How the Taleban Deal with the ALP and Uprising Groups

Enemy Number One: How the Taleban deal with the ALP and uprising groups Author : Borhan Osman Published: 19 July 2018 Downloaded: 10 May 2019 Download URL: https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/wp-admin/post.php It is one of the few ‘truths’ of the Afghan insurgency that the Taleban hate arbaki– their term for locally-recruited defence forces, primarily the Afghan Local Police and uprising groups.These forces have always been a mixed bag, with some abusing the local population or captured by ethnic, factional or criminal interests. However, especially where they have local legitimacy, they have posed a serious threat to the insurgency. Borhan Osman* and Kate Clark identify three phases of Taleban reaction to such forces – denial, all-out war and then ‘counter counter-insurgency’ – and discuss what this says about the model of mobilising local, pro-government forces. This dispatch is published as part of a joint three-year project by AAN, the Global Public Policy institute (GPPi), and the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani. The project explores the role and impact of militias, local or regional defence forces and other quasi-state forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, including mechanisms for foreign assistance to such actors. Funding is provided by the Netherlands Research Organisation. Afghanistan has seen a range of militia forces established since 2001, but from 2009 onwards, the international military increasingly organised them according to a specific model, the community defense force (also called local or village defence force). The American military, in particular, came to believe that the defeat of the Taleban lay in winning over ‘the tribes’ and 1 / 13 ‘local communities’; local defence forces, they thought, were in a better position to do so than the national forces of the corrupt Afghan state. (1) Local militias were set up under a variety of names, but in 2010, most coalesced into a new national force, the ‘Afghan Local Police’ (ALP). Since 2012, it has became increasingly institutionalised within the Ministry of Interior and officially numbers 29,000 today. Another type of local force also emerged from 2012 onwards. So-called ‘uprising forces’ (patsunian in Pashto and khezesh in Persian) were supposedly spontaneously rebellions organised by locals against the insurgency, although they usually turned out to have been prompted by or were soon supported/co-opted by the National Directorate of Security (NDS) and/or Independent Directorate of Local Government (IDLG). (For detail on all the various militias, see this background paper.) Locally-recruited forces – both ALP and uprising groups – have posed a serious enough threat to the Taleban for them to take extreme measures against them – vilification and attempts at annihilation and, more recently, co-option. The Taleban’s extreme response raises an interesting question: does the model of community defence force work? Despite a plethora of research and analysis on the ALP, in particular, and their continued renewal for eight years and counting, there has been little conclusive evidence that the community force model delivers on its security promises – to protect the population and help the government hold territory. (2) It is an important question because this is a model that the international military and, albeit less frequently, the Afghan government has kept returning to, especially when looking at what can be done to maintain government forces’ control of territory in the face of inadequate conventional state forces. Most recently, we have seen the start of pilot projects for a new community defence force, the Afghan National Army Territorial Force (ANATF), to be organised under Ministry of Defence command. (3) Understanding why the Taleban have viewed community defence forces as a particular threat offers at least a partial verdict on their effectiveness. It also says a lot about the dynamics of community mobilisation in Afghanistan. Four district case studies In trying to assess Taleban attitudes and conduct towards the ALP and uprising forces, the authors looked at four districts in the Taleban’s heartland: Andar and Muqur in Ghazni province, Arghandab in Kandahar and Shajoy in Zabul, with Panjwayi’s ALP in Kandahar also referred to, but to a lesser extent. Ghazni’s Andar and Muqur districts both saw the emergence of uprising groups in 2012. Both largely transitioned to ALP later that same year, although some uprisers remained as ‘remnant’ independent uprising forces. (For an analysis of Andar, see “Uprising, ALP and Taleban in Andar: The arc of government failure” by Fazal Muzhary and Kate Clark, 22 May 2018, which also quotes earlier extensive reporting by AAN) Zabul’s Shajoy district saw an ALP unit established in 2011. (For detail, see AAN 2 / 13 reporting in “How to Replace a Bad ALP Commander: In Shajoy, success and now calamity” by Fazal Muzhary, 21 September 2016) Arghandab was the site of one of the early, experimental community defence forces known as ‘Local Defence Initiatives’ (LDI). It was established in the district in 2009 and transitioned to ALP in 2010. (4) Our observations are drawn from regular field research and investigations into Taleban and security force developments since 2010. One of the authors, Borhan Osman, conducted 13 trips to Ghazni and Kandahar between 2010 and 2017 and many of the insights in this dispatch derive from observations and conversations during those trips. He also conducted interviews in Kabul with locals from the studied areas. In total, he held more than 70 conversations and interviews with Taleban fighters and officials, members and ALP commanders and uprising groups and civilians in the studied districts. The authors wanted to see if the trends in violence observed by us and reported by both civilians and combatants locally, could be borne out statistically. We therefore consulted a western security expert who has maintained a database of security incidents in Afghanistan since 2012 and compared our conclusions with his statistical evidence. The expert in question asked to remain anonymous and for AAN not to publish actual numbers. There is no clear, spelled-out, top-down Taleban policy on arbaki – the Taleban refer to both the ALP and uprising groups with this term used in its contemporary sense as an undisciplined and abusive, pro-government militia. (5) Also, as always in Afghanistan, local dynamics vary. Nevertheless, when looking at what happened in the studied districts, similarities in Taleban attitudes and behaviour become very evident. We argue that there were three phases in the insurgents’ approach to community defence forces: initially, the Taleban dismissed them, then used extreme violence and vilification to try to annihilate their new enemy and finally, embarking on a ‘softly-softly’ approach of counter counter-insurgency trying to co-opt and defuse the ALP and uprising groups by winning over individual police and fighters and their communities. These three phases are looked at in detail below. Phase 1 (2009-2011): Denial The ALP and uprising forces sought to draw on a constituency which the Taleban considered their own – rural communities, especially in the south and east of Afghanistan. Such communities had long served as the Taleban’s bedrock, supplying the insurgency with almost all its needs, from fighters to food and shelter. It is this support which has enabled Taleban fighters to use populated areas for their military bases and hideouts. The Talebanhad always taken the support – or at least consent – of local communities in their heartland for granted. They assumed the ‘Islamic Emirate’, as they call their organisation, and the ‘mujahedin’ as they call themselves, were rooted so firmly in their communities that nobody could pose a serious challenge. The emergence of a community force opposed to the Taleban, then, was simply unimaginable for members of the movement, both fighters and commanders. 3 / 13 At first, as ALP (and various precursor forces in areas like Arghandab) appeared in increasing numbers across the south, the Taleban disregarded them. Rumours, circulating in 2011 that the ALP programme was going to be expanded dramatically into a nation-wide counter-insurgent force, were dismissed by higher-level Taleban interviewed by Osman during field trips. (6) They described the rumoured plans as an American ploy doomed to fail. Conversations with Taleban fighters in the studied southern districts from 2011 through early 2012 typically ran along the lines of: the Islamic Emirate is the most authentic popular force – how can the nation turn against the mujahedin? Nevertheless, when the rumours came to pass and the number of ALP expanded dramatically from 2012 onwards, the Taleban understood the threat they were facing. Taleban commanders described finally realising that the ALP programme amounted to more than just isolated instances of externally-supported opposition forces. The Afghan Local Police became the Taleban’smost dangerous enemy, worse even than the American and other foreign forces which, thus far, had been their primary adversary. Phase 2 (2012 - 2014): Extreme violence and vilification As the ALP became institutionalised, it increased in numbers and absorbed most other community defence forces. The threat posed by the new force became evident. They were as close to the community as the Taleban. Local policemen and uprisers and local Taleban knew each other by name. They knew each others’ families, clan networks and sympathisers. Members of the new forces knew the insurgents’ places of shelter, their usual ambush points and exit and supply routes – normally unknown to outside forces. Some were former Taleban members. (7) Even when the new forces were not universally popular with the communities in which they operated – for example, in Andar – they were still able to pose a threat because of the support of their particular clan and family networks. An equally significant characteristic of the new local forces was that, unlike members of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), who could always retreat when under attack, the ALP tended to stand their ground.

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