Afghan Plan to Expand Militia Raises Abuse Concerns

Photo

Afghan militiamen fighting the Taliban outside Kunduz in May. Credit Nasir Waqif/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

KABUL, Afghanistan — With the Afghan security forces gravely challenged by Taliban offensives, the government is moving to rapidly expand the troubled Afghan Local Police program by thousands of members, Afghan and Western officials say.

The move to expand the police militias, prompted by the disastrous loss of the northern city of Kunduz to the Taliban almost three weeks ago, is being described by officials speaking privately as an attempt to head off panic in Afghan cities threatened by the insurgents.

But the expansion also amounts to an open admission that the United States’ main legacy in Afghanistan — the creation of nationalized police and army forces numbering more than 350,000 members — is failing under pressure even before any final American military withdrawal. On Thursday, President Obama called off that pullout, originally due at year’s end, leaving 9,800 American troops in the country for at least another year.

Further, the plan would involve a sudden, and potentially poorly vetted, expansion of the Afghan Local Police, an American-created force that in many areas of the country has become synonymous with human rights abuses even when directly supervised by the American Special Forces. Some of the NATO countries involved in Afghanistan have already expressed concerns about the move.

14 Years After U.S. Invasion, the Taliban Are Back in Control of Large Parts of Afghanistan

At least one-fifth of the country is controlled or contested by the Taliban.

OPEN Graphic

Until recently, requests for funding an expansion of that police force, a collection of local militias with around 30,000 total members, were repeatedly turned down by the United States military. While the forces have performed well in some parts of the country, in other parts, like Kunduz, they are seen as a source of chaos and banditry rather than security.

“The Taliban have all of a sudden felt a rush after Kunduz — they are abandoning plans for districts and making runs on cities,” said a senior Afghan official, who like others interviewed about security spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid political risk.

The militia expansion plan is a reversal for President Ashraf Ghani, who had long talked about the importance of solidifying “the state monopoly over the use of force” in a country still deeply scarred by its civil war. Militia forces wielded by American-backed warlords were responsible for some of the worst atrocities in that decade-long conflict.

Afghan officials who described the new plan, however, bluntly called it a matter of survival: Given a choice between ceding territory to the Taliban and reinforcing areas with semiformal militias deemed abusive and predatory, the government is opting for the latter.

Officials said the plan called for the immediate recruitment of an additional 15,000 armed militiamen under the Afghan Local Police program, and according to some accounts that may rise to as many as 30,000. The measure is supposed to focus on beefing up defenses at the district level, potentially freeing up the badly overstretched army and the national police to concentrate their forces for more strategic strikes.

While the Americans had long told the Afghan government to respect the 30,000 cap for the force, at least two Afghan officials said that discussions were underway and that the American military had shown interest in finding a way to fund the program’s expansion, which is believed to cost more than the force’s current $120 million annual budget. Mr. Ghani has told his officials he will seek other sources if the American funding does not materialize.

Reached for comment, a United States military official said that Afghan police officials had not formally approached the American military command to discuss expanding the Afghan Local Police forces, which the official described as “important.”

But European members of the NATO coalition have expressed concern about the expansion, officials said. And Franz-Michael Mellbin, the European Union’s special representative to Afghanistan, said that even successful reform of the Afghan Local Police, or A.L.P., would not be enough to justify its expansion.

“There is nobody on the European side who want to invest in anything that even remotely resembles the A.L.P.,” Mr. Mellbin said in an interview. “The fear is still there that the A.L.P. becomes the arms of local strongmen. We do not think the A.L.P. has worked — especially in the north, where they have become the extension of local interest groups.”

Afghan officials describe the move as one born of necessity. Mohammed Hanif Atmar, Mr. Ghani’s national security adviser, said the government was faced with a big influx of Taliban from Pakistan, as well as of other foreign militants, just as the effects of the reduction in NATO forces and their close air support were taking a toll.

The insurgency has also changed tactics this fighting season, Mr. Atmar said, noting that the Taliban “no longer fight in small groups, they now fight in large formations,” with intentions of overrunning and holding major territory. In the meantime, the Afghan security forces have faced a problem that Mr. Atmar called “chronic”: At the local level, a significant number of the forces are scattered, deployed at the service of local strongmen rather than the posts they are assigned to.

For example, a recent government assessment of the A.L.P. force, which is nominally under the Interior Ministry’s authority, found that more than 2,000 officers, about 7 percent of the entire force, was at the direct service of strongmen, according to security officials briefed on the assessment. That is particularly the case in northern areas like Kunduz, where they are widely seen as unaccountable armed groups that extort the local population and turn their guns against one another as much as on the Taliban.

Beyond that, the real numbers of police and military members stationed in some areas are often much lower than officially reported. Naqibullah Fayeq, a member of Parliament from Faryab Province, a vital northwestern region that has come under major Taliban assault recently, said that as much as a third of the security strength in the province is made up of the “ghost police” — empty spots officially reported as drawing a salary.

The widespread nature of the problem has prompted Mr. Ghani to order an immediate “personnel asset inventory,” official said.

Mr. Atmar said the increase in recruitment of the A.L.P. was to “front-load” for other national forces, with the goal of eventually using the new recruits to fill the vacancies that exist in the army and the police.

The Afghan Local Police were established by American commanders as a low-cost auxiliary force trained by the United States Special Forces. But even when units have been under direct American supervision, some have committed abuses. Several assessments, the most comprehensive of them by the International Crisis Group, have concluded that the A.L.P. “has not improved security in many places and even exacerbated the conflict in many districts.”

The current expansion is happening without the mentorship of American forces, and under difficult circumstances. Thousands of men who had once been disarmed by government campaigns costing hundreds of millions of dollars are now being rearmed.

The design is also being rolled out at a time when factional strongmen and elements of the former government in Kabul have mounted pressure on Mr. Ghani’s government, accusing him of exclusionary politics. In the wake of the Kunduz disaster, the strongmen, many of whom have pasts as northern warlords, have been pressing the government to use militias loyal to them in the fight against the Taliban. Some officials fear the militia expansion amounts to a political payoff to these strongmen, who have often used A.L.P. units for their personal business.

The Kabul government’s political struggles have had a direct affect on the morale of the security forces, some officials say. Many of the army and police commanders who were in Kunduz maintain factional loyalties that at times have been at odds with the central government. In the confusion of the Taliban assault, some simply chose not to fight when the moment arrived, some officials claimed.

“The security challenges cannot be seen in isolation,” said Mr. Mellbin, the European Union representative. “The political space needs to be worked more effectively. If the elite had come together on Kunduz, the situation could have been managed before it became a national security threat.”

Mr. Atmar conceded that amid the intense fighting this year, extensive background checks and training might not be immediately realistic for the expanded forces, but he said better vetting could take hold later. He insisted, however, that the government had made it clear that any new force in the districts would have to serve under the local police chief, and the larger chain of command.

“Without the state’s permission, people used their guns against the enemy,” Mr. Atmar said. “We did not authorize that, but as a responsible government we know they have done the right thing to protect themselves because we were not enough in numbers. Now we go there and say, ‘Look, you did the right thing, but if you continue this’ — and this will continue — ‘you have to now be properly integrated into our forces.’ ”

As a sign of how difficult it is in practice to bring order to the militias, Gen. Baba Jan, who was the police chief of Badakhshan Province, recently posted his resignation. His province has been facing a major Taliban offensive, and in response the local strongmen had armed their militias, often in coordination with the government. But General Jan said he could not control the illegal armed men anymore, and he included the Afghan Local Police in that category.

“They are tied to powerful individuals,” the general said, “and one cannot expect to have authority and order over them.”