It would be “just like the sons of Iraq,” he said, referring to the program used in Iraq which military commanders say helped turn around a failing war. “You got 90,000 Iraqis who switched sides, and are involved in protecting their hometowns against attack and violence.”

OK, distinctions time: the Sons of Iraq was a program that created — or, more accurately, recognized — militias. It gave them money, on some occasions weaponry, and stuff to do. This appears to be just a program to hand out cash. Presumably commanders would have leeway to implement it as they see fit. (Which can be a blessing and a curse. A blessing because commanders would have the flexibility to adjust to their local conditions. A curse because it runs the risk of outpacing broader strategies. Proof will come from what happens on the ground.)

Now, there’s already a tribal-auxiliary militia pilot program happening in Wardak Province, but this appears to be unrelated.

“I will go to all the tribal elders, the way I have done it in Nangarhar. And we will negotiate with the tribes who are supporting the Taliban,” Mr. Shirzai says, sitting in his bedroom at the governor’s mansion in the provincial capital, Jalalabad. “We don’t have to rely only on fighting and bombing and jet planes. That we use only for those people who won’t talk.”

Interestingly, he’s directly in favor of a Sons-of-Iraq-style tribal-militia program, something that the current government is at least halfway uncomfortable with:

Speaking with a handful of American military officers and officials after the March 5 security meeting, the governor said he was considering setting up village militias in districts of his province where the Taliban are strongest. The central government, with U.S. support, is setting up a similar pilot program in another part of the country.

Anyway, Shirzai is what you’d expect of a warlord: he gets his kickbacks, intimidates his rivals and everyone’s happy. (A Jalalabad shopkeeper tells The Journal, “Every politician in Afghanistan is a thief, but our governor doesn’t take all the money for himself. He is building our city.”) A friend of mine always wonders why the press refers to some corrupt foreign leaders as “warlords” and others with the more dignified “tribal leaders.” While the two aren’t exactly equivalent in this case — Shirzai’s tribal ties aren’t in Nangarhar — here at least the shorthand used for Afghanistan will at least remain consistent if Shirzai ends up becoming president, not that I have any idea how likely that is or isn’t. A blow against euphemism! Maybe if he was born in London, Shirzai would be called a Wide Boy.

–

TWI’s Twitter feed strikes fear in the hearts of warlords everywhere. Follow it here.

“This is not a militia, not an Arbakai,” Atmar said, referring to a traditional tribal volunteer security force, at a breakfast meeting for the press with the Afghan ministerial delegation that’s in town this week to advise the Obama Af-Pak strategy review. “This is not arming people outside the formal government structure.” Instead, he vowed, the APPF would be “part of the police force, but without the mandate of the police” to perform law enforcement functions, though the APPF would wear police uniforms and guard installations likes schools, roads and public buildings. “This frees assets from the police for community policing,” Atmar said. He also claimed that the APPF would amount to “accelerating” the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of militias.  Atmar’s ministry runs the program.

Atmar acknowledged that the upper house of the Afghan parliament has passed a resolution condemning the program — which is proceeding in pilot form in Wardak Province — but urged patience. Some of his countrymen “are behaving against the [counsel] of our famous proverb, ‘Don’t take your boots off before you see the water,’” Atmar said. “Don’t pass resolutions before you see the water. Don’t pass resolutions that will have no relevance whatsoever.”

The new entity, known as the Afghan Public Protection Force, is going to begin as a pilot program in Wardak Province, a central province that hosts part of the vital Highway 1 route to Kabul. Defense Minister Wardak said that the APPF was a response to the “pressing need for more troops on the ground” to protect the civilian population from Taliban attacks. Run through the Ministry of the Interior, representatives of the Afghan government will ask “30 to 40 influential people” in the province to nominate between 200 and 300 people to provide “public protection” but not “law enforcement.” The force will be under the normal chain of command established by the ministry in the province. Pressed by Politico’s David Cloud, Wardak said that the program could be expanded to “high threat areas.”

But Wardak didn’t appear entirely comfortable with the idea. He said that the Interior Ministry would need to “exercise maximum caution” to ensure that the program does not “create a new warlord or reinforce the old ones.” He explained the program was an emergency response to shortfalls in U.S., NATO and Afghan troops, and indicated that he thought the APPF program needed to be temporary. Recruits who prove “trustworthy [and] capable” will have opportunities to join the Afghan national army and police. But the program would ultimately be “disintegrated.”

This is worth watching. Much of the international effort in Afghanistan after the Taliban fled Kabul centered on disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of militias, and “militia” remains a dirty word in Afghanistan. Experimenting with auxiliary security forces, even under ministerial control, is a gamble. Wardak said in his opening remarks that abandoning “a strong central government” would mean “falling into the trap the enemy has laid.” He emphasized the risks of the approach as much as he did the opportunities it provides.

1. The 17,000 new troops are going to southern Afghanistan. Remember that this complement of new troops is in response to a request that McKiernan made to Central Command and the Pentagon last year. So he’s been thinking for a while about what to do with his reinforcements. The south is a big opium belt and basically a Taliban stronghold, where, McKiernan said, “we do not have sufficient security presence, an area that has deteriorated somewhat, an area where we need persistent security presence in order to fight a counterinsurgency and to shape clear, hold and build in support of a rapidly developing Afghan capacity.” In the area, the United States is “at best, stalemated.” The maneuverable Strykers are on their way to Afghanistan for what I think is the first time. We’ll see what kind of capability they provide against the insurgency. Get ready for 2009 to be the year of the battle for southern Afghanistan.

2. Notice what McKiernan did there? If you didn’t know he was in Afghanistan, you would think that quote described Iraq during the surge. Clear-hold-build is a strategy that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came up with out of thin air during congressional testimony in 2005, when that decidedly wasn’t military strategy in Iraq. The surge represented its first actual chance at implementation, except that Gen. David Petraeus interpreted “hold” to include the provision of security for the civilian population. McKiernan clearly thinks the strategy is appropriate for Afghanistan. In theory, it’s not wrong. But what we need to hear is how local circumstances influence his approach, so that it’s not a cookie-cutter formula imported from a much different war.

3. He needs money to accelerate the training of Afghan troops. Defense Secretary Bob Gates has warned that it’s necessary to have “an Afghan face” on the war. To that end, McKiernan is looking at expanding the size and the training of Afghan forces. Commendably, he said straight-up that he’ll need cash for that. Interestingly, he’s going to change the mission of his combat forces to incorporate training and mentoring, which have previously been more bifurcated than the training-through-combat effort has been in Iraq. “We want to bring it to the left” — that’s military jargon for “move it faster” — “which will require not only more trainers and more of a partnering, mentoring effort, but also additional funding to move it left.” Shorter McKiernan: Hey, Congress, if you want to make this the last big troop increase for the war, you’ll give me the money I’m about to ask for.

4. Not exactly Sons of Afghanistan. There’s been a lot of confusion over this. “I have never talked about tribal militias,” he interrupted a reporter. Instead, he said he’ll support a Kabul-directed program that runs from the Ministry of Interior to the Afghan National Police to better integrate locals in their security. That sounds more like a police recruitment program, but wow, is this mess still unclear. “The United States will not provide the money for the weapons. Those weapons will be provided by the Afghan government through the minister of interior.” I cannot tell without further reporting if this really is different from supporting tribal militias, or if McKiernan just can’t say that because it’s politically toxic in Afghanistan. It sounds like there are some differences, but it’s not clear that they’re the most relevant ones. (Maybe this is the adaptation of the Iraq strategy I wondered about above.)

5. This is probably the last troop increase. McKiernan acknowledged that he got about “two-thirds of what I asked for” from President Obama. He’s going to see if he can break the stalemate in the south before considering any further increase. But he indicated that he doesn’t want to break the emergency glass. “I don’t think I’m going to ask for more than I’ve already asked for.” Of course, he’s shy of what he’s already asked for, so he reserved, rhetorically, the right to go back to the well with Gates and Obama if he can’t change the situation in southern Afghanistan. Beyond that, he indicated he’ll look to Afghan capabilities and to NATO member-states for more troops if necessary. Good luck with that.

6. More troops doesn’t necessarily mean fewer airstrikes, but they’ll help. Airstrikes account for over 60 percent of U.S.-caused civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2008. I assumed that more infantrymen will mean a reduced reliance on the strikes. Not necessarily, McKiernan said, though he’d like to be more ground-centric. “You have to look at it in terms of the threat, in terms of the terrain. But I think there’s a possibility to have less reliance on air firepower.”

I agree with General Petraeus’s characterization of there are some that are reconcilable and there are some that are irreconcilable. And I think the effects that I would say are most important are what happens at the local level with fighters, those who wish to lay down their weapons, choose another future, maybe through other employment opportunities, through education, something that’s an alternative to fighting in an insurgency.

One alternative is to drill down on definitions of who is and who isn’t the Taliban. Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, has started to draw distinctions between those who fight the United States for ideological or religious reasons and those who fight for more transactional reasons, like money or fear or inter-tribal concerns. I don’t mean to imply that McKiernan is doing anything at all illegitimate. It’s important to have a taxonomy of what enemies you face, and why they fight you.

Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, seems to be going a step further. In October, Petraeus embraced Karzai’s Taliban outreach. But last month, at a big security confab in Washington, he left such outreach out of a presentation of what direction he thinks Afghanistan strategy needs to move in. Yesterday, though, Petraeus addressed the Munich Security Conference, and a version of the original outreach strategy was part of his remarks:

We also, in support of and in coordination with our Afghan partners, need to help promote local reconciliation, although this has to be done very carefully and in accordance with the principles established in the Afghan Constitution. In concert with and in support of our Afghan partners, we need to identify and separate the “irreconcilables” from the “reconcilables, striving to create the conditions that can make the reconcilables part of the solution, even as we kill, capture, or drive out the irreconcilables. In fact, programs already exist in this area and careful application of them will be essential in the effort to fracture and break off elements of the insurgency in order to get various groups to put down their weapons and support the legitimate constitution of Afghanistan.

Having said that, we must pursue the enemy relentlessly and tenaciously. True irreconcilables, again, must be killed, captured, or driven out of the area. And we cannot shrink from that any more than we can shrink from being willing to support Afghan reconciliation with those elements that show a willingness to reject the insurgents and help Afghan and ISAF forces.

There are some Iraq overtones here, though the parallel is inexact. In Iraq, the so-called “bottom-up reconciliation” strategy sought to give Sunni insurgents a stake in the Shiite-run government by hiring them as auxiliary security forces and trying to get the government to, eventually, foot the bill. That’s not, at least, explicit in this iteration of Petraeus’ proposal, but what does remain is the idea that you should fracture the insurgency by, basically, seeing if there are insurgent elements who can be placated or co-opted. And why not? That’s, most often, how insurgencies usually end.

Now, if it turns out no insurgent elements can be co-opted — or, at least, not at reasonable cost — then you’re in unwinnable-conflict territory. But you can’t know until you really make such a push — combined, as Petraeus notes, with tenacious military attacks on the irreconcilable to underscore the starkness of insurgent options — and none of your interests are materially harmed by doing so. Whether you call them “Taliban” or not is less important. And if not using the word helps you achieve the objective, so be it.

Now to find out what Richard Holbrooke and General-turned-Ambassador Karl Eikenberry think.

Basically, Gartenstein-Ross and Goodman report on and summarize a memorandum written by Sheikh Abu Risha, the brother of the slain leader of the Awakening. It’s an overview of an Awakening leader’s perspective on what made the Awakening click, but it doesn’t really add anything new: Al Qaeda overplayed its hand brutally; it helps to have a charismatic figure; it doesn’t help to offend Muslim sensibilities. Readers of Dave Kilcullen’s “Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt” essay from 2007 will be nodding their heads.

But what Abu Risha, Gartenstein-Ross and Goodman don’t deal with is whether the factors that led to the Awakening are in evidence in Afghanistan’s Pashtun areas. And that’s really the game: either the conditions are there, seen in the same way by the Pashtun tribes, or they’re not. Here’s the closest they come to addressing the point:

Abu Risha argues, nevertheless, that there are parallels between Afghanistan today and Iraq’s Anbar Province in 2006 and 2007. Most important, al Qaeda and affiliated groups in Afghanistan have created a “climate of terror” similar to what they created in Anbar, where “they murdered anyone who opposed or criticized their actions and behavior.” As in Anbar, he believes, an Awakening could help Afghanistan reverse its present deadly course.

But the trouble is this isn’t anything new for Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other affiliated groups have existed and operated in these fashions for, in some cases, 30 years (10 years in Al Qaeda’s case). By contrast, Al Qaeda was a foreign import to Anbar Province, arriving in 2003 and taking about four years to alienate the populace. But this is nothing new for the Afghan tribes. So why believe that the tribes are ready to flip now? If there’s evidence, the authors don’t present it. This boils down to saying it would be nice to have an Awakening in Afghanistan. And it would be!

Instead, what’s perhaps the most interesting part of the piece is that Abu Risha evidently doesn’t favor a plus-up of U.S. troops in Afghanistan:

“Keep U.S. forces’ and NATO forces’ movement in Afghan cities limited,” Abu Risha writes, “to only fight when needed, and control the Taliban insurgency and their expanded activities.” He suggests that scaling back U.S. and NATO activity will diminish public hostility to their mission.

A shame that the authors didn’t explore that further.

Admirably, the paper starts with basic principles — it’s even titled “Tell Me Why We’re There?” — and seeks to provide a ” clear articulation of U.S. interests in Afghanistan, a concise definition of what the coalition seeks to achieve there, and a detailed strategy to guide the effort.” It defines the worthy goals of policy negatively: “The Two No’s” — shades of CNAS’s “Three No’s” for Iraq in 2007, there — are “no sanctuary for terrorists with global reach in Afghanistan,” and “no broader regional meltdown.” If this sounds like a diminished expectation for policy, it’s not, really: authors and counterinsurgency luminaries David Kilcullen, John Nagl, Vikram Singh and Nate Fick says the strategy requires:

An internal balance between centralized and traditional power centers—not central government control everywhere—is the key to Afghan stability. Achieving this will require more military forces, but also a much greater commitment to good governance and to providing for the needs of the Afghan people where they live. The coalition will need to use its considerable leverage to counter Afghan government corruption at every level.

Oh, just that, fellas? Corruption in Afghanistan is, from what I saw, pretty endemic; and decentralized governance, from what people told me, was a contributing factor to it — the local leaders demanded kickbacks, and their provincial leaders demanded kickbacks, all the way up to Kabul. I’m not saying I have a better idea, just that CNAS’ proposals may be in greater tension than the paper discusses.

It also endorses integrating policy with Afghanistan and Pakistan’s neighbors, which presumably means the ‘stans, Iran and India. Interestingly, the paper doesn’t say anything about the prospect of either negotiating with the insurgency to try and fracture it; or building up Iraq-style tribal militias, two recent proposals. I wonder what’s up with that.

Either way, if you’re about to work in the Pentagon policy directorate, you should probably save yourself time and get Flournoy your notes on the CNAS paper by Monday morning.

Afghanistan’s government is preparing a pilot program in community policing that’s expected to debut in the near future, a senior Defense Department official said here today.

“Community policing”? If this were a police action, do you know who would be taking care of it? That’s right! The police. But I suppose “a pilot program in recruiting and arming tribal militias” might raise some objections, so out come the euphemisms.

But it gets worse. Morrell apparently denied that the war is going badly.

Whitman also addressed a reporter’s question about the tone of some recent media reports that the reporter said seem to imply that the Pentagon is telling incoming officials of President-elect Barack Obama’s administration that the campaign against terrorists in Afghanistan is not going well.

“That’s not the case at all,” Whitman emphasized. “And, that’s unfortunate. I think that any number of our commanders have said we’re not going to fail, and we’re not failing in Afghanistan.”…

[A]nyone who’d describe the situation in Afghanistan as being “in some kind of dire straits,” Whitman said, would be engaged in “a mischaracterization.”

Is Christmas Eve actually Iraq-In-2006 Nostalgia Day at the Pentagon? I’ll reserve judgment until I see the actual transcript, but this is dangerously close to denying the basic, on-display reality that Afghanistan has gotten way worse over the past two years. I thought we were done with this sort of crap in the Gates era.

Today Dexter Filkins of the New York Times explores the emerging Sons of Afghanistan plan and injects a healthy dose of skepticism. Apparently a pilot tribal-militia program is on track to start in Wardak in 2009.Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, has a very unhappy history of militias doing their own thing; and also unlike Iraq, where the Anbar Province revolt was a bottom-up response to the perfidies of Al Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate, this program is a top-down directive, through the U.S. military, to get tribal leaders to raise their own militias. Add to that the fact that the plan is a complete reversal of a U.S. and U.N. joint effort in the early days of the war to disarm Afghan militiamen. And the fact that the Afghan parliament voted this plan down already a few months ago.

“There will be fighting between Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns,” said Salih Mohammad Registani, a member of the Afghan Parliament and an ethnic Tajik. Mr. Registani raised the specter of the Arbaki, a Pashtun-dominated militia turned loose on other Afghans early in the 20th century.

“A civil war will start very soon,” he said.

Is that a proposition we really ought to be testing? One that could also inflame sectarianism in Afghanistan, which, at least on the basis of my admittedly short visit, I didn’t see in evidence?

What I did see was an overwhelming desire for security among the population. Lots of people said something to me that boiled down to, “When the Taliban were in power, the roads were safe, food was cheap and gas is cheap. Now the Americans are here and none of that is true.” The major factor that made the tribal revolt in Anbar work was that the population, including the extremists, understood that Al Qaeda offered them a bleaker future than even the occupation. Nothing like that exists in Afghanistan — or, at least, there is an alarming lack of evidence for that crucial proposition.

People need to take a very deep breath. To judge by the available evidence, the Afghan population wants security. It does not want more militias. The Afghan Senate has actually rejected this proposal explicitly. Is there any actual appetite among Afghans for a Sons-of-Afghanistan program? Or is this a case of hubristic Americans coming into Afghanistan and imposing a template from Iraq upon an overwhelmingly different country and overwhelmingly different set of conditions? You can tell what I suspect from the way I framed the question.

One more thing. I get a lot wrong. I believed with absolute certainty that the surge in 2007 had no chance of tamping down violence in Iraq. And I mean absolute certainty — not just that it wouldn’t work but that it couldn’t work. And clearly that was completely wrong. (It was still strategically the wrong thing to do, but that’s a separate argument.) If the tribal-militias proposal in Afghanistan is in fact a set course, I would like to be wrong about that as well.

But notice what we’re doing here by discussing the question in this way. We’re not talking about Afghanistan-qua-Afghanistan at all. Instead we’re talking about a series of meta-propositions and who was right and who was wrong about them, not first-order concerns about the wisdom, feasability, and drawbacks of the idea itself. And that is the sort of debate that in Washington substitutes for considering first-order problems, and it gets people needlessly killed. We cannot think in these terms anymore, because we know exactly where it leads. Merry Christmas.