Is US policy in Afghanistan undermining its own goals?

by Mehlaqa Samdani

The success of General McChrystal’s plan in Afghanistan depends heavily on a strong and effective central government, which can provide good governance and basic services to the Afghan population. And yet the current policy on the ground adopted by the United States and NATO has worked at cross-purposes to the goal of creating an effective Afghan government acceptable to Afghans. This is most obvious in the realm of security.

Recent reports suggest that U.S and NATO’s heavy reliance on regional warlords for security within Afghanistan has greatly undermined the credibility of the central government and its ability to provide protection within its borders.

According to a report by the Center for International Cooperation at NYU, US and NATO military units have used private security providers that “serve as ready-made militias that compete with state authority and are frequently run by former military commanders responsible for human rights abuses or involved in the illegal narcotics and black market economies”. This occurs at “the cost of consolidating government authority in the long-term”.

While this has been “cause of popular Afghan alienation from foreign military forces….the policy is not likely to be reversed anytime soon, because US and NATO officials still have no alternative to the security services the warlords provide”.

Some of these military commanders, such as Dostum, Khalili, Fahim, Ahmed Wali Karzai maintain close ties with the central government and indeed Karzai himself and thus further erode his legitimacy with the Afghan people. Men for the Afghan national army and police are recruited from the private armies of these men, whose loyalties lie with their respective warlord than with the central government. 9

The attack in Helmand yesterday that resulted in the deaths of five British soldiers by a member of the Afghan National Police, has brought into sharp relief the challenge of creating a national security force in Afghanistan.

A recent, independent report commissioned by the EU cautioned “that desperate recruiters dropped their vetting standards in order to replace officers killed in dangerous southern provinces such as Helmand and Kandahar, making it easier for insurgents to infiltrate police ranks.” The report also concluded that “some police, particularly about 15,000 hired in the runup to the presidential elections, received just three weeks' training…and…criticized a multibillion dollar American programme called focused district development (FDD) that has been promoted as a solution to the country's police problems but gives new recruits just eight weeks of training”.

With an approximate dropout rate of 24% a year, “it has become even harder to raise the quality of an institution that barely existed in any meaningful way after the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and was soon filled by former civil war militia fighters”.

Despite the challenges, General Sher Mohammad Karimi, a distinguished military officer “who heads the operations department at the Afghan Defense Ministry and plays a significant role in the effort to rebuild the Afghan National Army (ANA)”, remains optimistic. He maintains: "Indeed the national army is progressing well. We now have a National Army and it is being built further. But we all are very impatient and trying to build everything in one day. We cannot build everything overnight”.