Uprising, ALP and Taleban in Andar: The arc of government failure Author : Fazal Muzhary Published: 22 May 2018 Downloaded: 5 September 2018 Download URL: https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/uprising-alp-and-taleban-in-andar-the-arc-of-government-failure/?format=pdf The Taleban look to be preparing for a new onslaught on Andar district centre. The name ‘Andar’ is still full of political resonance, gained in the summer of 2012 when the Taleban were suddenly and swiftly pushed out of a large part of the district. That counter- insurgency in an insurgent stronghold was styled the ‘Andar Uprising’ and was promoted enthusiastically by the government and United States military they hoped it marked the start of a wave of popular revolts against the Taleban. But by late last year, the last areas captured by the uprisers in 2012 were lost back to the Taleban. The government now controls just a tiny sliver of land and that precariously. Roads to the district centre are cut off and residents are preparing themselves for a new onslaught. In this latest in a series of dispatches on the Andar uprising published by AAN since 2012, Fazal Muzhary and Kate Clark consider why the government has failed so badly in Andar and what it tells us about the attractions and perils of raising ‘community defence forces’. 1 / 20 This piece draws on earlier AAN research on the Andar uprising (1) and subsequent developments, as well as a range of new interviews with locals (both combatants and civilians) and international officials. Revisiting Andar is an opportunity to put events there in context, in the light of a research project* which in part is looking at community defence forceswhat makes them successful or not. Andar is a good example of a community defence force which failed. Although the uprising group and the Afghan Local Police (ALP) which it soon mainly turned into were initially successful in their fight against the Taleban – with strong Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) and international military backing – they ultimately failed to hold territory. In addition, introducing a local counter-insurgent element led to extreme violence, producing the opposite outcome from the ‘population protection’ mantra that has been used to justify the mobilisation of community defense forces. This dispatch can be read alongside a forthcoming analysis of the ALP in Yahyakhel district, in neighbouring Paktika, looking at why it has been highly successful. The arc of government failure in Andar All the signs are that the Taleban are preparing to launch a fresh attack on Andar district centre. On 4 May, as witnessed by one of the authors, they used an excavator to dig a hole on the outskirts of Ghazni city on the main, asphalted road which leads to Andar and then on to Paktika. The highway was already blocked in the other direction, meaning Andar was already cut off from the Afghan National Army (ANA) base at Chahardiwal,to the east of the district headquarters. With a third road also blocked by the Taleban, supplies can only now reach the district centre by air, with government helicopters vulnerable to insurgent rockets. A government operation to open the Ghazni-Paktika highway began on 14 May, but failed to get beyond the outskirts of Ghazni city. Residents in Andar told AAN the insurgents have distributed letters to officials offering amnesties: if they surrender their weapons and go home, they have been told, they will not be harmed. Provincial council member Ahmad Faqiri warned that “If the district doesn’t get supplies and reinforcements, there will be a disaster.” Local people have been waiting, as they have all winter, for the Taleban to again attack the district centre. In October 2017, it suffered an intense offensive and three-day siege – after the Taleban had blocked supply routes. (2) 60 Afghan National Police (ANP) and ANA managed to hold out against a Taleban force of 300 for three days, from 17 to 20 October. (Significantly, there were no longer any indigenous uprising or ALP forces still operating, only a small number of Shinwari ALP from Nangrahar, who did not fall back from their posts just outside the district centre on the road to the ANA base, to defend the town centre.) The Taleban onslaught was broken only by intense air strikes by US forces and the eventual arrival of ANSF reinforcements, including commandos. More than 70 people, including civilians, security forces and Taleban, were killed and injured in the attack. (3) The Taleban also captured pretty well the last of the territory they had lost to the uprisers in 2012. Government forces were left controlling just the district centre – now badly damaged – and four nearby villages. 2 / 20 Since the three-day siege, the ANA was making occasional forays against the Taleban and the insurgents were lobbing occasional rockets at the district centre and attacking ANP checkposts in the nearby villages. However, the government failed to regain control of any of the area round the district centre. Few people from outside town were risking coming to thebazaar and only three of the 16 families who fled the district centre and surrounding villages in October returned. The Taleban warned residents they would attack Andar again. They now fear that is imminent. What happens in Andar is strategically important. It lies on the east-west road joining Ghazni city (37 kilometres away) to Paktika province and forms one of the ‘gateways’ to Ghazni’s provincial capital. The main Kabul-Kandahar highway also passes through the western part of the district; insurgent control makes this vital road vulnerable to closure. The district also hosts one of the most important madrassas in Afghanistan: Nur ul-Mudares has, for decades, served as the religious hub for the whole south and south-east of Afghanistan, supplying top-level mullahs, madrassa teachers and imams. Andar also retains its political significance because of the 2012 uprising. Six years ago, it was the bellwether for those who hoped popular uprisings would lead to a routing of the Taleban. This dispatch looks at the reasons for the government’s failure there. The nature of the 2012 uprising Andar (also known as Shelgar) district went over to the Taleban insurgency very early on after the collapse of the Taleban regime, with young men who had mainly been madrassa students when the Taleban were in power taking up arms against the new government and its foreign backers as early as 2003. By 2012, Andar had been solidly held by the Taleban for years. Yet in May and June of that year, a new, local group of counter-insurgents formed. They called themselves De Melli Patsun Ghorzang (the National Uprising Movement), a term soon used for similar groups elsewhere in the country; members called themselves patsunian. In a rapid and unexpected campaign, the uprisers gained outright control of 46 out of the district’s 480 villages and stopped or reduced Taleban influence in others, so that the insurgents’ freedom of movement was hampered and constrained in about half of Andar (see detail here). The most immediate effect of the change of control was that schools, which the Taleban had closed in response to a government ban on unregistered motorcycles, which were being used to launch attacks, were re-opened. Many in the media, in government and among Afghanistan’s foreign backers hailed the event as a ‘popular uprising’. “Villagers take the counterinsurgency into their own hands,” reported The Economist. Radio Liberty described how “[a] group of angry Afghan villagers have got the Taliban scrambling after they mounted an unlikely rebellion against the insurgents in eastern [sic] Afghanistan – and won.” Meanwhile the Washington Times wrote that, “Fed up with the Taliban closing their schools and committing other acts of oppression men in a village about 100 miles south of Kabul took up arms late last spring and chased out the insurgents with no help from the Afghan government or U.S. military.” Influential American commentators, Frederick and Kimberly Kagan writing in the Wall Street Journal, differed in the detail, but not in their enthusiasm: 3 / 20 The Taliban attempted to crush this nascent resistance. But local fighters supported by NATO and Afghan forces defeated them, sending shock waves through the Taliban leadership and the Afghan government… As a result, many villages across Afghanistan are now modeling the “Andar Uprising,” by which they mean forming anti-Taliban groups that seek the help of NATO and the Afghan military. This phenomenon is not as widespread or pivotal as Iraq’s “Anbar Awakening” in 2006-07, when Sunni tribesmen helped turn the tide against al Qaeda-backed insurgents. But it is extremely important as a harbinger. Yes, as AAN research at the time found (read it here), the ‘uprising’ in 2012 was far messier than generally reported. This was an intra-militant struggle, rather than a case of popular resistance. The revolt was initiated by a group of young Hezb-e Islami members who had joined the Taleban. Their decision to move against their comrades was certainly buoyed up by widespread local discontent with the Andar Taleban’s particularly harsh rules; these included the widespread closure of schools and bans on development work and visiting the district centre, including the Mirai bazaar, which is located there. They had also forbidden mullahs from giving Islamic funerals to those killed by the Taleban because they worked with the government or were ‘spies’. Calling the rebellion a ‘popular uprising’, though, in the sense of an uprising organised and carried out by local communities was a misnomer. Local people, aside from the Hezbi fighters, were not actively involved.