1/10/2017 Interview transcript of Governor Fidai: Q. 2: I was governor of Maidan Wardak province from 2008 till 2014. It was the time that we piloted the Afghan Public Protection Force (APPF), I think it was one year after I went to Maidan Wardak as the governor. Which unfortunately didn’t show the desired results, most probably didn’t fulfill the expectations of our international partners and therefore it didn’t get further funding. I was also one of the pioneers to start the local councils at the district level in the province, the model was jointly adopted by the USAID and IDLG, later on, as the Social Outreach Councils. Which they modified and therefore, unfortunately, didn’t prove to elect true community leaders. They made it a kind of political bribery to the community elders that the government like. The initial concept was that we bring true leaders to cooperate on security issues, but government decided to add national security department’s vetting to the process and bring only those people that we like. Q. 3: Most of the stability programs were short term, their projects were short term. They were actually experimental with no actual linkage to a long term stability strategy. I can also say they were more like relief programs, just to treat the existing problems for short time. I will go again to the example of social outreach councils. We wanted them to be people who will go back and forth between the government and the people. But what ASOP elected were people who even couldn’t go to their village. They were just there to receive their salaries of 200, I think. The program would have stopped at any time as soon as the money was discontinued. I didn’t see a link between the method of ASOP councils’ elections, vetting process and any long term stability or development. I say that for successful stability programs we needed a vision, followed by some emergency relief type program to decrease the effects of military and other security operations, followed by development and finally stability interventions. Implementing stability programs in isolation was not useful. Because stability programs were implemented mostly in those areas where American military serge had happened and it was accompanied by problems that needed to be addressed. Unfortunately stability programs were seen as means of sustain military achievement, which could have had long term impact. There was not logical sequencing in the programs. Can you tell me what the policy that guided the stability interventions was? Most of them were listening to the complaints and demands of the people and designing projects for to address those. One thing happened with stability programs was that individual capacities were built, but capacity of the government as an institution was mainly left intact. Q. 4: I think only Afghan Local Police (ALP) was an area where we agreed with the Americans. It was a success too compared to other programs for stability. Americans lacked a strong political commitment to stability in Afghanistan. It looked like they were experimenting their strategy and policy here. Government (Afghan) wanted to support ALP and make a force of districts at the provincial level. In the start we defined ALP as a force of the people of the province fighting for the province. Americans saw it as village force fighting for village, not the district or the province. We were defining the term Local at the province level, while Americans were defining it at the village level. Finally we agreed to have it at the district level. Definition was important, because logistic arrangements were proposed differently. Government’s vision was to change the local police to a common police force in the province that will participate in the battles against the insurgents. But Americans opposed the idea of getting them involved in the anti-insurgency operations, while we saw that role inevitable. We proposed that ALP should be linked to the provincial councils and must be vetted by them. Americans didn’t agree to our proposals, they were stressing to make this force a village force and proposed that the vetting should also take place at the village level. Problem was that we were not able to hold accountable those people from the village that who vetted the local police, because they had no obligation to respond to us. If we had involved the provincial councils we could have easily held them accountable for their selection and recommendation of a person to the local police. I was against the involvement of the national security department in the screening process of the local police. Because that department was dealing this issue politically and personal choices were involved. I also proposed a quick reaction force of the Afghan national army, of about 50 persons, to be present in the province to support the ALP in case they need support. Americans said no, and stressed that ANP and ANA should provide support. I knew complexity of the command and control and resources allocation in the ANA and ANP and knew they are not able provide on time support. So we had problems right from the design stage of the program. Q. 5: I think stability programs could have been more effective if the implementers had listened to the right people. Unfortunately, they didn’t, if there was a disagreement at the local level about something the implementers will come to the provincial office and ask for help. If we didn’t impose their decision on the local level they would go to the center and get agreement of the officials at the central level and then impose the decision on us in the province and districts. This approach of just looking for an agreement of the government officials had affected all the follow up activities. It led to identification of wrong local approaches, local authorities used to just symbolically appear in the meetings without active participation. And obviously it was not leading to build capacity of the district authorities, because there used to be a distance between the implementing staff and the district officials. Q. 6: Back then I proposed something, my proposal to look for the historic background of a district then come up with some projects that has some history in that place. For example, I proposed that let us establish ALP first in those districts that have a history of Arbakai (local militias) and districts that don’t have a history of Arbakai, let us strengthen their national police units. A part of the arrangement that I proposed was that let us take all the resources of national police out of Paktika and give it to the police in Baghlan and take all the resources of local police out of Baghlan and give it to Paktika. Problem was in the misunderstanding of stability and security terms. If this approach was implemented both the south and north would have had longer stability. Problem with arming local police in the north was that local commanders, who were involved in the internal wars of 80s and 90s, took advantage of the local police program. And when they saw the international forces out, they started to revert back to their rivalries of 90s. The reason that south stayed relatively stable for longer time wat that in many southern provinces people didn’t go through sever group fights in 80s and 90s. Old group rivalries are a reason for instability. Second, I think general crime rate was higher in the north so there were already groups ready to make the system instable. I am not trying to rule out the possibility that stability programs helped. I think these were valuable programs, these programs had a good effect and people benefited from them. In some case even Taliban took advantage of the stability programs too. I mean indirectly benefited. In the south Taliban fought more battles so more military operation took place against them. I think a large number of targeted military operations in the south helped to remove some important Taliban and enabled the districts to stay calm for a longer time. Q. 7: My conservative idea is that for stability you have to implement laws with seriousness and laws must have a relation with the belief system of the people. In Afghanistan understanding of the people from law is that it is a part of the religion, so anything imposed on them in the name of Islam they accept it, because they consider it a part of the framework of their understanding. Taliban are using this belief framework for their legitimacy, if we can make people understand the reality that actions of Taliban are not part of the religion in reality, they will lose legitimacy. We somehow must take away this legitimacy from Taliban. If we establish special terrorism court on the local level, which will try cases against Taliban according to the rules of Shariah, and sentence them according to the Hadoods (capital punishments) of Shariah they will lose their legitimacy. We must also try them in the cases of narcotics. Currently we are bringing them to the normal courts, which slow and people already don’t trust the existing court system. I think piloting counter terrorism and Hadood courts is worth investment. Q. 8: Yes, I agree that presence of government is important, right now we have village, district and provinces. I propose that we should create another level too, which used to exist, Alaqadari (alaqadari used to be a sub-district unit, remote areas of a district used to have an Alaqadar, who used to do most of the jobs that a district governor can do).