"The U.S. has trained and supported paramilitary groups in Afghanistan that have committed summary executions, forcibly disappeared people and have been behind more than a dozen serious abuse cases in the last 18 months, a human rights organization said Thursday.Here's the thing.
Afghan strike forces, which have been accused of raiding medical facilities and killing civilians in night raids on their homes, sometimes in front of their families, are largely trained and overseen by the CIA, Human Rights Watch said in a report released Thursday."
We the People have never really come to any sort of sensible terms our use of mercenary militias in places like Vietnam or Nicaragua. The covert ops guys descended from Donovan's OSS have always had a fondness for using local jamokes to do the dirty work that regular joes either can't or won't, or, worse, get all fucked up personally or organizationally from doing.
Guerrilla wars are filthy because of their very nature. They're civil wars, and civil wars are fundamentally ugly. Adding irregulars and guerrillas just adds to the basic ugliness.
The problem I have with this isn't so much that it's a thing. If Afghans are going have a civil war, I'd just as soon that it be with Afghans and not Americans. And if they're going to have a guerrilla war, I'd just as soon it be with Afghan guerrillas and not Americans leading or driving Afghan guerrillas.
And it's not the basic brutal ugliness of this fight, either. Are these militias murdering people and doing other war-crime stuff? Sure they are. That's what happens when you give people firearms and turn them loose on people who don't have them without some sort of organizational control. "Militia" is just a sanitized term for "mob of murderous fucksticks" that lurks inside every armed group of people who have no institutional control over how they use those arms.
No, it's that we don't seem to learn that arming one mob to kill another mob (along with poor random bastards that have what "our" armed mob wants, or just for pure shits-and-giggles) doesn't do a goddamn thing geopolitically to solve civil war problems without some sort of genuine political solution available. There were negotiations going on that were supposedly leading to some sort of heading-towards-a-solution back in late summer, but part of the Art of the Deal appears to be screwing up that sort of deal, so we're back to Square Zero, only with...death squads?
Honestly. It's like we're the fucking Bourbons ("Personne n'est corrigé; personne n'a su ni rien oublier ni rien apprendre.") except with worse taste in entertainment and mistresses.
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Afghan Local Police (ALP)
Afghan National Auxiliary Police (ANAP)
Afghan Public Protection Force (APPF)
Afghan Public Protection Police (AP3)
Afghan Social Outreach Program (ASOP)
Community Defense Forces (CDF)
Community Defense Initiative (CDI)/ Local Defense Initiative (LDI)
Interim Security for Critical Infrastructure (ISCI)
These are all names for paramilitary armed groups created by the US forces or ISAF while in Afghanistan.
Localized armed groups, from tribal armies to private security companies, criminal gangs, and proto-insurgents, have long been the scourge of Afghanistan’s civilian population.
The general term for these groups in Pashto is “arbakai”, or militia.
It was Coalition policy to create more of these forces.
It's even here in US doctrine:
Paragraph 3-125 of Section 3 of Chapter 3 of the FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency says: “If adequate HN [Host Nation] security forces are not available, units should consider hiring and training local paramilitary forces to secure the cleared village or neighborhood. Not only do the members of the paramilitary have a stake in their area’s security, they also receive a wage. Providing jobs stimulates the economy. Having a job improves morale and allows locals to become a potential member of the local governmental process.”
I think the CIA is just better at this than the Army.
Brian
PS: glad to see you are still posting - I check back frequently
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