Abridged COINdinista’s Guide to the Revised Resolute Support Mission
By John Jacobs, Director Atlantic Forum
This article was originally written in May 2018 and previously published in Atlantic Voices Vol 8. Nr. 8. Editing and publication of this article has been realized with the financial support of NATO Public Diplomacy Division.
Introduction
In light of new ideas about counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, based on proof of concept counterinsurgency taken from India, pro-government militias (PGMs) are high on the agenda again. In this paper, I examine the literature available on pro-government militias and examine the limited literature on pro-government militias in Afghanistan, in order to find gaps that require our attention. Using bibliographies made by Malejacq, Carey and Mitchell, I sought to examine gaps for academics focussing on militias, warlords or Afghanistan at large. Simultaneously I seek to contribute to the knowledge of military and political practitioners, COINdinistasf and outsiders alike, in the United States and other NATO allied countries going to Afghanistan, or those otherwise being involved with the Afghanistan desk by identifying gaps: the “known unknowns” about pro-government militias in Afghanistan.
Three decisions put Afghanistan back in the spotlight of the academic, journalist and policymaker debate. The first is the decision to launch a new “Surge” into Afghanistan (Sarwar 2017), and the reinforcement of Resolute Support Mission (RSM) that was agreed upon by defence ministers of Troop Contribution Countries (TCCs) in November 2017. The new surge stance in stark contrast to earlier “surrogate” approaches (K. H. Smith 2006)for peacebuilding in Afghanistan. The new surge seems to be intended to make less use of militias than earlier counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics employed in Afghanistan, while simultaneously President Ashraf Ghani seeks to build an “Afghan National Army Territorial Force”, a 20,000-strong militia (Rasmussen 2017). By pursuing a new pro-government militia (PGM), Ghani seems to contradict the U.S. strategy.
We saw a disinterest in militias from the U.S. Government reflected in the new surge, the ousting of McMaster. While at the same time the invitation for peace talks and President Ghani’s plan for the Afghan National Army Territorial Forces raises questions about the role and nature of militias and what role they will play in the revised Resolute Support Mission. Before delving further into this discussion, however, let us first explore the debate on pro-government militias, before returning to Afghanistan.
Defining Pro-Government Militias
As a starting point, I will use the Oxford Bibliography entry by dr. Romain Malejacq on pro-government militias (Malejacq 2017b). Malejacq finds that:
“Militias have been correspondingly associated with (post)-conflict areas where the
rule of law is absent, or circumvented by the regime”.
Over the years political scientists have focussed on defining militias more narrowly and use the term restrictively in the context of civil war. Within the main contributors to the literature, we can distinguish two main definitions.
The definition used in this paper is developed by Carey and Mitchell. They define Pro-Government Militias (PGMs) according to four criteria (Carey, Mitchell, and Lowe 2013), a PGM: (1) is (by media sources) “identified as pro-government or sponsored by the government (national or subnational)”, (2) is not “the regular state security force as described in government information or other sources on armed forces and police”, (3) is “armed and equipped for violence (this criterion is not limited to firearms; some groups are equipped with machetes or clubs)”, and (4) has “some evidence of organisation”, in order to “exclude a “flash” or spontaneous mob”. Based on this definition Carey et al. pursuit the frivolous task of constructing a database of PGMs.
Structural Factors
There is plenty of literature on failed states, and the conditions of state collapse (and consequences of state collapse) that touch upon militias. Militias may be seen as either the cause, consequence or symptom of state failure. The literature on the cause of the emergence of pro-government militias is much more limited. Ariel Ahram attempts to identify the structural conditions explaining the emergence of pro-government militias in Late Developing States (LDSs) (Ahram 2011a; Ahram 2011b), however the work of Ahram does not apply to Afghanistan and subsequently Ahram did not include Afghanistan in this dataset.
We may also look at the work of Asal, Early and Schulzke (2015), who investigates under what circumstances ethnic minority organisations (EMOs) are likely to form militias. They conclude that formation is linked to the level of repression and vilification by their government. However, they exclude Afghanistan from their data set as well, but the reason to do so is unclear. In a comparative study on the differences between PGMs and Paramilitaries (Böhmelt and Clayton 2018), Afghanistan is again absent.
The exclusion of Afghanistan in such studies means two things: first, there is room and avenue for exploration for academic researchers, but second and most importantly civilian and military policymakers would do well to take this into account when pushing proof of concept approaches from elsewhere. Afghanistan, after all, is not like any of the other cases, and they may find the concept to be less proven when applied to Afghanistan.
States and Militias
As the name implies, pro-government militias have a strong relationship with their government, with whom they share an interest (Tar 2005). For Afghanistan, the intermediary role of the warlord and his loyalty play a role in the relationship as well, with Afghanistan’s militias having a stronger relationship to their patron than to the Ghani administration, or the Karzai administration before him. Variations of this relationship appear at the state or federal level (Baker 2002). Byman’s research on foreign fighters finds that militias rely heavily on the very states they reject (Byman 2017).
Delegating the use of violence to militias is accompanied with a trade-off between the pro-government militia’s capabilities and the state’s ability to control the militia (Biberman 2016a). Her work did not trigger any meaningful reactions, but as her focus is partly on India and Ghani’s plans suggest copying elements of India’s counterinsurgency militia’s it may be worthwhile to investigate further.
The Kunduz failure in 2015 (Rasmussen 2015)is seen as Afghanistan’s failure to employ pro-government militias (the ALP and informal militias in the Kunduz province) in counterinsurgency operations.
Leenders and Giustozzi (2017)look at the Assad Regime in Syria and Assad’s ability to avoid state disintegration while outsourcing a majority of its violence capabilities to the National Defence Force (NDF), a pro-government militia. Comparing the NDF with the Afghan Local Police and the proposed Afghan National Army Territorial Force may lead to insights in the dynamic between the delegation of violence to militias and the disintegration and failure of the state in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Counterinsurgency and Militias
Pro-government militias have often been tools for governments facing insurgents. While providing many advantages as counterinsurgents, pro-government militias are not without challenges. The advantages and disadvantages of pro-government militias as counterinsurgents have been heavily discussed and analysed in light of their uses in Iraq and Afghanistan for this purpose, but also in other post-World War II and colonial time cases.
Since the moment Patreaus and McCrystal had their say in Iraq following Operation Red Dawn, and in Afghanistan as part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), pro-government militias have played a fundamental role in the U.S. military strategy. The strategy led to the development of the counterinsurgency field manual, or US FM 3-24 (Department of the Army 2006). Militias have become an essential part of ISAF counterinsurgency operations in Iraq, through the Anbar Awakening (Kagan 2007; Long 2008) and Afghanistan (Schmeidl and Karokhail 2009).
In the early months of 2010, when faced with a resurgence of the Taliban and the decline of the Karzai government at the end of 2009, the U.S. army recruited, armed and gave financial support to local militias, simultaneously implementing a counterinsurgency strategy (Malejacq 2016). This militia would later become the Afghan Local Police (ALP). The ALP was to be compounded with a 30,000 U.S. force committed by U.S. President Obama a few months earlier. However as fast as the counterinsurgency rose, it was also short-lived and fell apart again when McCrystal and Petraeus left Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011 respectively (Elias 2018).
New Plans in Afghanistan
Nevertheless, the new plans for counterinsurgency and the proposed Afghan National Army Territorial Force deserve some scrutiny. According to Mashal (2017), around the time President Trump announced the new Afghanistan Strategy in August 2017, a delegation of U.S. and Afghan officials visited New Delhi to learn more about the Indian approach to counterinsurgency. Clark and Osman further explore this avenue (2017)and find that the Ghani administration and its U.S. backers are considering a new militia force, an army version of the ALP, named the Afghan National Army Territorial Force. In New Delphi, they hoped to find inspiration from the Indian Territorial Army.
The comparative literature on India and other counterinsurgent operations is limited, therefore offering a broad research avenue for new research. Both Biberman’s comparative study on India and Turkey (Biberman 2016a), as well as Routray’s evaluation of India’s Grand Strategy (Routray 2017), appear to be good starting points.
Conclusion
This paper gave an overview of discussions related to Militias and Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. It is by no means a comprehensive account but instead identified gaps in academic and policy research that need to be filled. Military and political practitioners in NATO countries going to Afghanistan or otherwise being involved with Afghanistan would do well to be aware of these gaps and complexities, while scholar and researchers should make haste to fill in the gaps as soon as possible to accurately give support to NATO and its allies. These gaps are both challenges and opportunities.
Between using militias for political entrepreneurship or as a tool of repression, in general, the explanation on the reason why Afghanistan has such a rich militia entanglement is limited. This, again, is primarily caused by the exclusion of Afghanistan in data sets. For policymakers, it is crucial to be aware of this exclusion when crafting policy based on the academic input.
Better covered in the literature is the use of militias for the purpose of counterinsurgency. The use of militias for COIN has been the dominant approach in the first one and a half decade of the long war in Afghanistan. However, there seems to be a paradox with the Trump administration appearing to have lost interest in the use of militias or counterinsurgency altogether. Meanwhile, Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani is pushing for more militias, supposedly backed by both NATO and the U.S. Military. Whether it is straightforward Trump saying one thing and Mattis doing something else, or whether the paradox is more complicated is a gap in our understanding that needs to be filled. Without this understanding, the new surge is doomed to fail.
Should the idea of a new Afghan National Army Territorial Force persist and put into practice modelled after the Indian Territorial Army, then Indian’s history and approach to counterinsurgency are in much need of attention, with the current stock of English literature being limited. The comparative research of Biberman (Routray 2017)and the recent account of India’s success in counterinsurgency (Ucko 2011)would be good starting points. Aside from looking eastward, researchers and policymakers may also look at Syria’s National Defense Force. Even though Syria delegated much of its monopoly of violence to the NDF, it did not lead to ‘state failure’or the collapse of the Syrian government.
Finally worthy of investigation is to research where Karzai went wrong, or what factors played a role in his inability to control militias and prevent bandwagoning and side switching. For Ghani, the future does not look too bright with the Islamic State insurgency in June 2017 in Southwest Jowzjan and the continuing fighting in Maimana. All in all, it appears Western allies will be staying in Afghanistan for quite a while longer.