Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai told a meeting of UN and donor countries in Germany this week that he intends to create a 70,000-strong army, loyal to the Afghan government. The country needs an army. Warlords have been re-emerging since the spring. The central government’s writ runs largely in Kabul alone. Even there, they are struggling to control increasing lawlessness.
Afghanistan’s rival political factions, who are nearly all represented in the government, are nevertheless looking to their regional power bases where tribal and historic links give them, and not the government, the authority to run local affairs. Such has been the growing arrogance of the supporters of these warlords that they have sought to hamper the efforts of UN and other aid agencies and seize supplies and transport.
It is only the presence of the US military, largely in the east of the country, that is keeping some warlords in check. The Americans are engaged in their continuing campaign against Al-Qaeda and Taleban elements operating along the Pakistan border. Nevertheless, some US troops have also been training some 2,000 Afghan soldiers, selected apparently for their loyalty to the new government. They are undergoing intensive schooling. They will be used to help form the officer and non-commissioned officer cadres of the new military.
It is expected that once the new army, which initially will be paid for by the Americans and the British, is operational, it will become the only organization legally entitled to hold weapons. The different militias will be required to hand in their weapons.
This may all look good to the planners in the Pentagon but it requires little effort to see that this is a high-risk strategy. For a start, because Washington and London are going to be the primary paymasters for the new Afghan Army, it will be seen as a tool of their Afghan policy. This could, by extension, dangerously compromise Karzai’s government.
The first and biggest test will be when the warlords are required to disarm and cede control of their petty kingdoms to the Afghan army. No doubt US diplomats will have offered all sorts of inducements for the local chiefs to comply. However, will many of them really be prepared to hand over the authority, which they have been so busy re-establishing in recent months? The risk might not have been so great had the whole process of creating a strong central authority and military been started immediately the Taleban regime collapsed. Even more importantly, the local warlords and their people might have been better disposed to accept a strong Kabul government, if the promised massive aid flows had in fact arrived, if ordinary Afghans could see tangible benefits from the billions of dollars that have been pledged by the international community.
Aid and the assertion of Kabul’s central authority must go hand in hand. So far they have not. Creating a new Afghan army without rebuilding and substantially enhancing the former economic fabric of the country, is a recipe for disaster. Afghanistan could end up like one of the Central American republics in whose affairs the US used to interfere so damagingly. It could find itself with a strong army and nothing else except an unwinnable range war on its hands, and the country would be plunged back into its awful cycle of violence.
