New Afghan Militias Plan Worries Rights Commissioner

The US military is implementing a controversial plan to assist Afghan militias to fight the Taliban in select areas of the country. This program, officially called the Community Defense Initiative (CDI), falls outside the authority of the NATO mission, and is being run by US Special Forces. Supporters of the CDI argue it will empower communities to take responsibility for their own security at a time when insurgents are carrying out an increasing number of deadly attacks on civilians. But critics of the plan say the creation of new militias will roll back hard-won progress on disarmament, place local populations at risk of abuse, and undermine the official security forces. Change.org asked Nader Nadery, the transitional justice commissioner for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), to share his opinion on the militias support program.

“Creating militias is not a good thing at all,” Nadery told Change.org during a phone interview on 23 Nov. “Experience has shown that creating militias does not support the rule of law in Afghanistan.”

Nadery believes the CDI threatens hard-won disarmament gains in a country awash with weapons and armed groups after thirty years of conflict. “It goes against the objective of disarming illegally armed groups,” he said.

International donors have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) programs in Afghanistan since 2002, and more than 60,000 former combatants were demobilized and disarmed, and 50,000 reintegrated into their communities through the United Nations-run Afghan New Beginnings Program. This phase of DDR ended in 2005, with at least tens of thousands of armed men still serving in hundreds of illegal armed groups throughout the country. Some of these groups were linked to politicians and warlords, others to criminal gangs.

The Disbandment of Illegal Armed Groups (DIAG) program, coordinated by the Afghan government and international donors, was initiated to disarm and demobilize remaining illegal armed groups. Under its current mandate, the DIAG program is set to run until 2011, but the US military’s militia plan, with its goal of bolstering existing anti-Taliban militias and spurring the formation of new ones, may render further disarmament impossible in much of the country.

Nadery dismissed the idea that support for new local militias will lead to any gains in security. “These new militias could become a source of instability themselves,” he said. “They will turn to local warlords immediately in a time when the government doesn’t have the ability to control them.”

The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission has not been involved in official discussions of the current militias program, Nadery said, but it was consulted a year ago, when a similar plan was floated.

“We had face to face meetings with the Ministries of Defense and Interior requesting more clarification and caveats,” said Nadery. “If it was going to happen, we wanted only a pilot project and lots of restrictions.”

Specifically, the commission wanted the militias program, then called the Afghan Public Protection Force, closely supervised by and tied to the central government, and not prematurely expanded beyond its pilot area of Wardak Province. That program now appears to have been sidelined in favor of the wider and less transparent CDI.

“Now the program is moving ahead without consideration of any of these issues and against the goals of the disarmament process,” Nadery said. “This is not linked to any broader rule of law effort, and we are concerned.”

Militias and other illegal armed groups have been responsible for threatening and killing numerous civilians, including human rights activists, journalists and aidworkers in recent years.

(Photo 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dwbrown/ / CC BY-ND 2.0)

(Photo 2: Nader Nadery, Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.)