U.S. Will Arm Militias in Afghanistan (Updated Again)

In Iraq's Anbar province, U.S. forces gave guns, money, and authority to local militias to keep order in their neighborhoods. Sure, many of these so-called "Sons of Iraq" were former insurgents, and barely-trained. But these often-tribally-based groups did the job, for the most part. And the violence came down.
Now, U.S. News' Anna Mulrine reports, the U.S. military is about to try the same trick in Afghanistan. It's tentatively, blandly called the "Afghanistan Social Outreach Program."

The idea has been floating in military circles for more than a year, at least. But there's been concerned that Afghanistan's tribes are too fractured, too shredded by the Taliban -- and too much at each other's throats -- to pull it off. That's one of the reasons why NATO cancelled an "auxilliary" police program, back in April. "Afghanistan has long struggled with warring tribes and warlords," said U.S. Army Brigadier General Robert Cone, the top coalition training officer, told our own David Axe in a March telephone interview. "What we saw was that the effect of paying people to support us when we needed them, despite the positive impact over time, also had the effect of arming people who were not necessarily in line with the [Afghan] government."

So the Afghan program will differ from the Iraq model, as wise observers have counseled. "While the Sons of Iraq groups were often assembled by local tribes, the tribes of Afghanistan are in disarray, weakened by decades of war," Mulrine writes. "U.S. forces plan to convene special shuras, or meetings of elders, to select the candidates and vouch for them."

Makes sense. But the Sons of Iraq also worked as a program because tribal leaders in Anbar were fed up with Al Qaeda in Mespotamia -- and had already started to take matters in their own hands. Is their a similar seed of opposition in Afghanistan?

UPDATE: William "Mac" McCallister, who served as the Marines' advisor on the tribes of Anbar, believes the Afghanistan militia program is a good idea. But he cautions that "arming local fighters in an attempt to empower the Afghan government may not achieve the intended result, if these security forces effectively take their orders from those with rules quite different from those espoused by state leaders."

On the other hand our strategy may inadvertently empower a given local political authority who in turn will reestablish and reinforce the traditional means for managing violence. This is does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. The social system could start fresh since many of the modernists that participated in governance before the experiment in collectivism, Soviet occupation and Taliban rule are gone. The state building process could begin anew founded on traditional governance and codes of behavior.

UPDATE 2: Is the new program a way to split up the Taliban? That's what the Christian Science Monitor's Anand Gopal says. In a report highlighted by Spencer Ackerman, Gopal writes:

According to officials at the Afghan Social Outreach Program, part of an Afghan government initiative to strengthen local governance, a new body is being formed to reconcile such [Pashtun tribal] fighters with the government that will use the promise of government jobs and cash inducements. This body will replace an already existing government organization that many say is corrupt and ineffective.

The second approach will be to sow divisions in the insurgency’s leadership and isolate elements close to Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda and the Taliban have differing strategies: Al Qaeda’s policy of global warfare has brought it into confrontation with the Pakistani government, while the Afghan Taliban are on good terms with Islamabad and restrict its fight to Afghanistan.

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