DTN News: Afghanistan TODAY July 16, 2010 - The U.S. Goes Local in Anti-Taliban Fight

DTN News: Afghanistan TODAY July 16, 2010 - The U.S. Goes Local in Anti-Taliban Fight

Source: DTN News - this article / report compiled by Roger Smith from reliable sources including TIME By MARK THOMPSON

(NSI News Source Info) WASHINGTON, USA - July 16, 2010: The good news is that the U.S. government is on the verge of creating thousands of jobs. The bad news is that they're in Afghanistan. But General David Petraeus is hoping that hiring up to 10,000 Afghans and arming them to keep the Taliban out of their villages will help turn things around in the nine-year-old war. Petraeus won the tepid backing of Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the plan, nurtured by his predecessor General Stanley McChrystal, after just two weeks in command of allied forces in Afghanistan. It requires a delicate balancing act - the creation of local forces strong enough to shut the Taliban out of areas where neither Afghan nor NATO troops operate, but not so strong as to undermine the authority of Karzai's central government. While progress is slow in fielding Afghan national security forces to fight the Taliban, U.S. officials believe that a growing number of Afghans are receptive to this more localized initiative. Marine Major General Richard Mills, running operations in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand province, said Thursday he is seeing locals growing increasingly anti-Taliban. "We have strong anecdotal evidence that as Taliban tax collectors enter Marjah at night and enter other parts of this province, that they are repulsed and sent away by the people," he told reporters at the Pentagon in a teleconference. Taliban recruiters also are "being rejected and told to disappear," Mills added. "We're beginning to see the emergence of the people wanting to defend themselves." (Watch an audio slideshow about Afghanistan.) Petraeus won Karzai's backing for the plan by giving the Afghan Interior Ministry control of the new localized police forces, which will supplement the 130,000-strong Afghan army and the 100,000 members of the Afghan national police. While their role is supposed to be defensive, that may be easier to promise than deliver in a country run by warlords and their local militias for the past 30 years. Some fear that the new rental cops could be easily turned into militias. "These would be local community policing units," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell insisted Wednesday. "They would not be militias." (See how a U.S.-backed Afghan militia transformed a valley of death.) Petraeus' calendar for showing progress is another challenge. A major review of the U.S. war strategy for Afghanistan is less than six months away, and President Obama wants to begin reducing U.S. troops there a year from now. Building even rudimentary security forces takes time, giving this latest initiative just a whiff of desperation as the clock ticks down. It's "a temporary solution to a very real, near-term problem," Morrell said, adding that the force shouldn't take long to train. "This is about putting locals to work so that they can be on watch in their communities for people who shouldn't be there," he said. "And then work with the established security organizations - the army, the police, the coalition - to make sure they don't menace their communities." But the local police forces won't always be operating solo, Petraeus explained at his Senate confirmation hearing last month. Some of them will be "working around our great special-forces A teams who are out there very courageously in villages, and helping to empower and to support local elements that want to resist the Taliban." Petraeus performed a similar, if not identical, magic trick when he and 30,000 additional U.S. troops surged into Iraq in 2007. Many credited that surge with turning Iraq around. But many U.S. military officers say a more important factor was the willingness of the so-called Awakening movement - Sunnis in western Iraq, many of them former insurgents - to fight al-Qaeda. Ultimately, about 100,000 Iraqis ended up on the U.S. payroll through the Awakening movement. But in Afghanistan, any "awakening" is to begin - and remain - under the control of the government. Similar units have recently been created in different regions of Afghanistan, largely in the east and south, with mixed results. Such homegrown security forces tend to work better than those imported as part of a central army. "It encourages neighborhood responsibility for their own security," Mills said. It gives locals "an opportunity for them to defend their own territory, in which they have, of course, a very, very vested interest." Not only are locals intimately familiar with the topography, they also know the local bad guys better than any outsider does. But the challenge for Petraeus and Karzai will be to keep local bad guys off the police payroll.

*This article is being posted from Toronto, Canada By DTN News ~ Defense-Technology News, contact: dtnnews@ymail.com

DTN News: Afghanistan TODAY January 22, 2010 ~ US Ambassador Puts Brakes On Plan To Utilize Afghan Militias Against Taliban

DTN News: Afghanistan TODAY January 22, 2010 ~ US Ambassador Puts Brakes On Plan To Utilize Afghan Militias Against Taliban *Source: By Greg Jaffe and Rajiv Chandrasekaran Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, January 21, 2010; 10:52 AM (NSI News Source Info) KABUL, Afghanistan - January 22, 2010: The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and senior Afghan officials have resisted moving forward with a bold and potentially risky initiative to support local militias in Afghanistan that are willing to defend their villages against insurgents, according to U.S. officials. Their concerns have slowed the implementation of a key effort to provide security in places where there are relatively few NATO forces or Afghan police and Army units. U.S. military officials had wanted to get the initiative -- developed under the leadership of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan -- off to a quick start this year. The plan was to take advantage of the emergence of informal village security forces that were taking up arms against outside insurgents. The hope was that the new program could yield thousands of new security forces relatively fast, bridging the gap until more Army and police forces could be trained. But before the initiative can be implemented on a broader scale, Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry must approve the release of more money for it. Eikenberry's unease about the program as it was structured by the military also reflects a broader difference of opinion at the highest levels of the U.S. military and diplomatic headquarters in Kabul about new approaches to combating the Taliban insurgency. While military commanders are eager to experiment quickly with decentralized grass-roots initiatives that work around the ponderous Afghan bureaucracy in Kabul, civilian officials think it is more important to wait until they have the support of the central government, something they regard as essential to sustaining the programs. U.S. Embassy and Afghan officials are working to modify the program, called Local Defense Initiatives, to ensure that the Afghan government plays a more central role in how it is run. "We are committed to doing this right, and that means taking the time for the Afghan government and people to decide on whether and how to move ahead," said Philip Kosnett, the U.S. Embassy's political-military counselor in Kabul. The disagreement about how best to move forward with the local security program comes at a time when McChrystal and Eikenberry, who previously served as the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, are under intense pressure to show fast results to take advantage of the 30,000 U.S. troops that will arrive in the country this year. By July 2011, President Obama has said, military commanders will begin sending some of those forces home. Afghan officials and Eikenberry have also expressed concern that unless there is a detailed plan to connect these village security forces to Ministry of Interior oversight, they could fuel the rise of warlords and undermine the already fragile government in Kabul. Another worry is that the local tribal leaders could manipulate U.S. officers who do not understand politics and tribal grievances in a particular area, said U.S. officials. "Our level of intelligence is so lacking," said an adviser to the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan. "We could be supporting people whose interests are not what we think they are." Eikenberry has argued that without Afghan government support, the program could be quickly disbanded if one of the village security forces is turned by the Taliban or gets into a dispute with government security forces. "It's a two-edged sword," Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said in an interview. "One person's community defense initiative can be another person's warlord militia." Military officials said it is important to take advantage of the colder winter months when violence drops to begin training village forces. "If you delay until March, you lose a lot," said a military official in Kabul. The military is moving forward with the initiative on a smaller scale, using money that the embassy does not currently control. "No one is frustrated. We just want to get going," the official said. The Afghan village program has drawn comparisons to the Sons of Iraq effort, in which Sunni tribal forces consisted of more than 100,000 Iraqis -- many of them former insurgents -- were paid to police their villages. That effort, which was widely viewed as essential to blunting a runaway insurgency, was started without seeking permission from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who initially voiced strong objections to the program. Although some members of the Sons of Iraq have been absorbed into the army and police forces, Sunni leaders have accused Maliki of reneging on commitments made by U.S. commanders when the program was started and trying to dismantle the program. The Afghan village security initiative differs significantly from the Sons of Iraq effort, which involved U.S. military personnel training, arming and paying Sunni tribesmen to defend their communities against al-Qaeda-affiliated extremists. In Afghanistan, the military does not intend to arm or pay members of the local security groups. Afghanistan, military officials note, is already awash in weapons. Compensation will be in the form of money for development projects in areas where the groups operate. Although Afghanistan's interior minister has expressed a desire to pay recruits, the United States plans to channel development projects to villages that sign up for the security effort. Village militias will also receive radios to call for assistance from nearby U.S. or Afghan forces and receive training from Special Forces troops. Military officials also said that to prevent warlordism, the groups will be under the authority of a local shura -- a council of tribal elders -- not a single tribal chief. U.S. military officials, meanwhile, have said that they are committed to a bottom-up approach to security and economic development, which recognizes that many Afghans consider the corrupt central government part of the problem and a threat to local tribal power structures. "The community level will be decisive -- and that support is entirely up for grabs," Col. Christopher D. Kolenda, an adviser to McChrystal, wrote in the current issue of Joint Force Quarterly, a military journal. Staff writer Karen DeYoung contributed to this report.