine the development of the national army and police. Ahmad Zia Abdulzai, the Nangarhar provincial spokesman, said the government aimed to incorporate the tribal militias into the Afghan police force.

North of here, in the northern province of Kunduz, a multiethnic area that has a large Taliban presence in the Pashtun regions, dozens of militias have sprouted recently. Many of their commanders are former warlords who participated in Afghanistan's civil war in the 1990s and were disarmed in the years after the U.S.-led invasion of the country in 2001, only to rearm in recent months. In some areas — particularly those without large Pashtun populations — locals report that the militias have been reducing the Taliban threat.

In other parts of Kunduz, however, locals say that the new militias are even worse than the Taliban are. In the district of Imam Sahib, a militia leader known as Commander Nizam is widely accused of crimes that include looting and rape.

"His people stopped our bus one night," recalled Fardin Rasouli, a businessman from the area, "and took all of our money, even the jewelry from the women. During the day these people are supposedly providing security, but during the night they become thieves."

Kunduz government officials acknowledged that Nizam and other militias occasionally crossed the line. "There have been some complaints about the militias," said Mohebullah Saidi, a spokesman for Kunduz province. "Members of the suspected militias have been arrested, and there is an investigation ongoing."

Still, he said that the militias were needed until the government could field its own effective security force. U.S. Special Operations Forces are widely thought to have provided money to Nizam and other commanders, but neither side would comment on the issue.

Military officials say that the use of militias is subordinated to the development of Afghan security forces. The "over-reliance on tribal- or community-based security can promote instability or abuses of power that are associated with warlordism," said U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Thomas Porter, a spokesman with the international forces. "At the same time, we've learned that it's not productive to work against the grain of Afghan culture, which means respecting the existing system of tribal and communal ties."

Nonetheless, it's no surprise that governments are wary of any plan to arm the militias.
"We have a dangerous history in this country with militias," Abdulzai said, referring to the country's civil war, in which thousands died as a result of warring militias. "We need to learn from that experience and make sure we don't repeat the same mistakes."

(Gopal is a McClatchy special correspondent

Afghan tribes organized for regional jirgas can defeat Taliban intruders

The following article appeared today on Afghan Online Press at http://aopnews.com/today.html. The gist of the article is that US-led military operations are not protecting civilians and are not keeping Taliban permanently out of villages. The author, Mohammed Amin Mudaqiq, further points out that there are 40,000 villages in Afghanistan. The US military approach cannot deal effectively with this reality and landscape. Mudaqiq suggests the key to victory over alien Taliban is through bringing villages leaders together through regional jirgas and through the self-organization of tribal leaders.

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After Marjah And Kandahar, How Many More Operations In Afghanistan?
April 15, 2010Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

By Mohammad Amin Mudaqiq

As Operation "Moshtarak" (Together) in the Marjah and Nad Ali districts of southern Helmand Province enters its final stage, preparations are already under way to launch another full-fledged military campaign named "Omaid" (Hope) in the Zirai and Panjawai districts of Kandahar.
The conventional wisdom among Western military generals and diplomats is that such operations are crucial in order to halt the advance of the Taliban, who now control large swathes of rural Afghanistan.

Afghanistan's emerging security establishment too is eager to see these operations implemented. Afghan deputy intelligence chief Naim Baluch recently declared that the insurgents pose a serious security threat to 15 provinces of Afghanistan (consisting of well over 100 districts). Ten districts in those 15 provinces have already fallen into Taliban hands since the Taliban resurgence began in 2005.

Afghanistan has 34 provinces with a total of 364 districts. The question now is: how many more military operations will be needed to secure the whole country. Perhaps another hundred? Operation Moshtarak is already into its second month. If most of the next 100 operations take as long, it will be another 100 months (eight years) before they are over. But there is still no guarantee these offensives will yield the desired results.

In Marjah, the results so far have been mixed. While the 15,000-strong Afghan and NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) contingent may have pushed the Taliban and other extremists out of Marjah and Nad Ali, the operation has caused large-scale displacement and some civilian casualties. In addition, dozens of Afghan and ISAF soldiers have been killed, while thousands of displaced civilians remain stranded between the warring sides.

Unfortunately, there was no contingency plan to help the local residents displaced by this intense battle, and that failure in turn compounded the local population's anger and distrust. Afghans believe that such mistakes during military operations only push more youngsters to join the Taliban.

Tribal Realities On The Ground

The basic challenge is that the international community in Afghanistan is convinced that its approach is appropriate and correct. It seems reluctant to take into account the centuries-old tribal structure and traditions in Afghanistan, particularly in the region around Kandahar where the insurgency is strongest. Unless there is a genuine effort to understand the roots of the crisis and ultimately solve it in accordance with local tradition and practice, it will be almost impossible to convince the pro-Taliban fighters to lay down their weapons and pledge support for the government.

Instead of resorting to such devastating military operations, the international community should encourage Kabul to convene an inclusive regional tribal jirga (council) in Kandahar that would bring together all tribal chiefs from the provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul, Oruzgan, Ghazni, and Farah. The international community should create a neutral mechanism for convening and hosting the Jirga to enable the tribal elders to express their wider concerns freely. Once those concerns are understood and addressed, then a military plan could be prepared to isolate and ultimately knock out the insurgents.

That approach has been successful before, eliminating insurgents from certain areas of Afghanistan. The once-volatile Spin Boldak district in Kandahar Province on the Pakistani border was tamed this way in 2003.General Abdul Razeq, with a battalion of 350 police officers recruited with the consent of the tribal chieftains, succeeded in expelling the Taliban from the whole district.

The grand jirga of the Shinwari tribe in Nangarhar Province just six weeks ago is another landmark example the success of those tactics. The Shinwari tribesmen agreed to expel the Taliban from their region and warned that those who accommodated them would be severely punished by the tribal authorities. Consequently, there is no longer any significant Taliban presence in this strategic belt along the border with Pakistan.

Afghanistan has a complicated tribal system with centuries-old rivalries. Geographically, over two-thirds of the country is mountainous, with 30 million people living in 40,000 villages. Unless you find a way to bring those people into the security system, address their concerns, and win their consent, there is no way that posting security guards can stop Taliban infiltration into the villages. Without a concerted effort to understand the Afghan people and address their wider concerns, any plan for bringing peace and stability will be doomed to failure.

Mohammad Amin Mudaqiq is the head of the Kabul bureau of RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan. The views expressed in this commentary are his own, and do not necessarily reflect those of RFE/RL

Tribal power dynamics may have changed to weaken roles of traditional Afghan tribal leaders

Thomas L. Day's report for McClatchy Newspapers raises a few questions. (See the report after my comments.) (Also see the sources at the end of Day's article.)

First, the report identifies the oultines of the Afghan tribal structure. He tells us that there are 5 super tribes, with 350 or so sub-tribes variously embedded in them. And, further, there are clans that criss-cross the tribes. However, this description may imply that traditional tribal leaders at the various levels of the tribal structure have power. This idea is challenged by Antonio Giustozzi's analysis in his book, Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan. On page 40, Giustozzi writes the following.

"In Afghanistan the legitimacy of tribal and village elders was weakened by the war and by the emergence of armed strongmen who often tried to replace the elders, without entirely succeeding. Moreover, the youth who grew up in the Pakistani refugee camps were much less likely to be respectful of the tribal elders. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the disruption caused by Afghan militias, police and foreign troops contributed to further weaken tribal and local elders. At the same time the difficulty of the tribal system (where it still exists) or of the rural economy to cope with war, post-war, large scale-migration and resettlement, together with the uncertainty about the medium- and long-term future, led many families to see a diversifcation of their sources and influence. Hence an increase in the number of children sent to Pakistani religious madreas to become mullahs or to the cities to seek employment, both cases contributing to further weaken the influence of the elders over the youth."

If Guistozzi's analysis is valid, then the US military counterinsurgency strategy, including a focus on winning the support of tribal leaders, tribe or sub-tribe by tribe or sub-tribe, may be based on mistaken assumptions about tribal power arrangements.

Second, it remains questionable as to whether the US occupation/surge forces have the cultural and linguistic resources to establish meaningful relations with whomever holds power.

Third, the US-led occupation itself may contribute to undermining whatever legitimacy traditional tribal leaders and elders have had or to any tribal groups that cooperate with the occupation. Rather than strengthening anti-Taliban and rogue or dissenting groups, the occupation may strengthen them.

Fourth, where are the mullahs in all this?

Bob

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McClatchy Washington Bureau

Posted on Thu, Feb. 04, 2010 - http://www.mcclatchydc.com/world/v-print/story/83712.html

U.S. plan to win Afghanistan tribe by tribe is risky
Thomas L. Day McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: February 04, 2010 03:49:06 PM

PAKTIA PROVINCE, Afghanistan — U.S. officials put a lot of hope last year in Haji Rashid, an up-and-coming community leader in the Zormat district of Afghanistan's Paktia province. They considered Rashid a unifying figure who was capable of bringing together about a dozen tribes in the area to work in support of the American-backed Afghan government.

Their hopes collapsed, however, when Rashid was kidnapped, tortured, mutilated and murdered and his groundwork to broker the support of the tribes in Zormat quickly foundered.
Military officials aren't sure who killed Rashid, but their suspicions point to the Taliban. "It's to their benefit to have instability," said Lt. Col. Matthew Smith, a Georgia Army National Guard officer and the commander of about 1,000 U.S. troops in Paktia province.

Rashid's murder illustrates one of the obstacles that American officials and military commanders face as they try to persuade tribal leaders to cooperate with U.S. troops and with one another against the Taliban. Afghanistan's historically weak central governments have shared power with the country's five so-called "super-tribes" and the tribes that compose them, with 350 or so sub-tribes and with local clans, and most of the country's would-be conquerors — including the British and the Soviets — have employed their own tribal strategies.

Now American officials are attending tribal meetings, staying in close touch with tribal leaders and trying to determine which leaders are friendly and which aren't.

In Zormat, U.S. and Afghan officials have turned to tribal leaders as a channel of communication with several small Taliban networks in the region, networks they think could be persuaded to join a peaceful political process. American commanders declined to identify the Taliban commanders with whom they've been communicating.

Those efforts, however, risk feeding traditional tribal rivalries, to the detriment of any plan to undercut the Taliban.

"If you are seen as favoring one tribe over another, you are seen as an enemy to them," said 1st Sgt. Troy Arrowsmith of Odgen, Utah, the top enlisted soldier on the Paktia Provisional Reconstruction Team, a cooperative of about 100 troops and civilians from multiple U.S. agencies.

Unhappy tribes don't have to look far to find outside support.

"In Zormat, the tribes are fractured, and the Taliban are a part of those tribes," Arrowsmith said. "They live with them. They have families there."

American commanders in Paktia keep maps of the province, closely demarcating the tribal areas.

Rivalries among tribes, sub-tribes and families aren't confined to Zormat.

In Paktia's northeast, there's a long-standing animus between the Turi, a Shiite Muslim tribe that extends into Pakistan, and the Bushara, a Sunni Muslim tribe. U.S. officials think the tribes have been at odds over territorial boundaries for about 60 years.

The Bushara "claim that they won't allow them to move freely; the Turi claim that they get threatened when go to Gardez," said Genevieve Libonati, a State Department official who's assigned to Paktia.

The chaotic nature of tribal relations was on display on a recent Sunday, when a panoply of American military, diplomatic and Department of Agriculture officials joined about 100 government and tribal leaders from the region for a "shura," or meeting, near the Pakistani border.

After introductions, no U.S. officials spoke during the shura. They only listened.

What they heard was a cacophony of complaints. As emotions rose, any formalities guiding the shura were quickly abandoned. The only common issue among the tribal leaders involved the failings of the American occupiers.

"I'm glad the PRT commander is here," one Afghan participant told the other tribal leaders, referring to Lt. Col. Carlos Halcomb. "They were going to build a hospital in our district, and it hasn't been provided yet."

The comment brought an uproar of support and dissent.

"If we don't have good security in the area, we're not going to be able to finish the projects," retorted Abdul Rahman Mangal, the deputy governor of Paktia.

For several hours, tribal leaders shouted their concerns, with no one attempting to regulate who had the floor. One continued a harangue even after he'd left the lectern, directly in front of the provincial deputy governor and the U.S. officials seated in the back of the room.

Finally, the local director of the Afghan Intelligence Service approached the lectern and calmly delivered a clear message to the tribal chiefs: "Don't assist (the Taliban). Don't let them stay in your home overnight. Don't give them food. Just tell them to leave."

Turning away the Taliban isn't easy, though, particularly in areas that Taliban fighters call home. American officials think the Taliban even have infiltrated some local political meetings — denouncing the U.S. occupation — and threatened other tribal leaders who attend these shuras.

"Have I been to a shura where there was Taliban infiltration? I'm pretty sure I have," said 1st Lt. Luis Alberto Moreno, a U.S. civil affairs officer who specializes in tribal relations in the border region.

(Day reports for The Telegraph in Macon, Ga.)

ON THE WEB
"A Tribal Strategy for Afghanistan," from the Council on Foreign Relations
"One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan"

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