BABEAA wrote an excellent take down of Anatol Lieven’s love letter to the Taliban’s humanity and sense of fair play. No, I’m not kidding. Read it.
Also Peter Marton highlights just one of many contradictions in the new NATO counternarcotics policy. Peter and I largely agree on the problem, so it’s no surprise I like it, but he uses evidence, and references a really good book you should probably read.
And both actually link to this op-ed by Abbas Daiyar, on why arming tribal militias (now called the “Afghan Public Protection Force”) is a really bad idea:
Divisions here are not merely sectarian; rather, they are ethnic as well as tribal and clannish. Arming one group to turn it against another will only exacerbate the situation. And as much as the Karzai government would like everyone to believe the contrary, the insurgency is not entirely comprised of hit-and-run Pakistanis from across the border. The “Taliban” in the South, the bastion of the insurgency, consists of the disenchanted Pashtoon tribal groups who feel left out. Old tribal divisions continue to play out in Afghanistan today: some Durrani clans call most of the shots, while the Ghilzai clans in the South feel marginalized. These are the clans that were the original Taliban, and the ones that today fuel the insurgency.
I’m not certain I buy his argument that the failed experiment with Lashkars in Pakistan is instructive (and I say that as a believer in Lashkars as a semi-formal institution in Pakistan; they are not semi-formal in Afghanistan, which is a major issue), but his thoughts are important to consider regardless. As a native journalist, Daiyar probably has a better idea of the danger these militias pose to the state. In a broader sense, too, doing this flies in the face of counterinsurgency, which is normally about connecting people to their government, not proving entire government institutions (like the ANP) to be abject failures.
And anyway, all of this talk about arming tribes assumes they are organizations to be co-opted—an idea that is absolutely not supported from current research. I’m pretty sure the Army can come up with a better plan… like, say, training the actual police. But what do I know?
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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