The first stages of a plan to raise militias against the Afghan insurgency will involve giving 1,200 assault rifles to local men with little training, according to documents that reveal fresh details about the controversial program.
The Afghan Public Protection Force was cloaked in secrecy when its existence was announced last month, as government officials refused to confirm even the location where the new units are being recruited. The few details released so far have raised concerns that the APPF will repeat previous failed experiments with tribal militias in Afghanistan, where hired gunmen have a long history of stoking disarray and rebellion.
But with the number of Taliban attacks this winter reaching twice the levels seen last year, the United States is moving quickly to sponsor new security forces that have drawn comparisons with the Awakening Councils that have helped quell the violence in Iraq.
A 23-page PowerPoint briefing obtained by The Globe and Mail suggests the Afghan government wants the new militiamen in some districts to vastly outnumber the police.
The document shows the first units will be organized in Saydabad district of Wardak province, southwest of Kabul. They will eventually cover the province with 1,200 uniformed men carrying Czech-made assault rifles and driving white Ford Rangers, dwarfing the province's current police force, officially listed at 688 officers.
Interior Minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar will command the APPF, but in an interview this week he declined to confirm most details about the new unit.
“It will be launched pretty soon, and it will be launched in several districts, not just one,” Mr. Atmar said. “So far we've been working on finalizing the concept and the legal aspects of it, and mobilizing resources and then putting together operational plans.”
The minister sketched the broad outlines of the plan, however, saying the APPF model could eventually transform the Kandahar districts of Zhari and Panjwai, where Canadians have been fighting in recent years.
Grabbing a sheet of paper, the minister drew a three-pronged organizational chart to indicate how he intends to prop up the beleaguered police. The first pillar, the regular police, have too often been assigned basic tasks such as protecting roads, schools and government buildings, he said: “They are reduced to simply guards.”
The minister drew two more pillars beside the police, labelling one the Anti-Crime Division and the other the APPF. In a war-torn district such as Panjwai, he said, approximately 90 regular police could be supported by perhaps six highly trained investigators from the new Anti-Crime Division, and roughly 200 APPF. The new APPF units might have less than four weeks training, he said, but he insisted they cannot be labelled tribal militias.
“They will be trained, uniformed, paid by the government,” he said.
A Western official said the government appears to be envisioning a rapid expansion of the APPF beyond the pilot program in Wardak, with plans to distribute as many as 9,000 light weapons in seven provinces along the main highway that rings the country.
But a senior Afghan official said such plans do not yet exist, and the government's first priority is proving the concept in Wardak.
Hastily assembled units have a poor track record in Afghanistan. Canadian soldiers watched their hard-won ground in the Panjwai valley fall into chaos in 2007 as the poorly trained Afghan National Auxiliary Police got into firefights with their fellow security forces and abandoned their posts. The auxiliary police were soon scrapped.
Canada has donated millions of dollars for programs aimed at disbanding Afghanistan's illegal militias and recovering their weapons, a process that some observers say has been undermined by the establishment of new armed groups.
The PowerPoint presentation by the Ministry of the Interior appears to anticipate hard questions about the APPF's similarity to other discredited militias.
“This is NOT ‘tribal' or ‘militia' – it is community-based security,” the document says, adding: “This is NOT the Afghan National Auxiliary Police.”
These assurances drew a bitter laugh from a Western official in Kabul. “You can't make something different,” he said, “just by saying it's not the same thing.”
In an interview with The Canadian Press last year, Defence Minister Peter MacKay said Ottawa does not support plans for tribal militias and suggested they could be “counterproductive.”
But asked yesterday about the possibility of APPF units in Kandahar, the commander of Canada's battle group said his soldiers could use the help.
“In my view, the more Afghan forces we can get engaged with the population, the better,” Lieutenant-Colonel Roger Barrett said.
