Dexter Filkins provides a supportive, eager-to-please report about the U.S. military’s “new” plans to aid local militias in Afghanistan that are fighting the Taliban. Here are the first few paragraphs:
American and Afghan officials have begun helping a number of anti-Taliban militias that have independently taken up arms against insurgents in several parts of Afghanistan, prompting hopes of a large-scale tribal rebellion against the Taliban.
The emergence of the militias, which took some leaders in Kabul by surprise, has so encouraged the American and Afghan officials that they are planning to spur the growth of similar armed groups across the Taliban heartland in the southern and eastern parts of the country.
The American and Afghan officials say they are hoping the plan, called the Community Defense Initiative, will bring together thousands of gunmen to protect their neighborhoods from Taliban insurgents. Already there are hundreds of Afghans who are acting on their own against the Taliban, officials say.
Aside from those “American and Afghan officials,” the only apparent sources for this article are two tribal elders whose village fought off Taliban attempts to interfere with an infrastructure project in their province bordering Pakistan:
One of the most striking examples of a local militia rising up on its own is here in Achin, a predominantly Pashtun district in Nangarhar Province that straddles the border with Pakistan.
In July, a long-running dispute between local Taliban fighters and elders from the Shinwari tribe flared up. When a local Taliban warlord named Khona brought a more senior commander from Pakistan to help in the confrontation, the elders in the Shinwari tribe rallied villagers from up and down the valley where they live, killed the commander and chased Khona away.
The elders had insisted that the Taliban stay away from a group of Afghans building a dike in the valley. When Khona’s men kidnapped two Afghan engineers, the Shinwari elders decided they had had enough.
“The whole tribe was with me,” one of the elders said in an interview. “The Taliban came to kill me, and instead we killed them.”
It’s impossible to know, of course, how representative “one of the most striking examples” is — much less what the unwanted effects of building U.S. plans around such militias might be — but the point is to promote the policy, not examine it critically.
Jon Boone, in a more skeptical piece at The Guardian, suggests that U.S. officials have good reason to keep a lid on the Community Defense Initiative, which is what the program is called: experts are already warning it could be destabilizing, and NATO allies are unlikely to support it:
… The hope is that the militias supplement the Nato and Afghan forces fighting the Taliban. But the prospect of re-empowering militias after billions of international dollars were spent after the US-led invasion in 2001 to disarm illegally armed groups alarms many experts.Senior generals in the Afghan ministries of interior and defence are also worried about what they see as a return to the failed strategies of the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan.
Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, said the US risked losing control over groups which have in the past turned to looting shops and setting up illegal road checkpoints when they lose foreign support.
“It is not enough to talk to a few tribal elders and decide that you trust them,” Ruttig said. “No matter how well-trained and culturally aware the special forces are they will never be able to get to know enough about a local area to trust the people they are dealing with.”
Despite these concerns, and the fact that CDI has not even been publicly announced or discussed, operations have already been started “in 14 areas in the south, east and west” — although the program “is expected to extend far beyond that.”
Conservative and milblogger response to the Filkins article is typically starry-eyed. “Uncle Jimbo” at Blackfive calls it “good news,” and forecasts sunny skies and clear, uncluttered highways:
It will take something just like this across much of the country, but it is exactly what Gen. McChrystal’s plan calls for facilitating. What these tribes need now is our help ensuring they do not get rolled over by a Taliban push back. We need to give them air support, weapons, and yes satchels of cash to use as they see fit. We must tread lightly so as not to upset the local nature of these uprisings, but we must cover their backs. Then as we talk to tribal leaders in other areas we can point to these successes and give them some motivation.
It will be a delicate ballet as there are many different tribes who have as many beefs with each other as they do w/ the Talibs, but we can handle that. We need to take advantage of this and get the push back against the enemy going. Our troops deserve a decision. Make the call sir!
Joe Klein is positively rapturous:
Sunday morning brings a glimmer of good news from Afghanistan, courtesy of the amazing Dexter Filkins. The U.S. is beginning to support tribal militia fighting the Taliban. This is important because the weakest link in the military’s Afghan plan is the idea that we can train a 250,000 man Afghan army and 150,000 police officers. It’s important to train up some organized security forces, especially for the more urban areas. But Afghanistan is a land of a thousand remote valleys and those are best defended by their residents, as they always have been. If the U.S.–and, especially, the Kabul government–can establish credibility as a friendly force that will provide economic, humanitarian and some tactical support, without demanding payoffs in return, there is a very good chance that the local tribes will reject the Taliban. Ultimately, this is the only way the situation can be stabilized. Let’s hope it works as well as it did in Iraq. …
Neptunus Lex also sees this as good news, but one of his readers — “Filterman” — points to an article in the Washington Post about a resurging Al Qaeda in Iraq — a situation that argues against the supposed “success” of the surge in that country — and to an article in The Nation about the U.S. military funding the same Taliban insurgents that are killing American troops.
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