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Hakimi, Aziz Ahmed (2015) Fighting for patronage: American counterinsurgency and the Afghan local police. PhD thesis. SOAS, University of London. Copyright © and Moral Rights for this thesis are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non‐commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder/s. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. When referring to this thesis, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given e.g. AUTHOR (year of submission) "Full thesis title", name of the School or Department, PhD Thesis, pagination. Fighting for Patronage: American counterinsurgency and the Afghan Local Police AZIZ AHMED HAKIMI Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Development Studies School of Oriental and African Studies University of London 2015 1 Abstract This thesis examines the emergence and evolution of the Afghan Local Police (ALP), a pro-government militia supported by the US military as an entry point for exploring the fluid security and political terrain of post-2001 Afghanistan. The study reveals how the ALP emerged as a compromise between the US ambition to scale up the use of local militias and the Afghan president’s attempts to control the local armed groups and the flow of patronage that the US support to these groups represented. The existing literature on the ALP is highly normative and based on limited empirical evidence. Applying the extended case method, this thesis documents the processes through which the ALP was established in three Afghan provinces: Wardak, Baghlan and Kunduz. It demonstrates that the impact of the programme was not unequivocal; the varied outcomes depending on how the programme intersected with local political landscapes. In Wardak, an already fragmented military context was further exacerbated by the injection of US-backed militias, negatively affecting local security. In Baghlan, the ALP emerged as a vehicle for politically marginalised Pashtun groups to re-negotiate Jamiat and Tajik dominance of provincial power structures. In Kunduz, the ALP was appropriated by a Jamiat-led coalition of local commanders and served to preserve the political status quo. This research is the first historically situated, empirically grounded analysis of the role played by militias in local conflicts and processes of state formation in post-2001 Afghanistan. It builds on newer and older debates in historical political economy literature and a range of disciplines in the social sciences about the intertwined relationship between coercion, resources, and patrimonial politics in processes of state formation, and the problems that a historicised political economy approach emphasising the violent foundation of the state raises for liberal understandings of the state. Through a consideration of Afghanistan’s modern history and a detailed analysis of the role played by local militias in the political dynamics of three provincial settings, this thesis foregrounds the centrality of violence, transnational resource flows, and elite bargaining to the emergence of state structures in post-2001 Afghanistan. It makes important theoretical and empirical contributions to an expanding body of literature on violence, local militias, policing, and the contentious politics of statebuilding. 3 Contents Declaration for PhD thesis..............................................................................................................2 Abstract ..............................................................................................................................................3 Acknowledgements...........................................................................................................................6 Chapter 1: Introduction .............................................................................................................8 I. All the president’s strongmen .........................................................................................8 II. Chapters outline ...........................................................................................................17 Chapter 2: Coercion, patrimonial practices and the institutionalisation of power.... 24 I. Introduction ...................................................................................................................24 II. Historicising violence ..................................................................................................27 III. The violent men of the past: state formation and wielders of coercion......................29 IV. Patrimonial practices and the institutionalisation of power .......................................42 V. Liberal peacebuilding and violent conflict ..................................................................48 VI. Local militias and exogenous statebuilding ...............................................................51 VII. Post-interventionary states and transnational fields of power ...................................56 VIII. Conclusions................................................................................................................61 Chapter 3: Methodological approaches and research ethics........................................... 62 I. Introduction ...................................................................................................................62 II. The shifting political and military landscape...............................................................62 III. Research design ..........................................................................................................65 IV. Research methods.......................................................................................................67 V. Research trajectory, data access and ethics .................................................................74 Chapter 4: Historical lineages of state power in Afghanistan......................................... 89 I. Introduction ...................................................................................................................89 II. The historical emergence of state rule .........................................................................90 III. The conquest empire of Ahmad Shah Durrani ...........................................................91 IV. Afghanistan’s colonial encounter and its consequences ............................................95 V. Centralisation of power under the ‘iron’ Amir and his successors..............................98 VI. Kingship, kinship and revolution: the turbulent twentieth century..........................105 VII. The Saur revolution, Soviet invasion and the mujahedin resistance .......................114 VIII. Conclusions..............................................................................................................123 Chapter 5: Rebuilding the ‘old’ Afghanistan: counterinsurgency, local militias and post-2001 statebuilding ..............................................................................................................125 I. Introduction .................................................................................................................125 II. Bringing the warlords back in....................................................................................127 III. Armed politics and the consolidation of state power ...............................................134 IV. Taliban insurgency ...................................................................................................142 V. American counterinsurgency.....................................................................................146 4 VI. The emergence of the Afghan Local Police .............................................................151 Chapter 6: Getting savages to fight barbarians: counterinsurgency and the remaking of Afghanistan ..............................................................................................................................163 I. Introduction .................................................................................................................163 II. Tribes, tradition and indirect rule...............................................................................166 III. Provincial political and security landscape ..............................................................178 IV. AP3 – an American experiment in local militias .....................................................180 V. Change of guard: AP3’s transition to ALP................................................................185 VI. The limits of tradition and the lure of violence........................................................190 VII. Conclusions..............................................................................................................195 Chapter 7: Contested landscapes: Violence, memory and power struggles in Baghlan ................................................................................................................................199 I. Introduction .................................................................................................................199 II. A changing political landscape ..................................................................................203