Fetishizing “culture”: local militias and counterinsurgency in AfghanistanPublished on openDemocracy (http://www.opendemocracy.net)

Fetishizing “culture”: local militias andcounterinsurgency in Afghanistan

Fetishizing “culture”: local militias and counterinsurgency inAfghanistan Aziz Hakimi [1] 24 January 2014 Subjects:

Culture [2]Conflict [3]Afghanistan [4]

[5]

[6] The US military's attempt to mobilize local militias against the Taliban paradoxically imposes a“traditional” mode of governance on a subject people initially the target of an emancipatory andliberating discourse to justify military intervention in 2001. This is the sub-text to the corrosiverelationship between President Karzai and his western allies.

The Afghan Local Police [7] (ALP) is a US military supported local militia programme run by theMinistry of Interior. It was established as part of NATO and Afghan government efforts to counter theinsurgency that has been sweeping the country since 2005, and to supplement the Afghan NationalSecurity Forces (ANSF) - comprised of the national army, national police and paramilitary units of theDirectorate of National Security. The ALP was initially envisaged as a short-term security solutionwhich involved the deployment of additional US and NATO troops in southern, eastern and northernAfghanistan to combat the insurgents. However, plans are now underway to make it a permanentpart of ANSF.

The former US Defence Secretary Robert Gates [8] called the ALP ‘’potentially a game changer’’, andthe former commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), Gen. David Petraeus[9], described it as ‘’arguably the most critical element in our effort to help Afghanistan develop thecapacity to secure itself’. Despite public criticism of the programme, especially in northernAfghanistan, President Karzai [10] believes that when implemented according to procedure andunder government control, the ALP is a useful initiative in improving security at the local level.

The conceptual lineages of the ALP can be traced back to the Afghan Public Protection Programme(AP3) [11] which was the culmination of a series of attempts since 2006 to tap into and rejuvenatewhat were presented as ‘’authentic’’ and ‘’enduring’’ rural and tribal traditions of ‘’self-protection’’based on the tribal policing concept of arbaki [12].

Before the advent of the ALP, local militias under US military control had taken an ad-hoc anddecentralized character with few, if any, links to Afghan government institutions. Consequently,centralizing the means of coercion became a key priority of the Afghan government. In 2009, afterwinning a second term, President Karzai [13] not only promised to build Afghanistan’s national armyand police force, within the next three to five years, but he also pledged to adopt, within two years,more stringent measures to improve the regulation of local militias, and to end the operations ofprivate security companies.

Realizing that as long as foreign forces conducted combat operations, Afghan forces would always

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Fetishizing “culture”: local militias and counterinsurgency in AfghanistanPublished on openDemocracy (http://www.opendemocracy.net)

remain in a subordinate role and that the US and NATO were unlikely to invest sufficiently in buildingANSF’s capabilities, Karzai brought forward the date for the transfer of security responsibilities fromNATO to Afghan forces from 2014 to 2013, giving ANSF time to adjust to a lead role in combat, andto encourage the US and NATO to invest in training and equipping ANSF.

To improve the regulation of local militias and private security companies, President Karzai and hisgovernment embarked on a ‘’twin initiative’’ by establishing the ALP and the Afghan PublicProtection Force (APPF) and banning private security companies. This was met with strong oppositionsince thousands of US and NATO-funded private security companies and local militias wereemployed by international forces to protect military bases and logistics convoys, and to pursueTaliban insurgents.

When it was approved by the Afghan government in August 2010, following contentious negotiationswith NATO, the ALP incorporated all previous militia formations under the Afghan Ministry of Interior.It was part of attempts to subordinate US-funded armed units to the Afghan National Policecommand at the district and provincial levels – an objective which proved problematic consideringthe interference of US Special Forces, the power of local commanders, and the weakness ofsub-national administration in many parts of the country.

The ALP, in many ways, represented the struggle between President Karzai and the US military overthe control of local armed groups. It was an imperfect solution that allowed Karzai to centralise hishold over the murky world of US counterinsurgency with its fragmentation and decentralization,involving a variety of armed groups and the patronage that accompanied US security initiatives.

Refashioning the ‘traditional’ through western intervention

By the end of the decade, with the war against the Taliban showing few signs of victory, Americancommanders increasingly framed their efforts to arm local militias in the fight against insurgents inthe language of ‘’tradition’’ and respect for Afghanistan’s ‘’authentic’’ culture, in particular theenduring imagery of ‘’the tribes’’ fiercely guarding their independence and protecting its membersagainst outside threats. NATO hoped that the purportedly still-tribal Afghans could yet be mobilized -and armed - against an elusive ideological enemy, represented by the Taliban.

NATO’s efforts were presented as a corrective to previous western interference and imposition ofliberal norms and institutions on non-western and non-liberal societies – a somewhat vague, butnonetheless revealing, critique of initial western attempts at nation-building in Afghanistan. Western‘’experts’’, critical of earlier failures to build a centralized nation-state redoubled their efforts inengaging with and cultivating the so-called ‘’traditional’’ or ‘’customary’’ terrain.

However, there remained a yawning chasm between western claims about valorizing authenticityand non-interference, and the actual processes through which local forms of security were promotedand the political effects they ended up producing. So-called ‘’local solutions’’ were in fact imposedfrom above, as the case of the ALP graphically illustrates. It is a story of how short term measures,based on expediency and quick fixes were delivered in a package bearing the seal of “culture” and“tradition”.

Local militias and ‘military patrimonialism’

The US military’s attempt to resuscitate ‘’age-old Afghan traditions’’ of self-protection - based uponan idealized and reified vision of the past - proved difficult to realize, as did the assumption ofwillingness of Afghan villagers to stand up and revolt against Taliban. The case of Wardak province,which has been a hornet’s nest of factional rivalries between armed groups dating back to theanti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s and the civil war that followed the withdrawal of Soviet forces fromAfghanistan, illustrates this point.

A number of factors coalesced to produce this outcome. A sense of pervasive insecurity compelledlocal villagers in Wardak to avoid involvement in the ALP programme being forced upon them. TheUS military struggled in Wardak as local support proved elusive, and many villagers seemed

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Fetishizing “culture”: local militias and counterinsurgency in AfghanistanPublished on openDemocracy (http://www.opendemocracy.net)

unwilling to defend themselves against Taliban insurgents. Since the ALP was mostly used by SpecialForces to carry out night raids and targeted killings against insurgents, it played a limited role inprotecting the population.

The transformation of the Afghan countryside through the war years, particularly the loss ofinfluence by so called ‘’traditional’’ leaders who in the past played a key role in patron-clientrelations, meant that the search for ‘authentic’ tribal leaders produced few results. In fact, localcommanders emerged as the main beneficiaries of the programme, and used it to ‘’re-invent’’themselves and their militias and to expand their power. As a result, while the Americancounter-insurgency experts and the US military ‘’did’’ culture, and local Afghan intermediariesearned a premium as cultural brokers, those alleged to be enmeshed in their tribal ways andtraditions refused western and Afghan government attempts to lock them into indigeneity and thenpolice them by invoking tradition.

The ALP study in Wardak, based on my year-long research (2011-2012) examining the dynamics ofgovernment and NATO supported local militias, showed that although actors and regimes have comeand gone, the system of rule based on patronage and patron-client relations [14] has survived andimportant traces of it can be observed in President Karzai’s system of rule. In this system, jihadicommanders have replaced the old ‘’traditional’ elites.

The ALP fed into a variety of patron-client dynamics at different levels, by empowering local andnational level power brokers, and local commanders and parliamentarians - an outcome whichcritics claim is at odds with liberal notions of transparency and accountability supposedly at work inthe projects of international state-building and peacekeeping.

After a number of attempts over the years to ‘fix’ the ALP in Wardak, Afghan officials and US militaryauthorities eventually gave up on earlier ambitions to reform and expand it . Since the ALP played anegligible role in improving security, in the spring and summer of 2012 senior Afghan officials andUS Special Forces began to discuss a more dramatic, if problematic solution, which allegedlyinvolved arming local Hizb-e-Islami fighters - a long standing rival of the Taliban in Wardak - in orderto contain the insurgency and improve security.

With the failure of ALP in Wardak, the US military abandoned the ambitions of a transformativecounterinsurgency campaign, and reverted to counterterrorism tactics and the use of covertoperations by Special Forces and proxy militias. However, the human and political cost of this shiftwas so great that the subsequent stages of US military presence in Wardak severely strainedrelations between the US and Afghan governments.

Violent practices and contested legacies

In the spring of 2012, the US military operations began to undergo important changes. As part ofPresident Obama’s planned withdrawal, the US military withdrew its regular forces from many partsof Wardak, replacing them with additional US Special Forces. As a result, the role of regular forcesdiminished, while that of Special Forces and counter-terrorism pursuit teams increased. This was thebackground to the war crimes [15] that were allegedly committed by US Special Forces betweenOctober 2012 and February 2013.

The widespread abuses occurred during search operations for suspected insurgents, which involvedforced entry into homes, destruction of property, beatings, arrests and intimidation. According tolocal accounts, US Special Forces operated private prisons and interrogations centres in their base inNerkh district, close to the provincial capital Maidanshahr, where they allegedly tortured prisoners.

In February 2013, the allegations of abduction, torture and extrajudicial killings emerged into theopen, prompting local resident and family members of victims to organise demonstrations in Wardakand Kabul. The allegations, widely reported by local and international media, prompted PresidentKarzai to order US Special Forces out of Wardak in late February. Whilst continuing to insist that USforces had not been involved in criminal incidents in Wardak, in March, the US military began thewithdrawal of its Special Forces from Nerkh.

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Fetishizing “culture”: local militias and counterinsurgency in AfghanistanPublished on openDemocracy (http://www.opendemocracy.net)

Karzai’s attempts in 2010 to reduce the influence of US Special Forces over US funded local militias,by establishing the ALP, could arguably be justified as a means to avoid the kinds of grave humanrights abuses that later occurred in Wardak. However, despite securing a formal agreement with theUS military, he could not fully control their conduct, as is also evident from his inability to end nightraids by Special Forces and the detention of Afghan nationals.

The ALP in Wardak constitutes a microcosm of the dynamics of conflict in Afghanistan as a whole.Western politicians invoke the image of Afghanistan as an ‘’ungoverned space’’, a zone of chaos anda frontline in the war on terror; Wardak itself is positioned in this discourse as the frontline of the waragainst Taliban ‘’barbarians’’. In this seemingly epochal confrontation, civilization and barbariansmutually sustain each other. The Taliban thrive on the presence of ‘’foreign infidels’’, a reference toNATO and US forces, while at the same time Taliban’s continued armed resistance against US andNATO forces provides the justification for continued US military presence.

This is the sub-text to the tense, and at times corrosive relationship between President Karzai andhis western allies, the latest glimpse of which was fully on display in the recently concluded ‘’Consultative Jirga’’ [16], which approved the US-Afghan Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA). Thisbroader ‘’structuring’’ environment has provided ample opportunities to some Afghans to profit fromthe political economy associated with the west’s 'war on terror'. Therefore, many people have a lotto lose from a reduced military presence, and even more so from a complete withdrawal of NATOand US troops (in the event that the Afghan government does not approve the BSA). It is littlewonder that Afghan politicians and businessmen-and-women who profit from the NATO presence arethe most vocal advocates of the BSA with the US, which President Karzai has resisted so far.

As David Keen [17] argues, war may be less about defeating the enemy than maintaining a systemin which insurgents and counter-insurgents both accrue benefits. A range of different actors andorganizations accrue political and material benefits from the ALP programme and the wider war, andeach fights to shape the process to their own advantage, ensuring its survival in diverse forms inspite of its evident failure.

The US military’s move to mobilize local villagers in Wardak against the Taliban may be interpretedas a paradoxical attempt by the representatives of modernity and civilization to impose a traditionalmode of governance on a subject people who had initially been made the target of its emancipatoryand liberating discourse by the Bush Administration to justify military intervention in 2001.

The corollary of this - the idea, popularized by American scholar Louis Dupree [18], of a traditionalAfghan peasantry erecting a metaphorical ‘mud curtain’ to keep the modernizing influences of thestate at bay, or to limit contact with the outside world - no longer applies, if it ever did. The warappears to have changed Afghans’ expectations of the state after years of experiencing ‘’decentralized despotism’’ [19], and their willingness to be encompassed by it.

There is a crucial difference between endogenous state-making and centralization of power as aresult of a broader historical ‘’civilizing process’’ [20] - the organic emergence of new politicalorders as against the reality of coercion and imperial imposition by Special Forces, andcounterinsurgency experts’ attempts at social engineering. After more than a decade of muddlingthrough, the west is likely to leave behind a violently transformed landscape dominated by localmilitias and only loosely held together by short term deals with local allies, for whom violence andpredation has become an effective means of staying in power.SideboxesRelated stories: Karzai: a legacy of failure on Afghan women's rights? [21] Gender in Afghanistan: pragmatic activism [22] Problematic protection: the law on Elimination of Violence against Women in Afghanistan [23] Negotiating with the Taliban: the view from below [24] Afghanistan: the blind pursuit of peace and reconciliation [25] Taliban: agent or victim? [26] Afghanistan: fundamentalism, education, and the minds of the people [27] Afghanistan: an all-time struggle for women [28] Meeting in monochrome: women and the Afghanistan conference [29] CSW: Voices from Afghanistan [30] Will courage be enough? [31]

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Fetishizing “culture”: local militias and counterinsurgency in AfghanistanPublished on openDemocracy (http://www.opendemocracy.net)

Country or region: Afghanistan Topics: Conflict Culture Rights: Creative Commons $(document).ready(function(){ $("div#contentgrid").removeClass('grid-8');$("div#contentgrid").addClass('grid-6'); }); About the author

Aziz Hakimi is a PhD candidate in development studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies,University of London. His research is focused on US counterinsurgency and local militias inAfghanistan. He is also a guest researcher at the Christian Michelsen Institute (CMI) in Bergen. Hismost recent publication on the Afghan Local Police appeared in the journal Central Asian Survey [32].

Related Articles Karzai: a legacy of failure on Afghan women's rights? [21]Massouda JalalGender in Afghanistan: pragmatic activism [22]Deniz KandiyotiProblematic protection: the law on Elimination of Violence against Women inAfghanistan [23]Torunn WimpelmannNegotiating with the Taliban: the view from below [24]Deniz KandiyotiAfghanistan: the blind pursuit of peace and reconciliation [25]Massouda JalalTaliban: agent or victim? [26]Afiya Shehrbano ZiaAfghanistan: fundamentalism, education, and the minds of the people [27]Massouda JalalAfghanistan: an all-time struggle for women [28]Massouda JalalMeeting in monochrome: women and the Afghanistan conference [29]Sara MojtehedzadehCSW: Voices from Afghanistan [30]Massouda JalalWill courage be enough? [31]Lynne O'Donnell

[33] This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence. If youhave any queries about republishing please contact us [34]. Please check individual images forlicensing details. Source URL: http://www.opendemocracy.net/aziz-hakimi/fetishizing-%E2%80%9Cculture%E2%80%9D-local-militias-and-counterinsurgency-in-afghanistan

Links:[1] http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/aziz-hakimi[2] http://www.opendemocracy.net/topics/culture[3] http://www.opendemocracy.net/topics/conflict[4] http://www.opendemocracy.net/countries/afghanistan[5] http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://www.opendemocracy.net/printpdf/78663&t=Fetishizing “culture”: local militias and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan[6] http://twitter.com/share?text=Fetishizing “culture”: local militias and counterinsurgency inAfghanistan[7] http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02634937.2013.843300#.UtwN_WTFJhB[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/bad-guys-vs-worse-guys-in-afghanistan.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0[9] http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/09/26/human-rights-and-afghan-security-transition-0[10]http://www.usip.org/publications/counterinsurgency-local-militias-and-statebuilding-in-afghanistan

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Fetishizing “culture”: local militias and counterinsurgency in AfghanistanPublished on openDemocracy (http://www.opendemocracy.net)

[11] http://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/publication/local-defence-in-afghanistan-a-review-of-government-backed-initiatives[12] http://www.lse.ac.uk/internationalDevelopment/research/crisisStates/download/op/OP7Tariq.pdf[13] http://www.afghanistan-un.org/2009/11/president-karzai%E2%80%99s-inauguration-speech/[14] http://www.webref.org/anthropology/p/patron_client_relationship.htm[15] http://www.rollingstone.com/feature/a-team-killings-afghanistan-special-forces[16] http://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/a-yes-a-maybe-and-threat-of-migration-the-bsa-loya-jirgas-last-day[17] http://www.amazon.com/Useful-Enemies-Waging-Important-Winning/dp/030016274X[18] http://www.amazon.com/Afghanistan-Louis-Dupree/dp/0195776348[19] http://www.amazon.com/Citizen-Subject-Contemporary-Colonialism-Princeton/dp/0691027935[20] http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Civilizing_Process.html?id=AYp1tgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y[21] http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/massouda-jalal/karzai-legacy-of-failure-on-afghan-womens-rights[22] http://www.opendemocracy.net/deniz-kandiyoti/gender-in-afghanistan-pragmatic-activism[23] http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/torunn-wimpelmann/problematic-protection-law-on-elimination-of-violence-against-women-in-afghan[24] http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/deniz-kandiyoti/negotiating-with-taliban-view-from-below[25] http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/massouda-jalal/afghanistan-blind-pursuit-of-peace-and-reconciliation[26] http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/afiya-shehrbano-zia/taliban-agent-or-victim[27] http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/massouda-jalal/afghanistan-fundamentalism-education-and-minds-of-people[28] http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/massouda-jalal/afghanistan-all-time-struggle-for-women[29] http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/sara-mojtehedzadeh/meeting-in-monochrome-women-and-afghanistan-conference[30] http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/massouda-jalal/csw-voices-from-afghanistan[31] http://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/lynne-odonnell/will-courage-be-enough-0[32] http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02634937.2013.843300#.Ut2BjmQ1hhA[33] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/[34] http://www.opendemocracy.net/contact

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