Using Local Power structures

I am reading an excellent paper written by a foreign service officer about how to be a good adviser in the Islamic world. It is available here.

There was one story in particular that illustrated one of our key mistakes that we have only now reversed in Afghanistan.

“An American Commander in Afghanistan made an unannounced visit to a remote district of Heart Province. They traveled in a large convoy of more than 20 vehicles filled with well-armed American and Afghan soldiers, about 100 in all as a display meant to cow the district officials. The district administrator was summoned to appear before the colonel and subjected to a long public speech by the American about the necessity of collecting all the weapons held by the district residents. The Afghan administrator waited until the colonel was finished, and then said simply: “There are more than 200 villages in this district, and every house has a weapon. We have almost no police enforcement here. If you promise me that every time a village family has a problem you will come immediately from the capital to solve it, I will happily collect all the weapons. But Colonel, come unarmed and not with all these soldiers. You shouldn’t tell us to get rid of all our weapons unless you are brave enough to come alone and unarmed to talk about it.”

The most evident lesson from this story is the importance of providing local security to the population. It is clear the district officials did not trust the central government and the Americans to provide him with security and so their policy was doomed.

However, the more important question this raises is whether or not to work with local power structures or supplant them. By taking away weapons from the people, the Americans were trying to strengthen the hand of the central government and increase it's ability to rule its people. Central government as a power structure has never really existed in Afghanistan in a constructive way. Instead, power tends to be held at the local level.

I think that rather than trying to supplant these local power structures, we should try and coopt them to our cause. It is naive to think we can turn into Afghanistan into a country like the US. Victory there means reducing violence to culturally acceptable levels and it will probably never have a very effective central government. So, rather than exclusively building the central government, forming local militias to help fight the Taliban is the best method. We have only just started to do so. Progress will be slow and there are some downsides, but the strategy represents the best hope for Afghanistan.