WASHINGTON - The revelation by the New York Times on Wednesday that Ahmed Wali
Karzai, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, has long been on the
payroll of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), is only the tip of a much
bigger iceberg of heavy dependence by US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) counter-insurgency forces on Afghan warlords for security, according to
a recently published report and investigations by Australian and Canadian
journalists.
United States and other NATO military contingents operating in the provinces of
Afghanistan's predominantly Pashtun south and east have been hiring private
militias controlled by Afghan
warlords, according to these sources, to provide security for their forward
operating bases, other bases and to guard convoys.
General Stanley McChrystal, the US's chief in Afghanistan, has acknowledged
that US and NATO ties with warlords have been a cause of popular Afghan
alienation from foreign military forces. But the policy is not likely to be
reversed anytime soon, because US and NATO officials still have no alternative
to the security services the warlords provide.
A report published by the Center on International Cooperation at New York
University (NYU) in September notes that US and NATO contingents have
frequently hired security providers that are covertly owned by warlords who
have "ready-made" private militias which compete with state institutions for
power.
The report cites examples of major warlords or their relatives or allies who
have been contracted for security services in four provinces.
In Uruzgan province, both US and Australian special forces have contracted a
private army commanded by Colonel Matiullah Khan, called Kandak Amniante
Uruzgan, with 2,000 armed men, to provide security services on which their
bases there depend. That case was reported in detail in April 2008 by two
reporters for The Australian, Mark Dodd and Jeremy Kelly.
Khan's security force protects NATO's International Security Assistance Force
(ISAF) convoys on the main road from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt, where more than
1,000 Australian troops are based at Camp Holland, according to the article.
Khan gets US$340,000 per month - nearly $4.1 million annually - for getting two
convoys from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt safely each month. Khan, now police chief
in Uruzgan province, evidently got his private army from his uncle, Jan
Mohammad Khan, a commander who helped defeat the Taliban in Kandahar in 2001
and was then rewarded by President Karzai by being named governor of Uruzgan in
2002.
The Australian Defense Force claimed to The Australian that Khan was paid by
the Afghan Ministry of Interior to provide security on the main highways of
Uruzgan province. The Australian military had previously refused to confirm or
deny Australian payments to Khan.
CanWest News Service's Mike Blanchfield and Andrew Mayeda reported in November
2007 that the Canadian military had hired a "General Gulalai" to provide
security for an undisclosed forward operating base. Gulalai is a warlord in
southern Afghanistan who drove the Taliban out of Kandahar in 2001.
The same reporters revealed that Colonel Haji Toorjan, a local warlord allied
with Kandahar governor and major warlord Gul Agha Sherzai, was hired to provide
security for Camp Nathan Smith in Kandahar City, where Canada's provincial
construction team is located.
Blanchfield and Mayeda found that the Canadian military had given 29 contracts
worth $1.14 million to a company identified as "Sherzai", suggesting strongly
that the former governor of Kandahar, who had become governor of Nangarhar
province, was the owner.
The Canadian military refused to confirm whether Gul Agha Sherzai is indeed the
owner.
In Badakhshan province, General Nazri Mahmed, a warlord who is said to "control
a significant portion of the province's lucrative opium industry", has the
contract to provide security for the German Provincial Reconstruction Team,
according to the NYU report.
The report suggests that the US and NATO contingents were spending hundreds of
millions of dollars annually on contracts with Afghan security providers, most
of which are local power brokers guilty of human-rights abuses.
In addition to Ahmed Wali Karzai, it names Hashmat Karzai, another brother of
President Karzai, and Hamid Wardak, the son of Defense Minister Rahim Wardak,
as powerful figures who control private security firms that have gotten
security contracts without registering with the government.
Two anonymous United Nations sources cited in the report estimate that 1,000 to
1,500 unregistered armed security groups have been "employed, trained, and
armed by ISAF" and "Coalition Forces" for security services. As many as 120,000
armed individuals are estimated by the UN sources to belong to about 5,000
private militias in Afghanistan.
Most Afghan warlords are widely reviled, mainly because the private armies they
continue to control carry out theft and violence against civilians without any
accountability.
In his initial assessment last August, McChrystal referred to "public anger and
alienation" toward ISAF, of which he is commander, as a result of the
perception that ISAF is "complicit" in "widespread corruption and abuse of
power".
That remark suggests that McChrystal, who had carried out the special forces'
policy of relying on Afghan warlords for security in the past, was now
expressing concern about its political consequences.
Jake Sherman, a co-author of the NYU report, was a United Nations political
officer involved in the effort to disarm warlords from 2003 to 2005. He is
skeptical that US policy ties with the warlords will end.
"I don't see how the US and other contingents could sustain forward operating
bases without paying these guys," said Sherman in an interview with Inter Press
Service (IPS).
Beyond their continuing dependence on the warlords for security services,
Sherman sees another reason for keeping them on the payroll. If the US and NATO
military commanders tried to cut their ties with the private militias, Sherman
said the warlords "would actually become a security threat".
Sherman recalled that during his period working for the UN in northern
Afghanistan, local police were hired to guard a World Food Program warehouse in
Badakhshan. After a rocket attack on the warehouse, an investigation quickly
turned up the fact that the police themselves had carried out the attack to
pressure the UN to hire more guards.
The present US and NATO dependence on warlord armies is rooted in the policy of
the George W Bush administration in the early years after the ouster of the
Taliban regime in late 2001.
The CIA put the commanders of the forces who had defeated the Taliban on the
payroll and gave them weapons and communications equipment to help US
counter-terrorism squads locate any al-Qaeda remnants in Afghanistan.
The commanders used the US support to consolidate their political control over
different provinces or sub-provincial areas. Human Rights Watch observed in a
June 2002 report on the new relationships forged between the United States and
the warlords, "While the US government does not view this policy as actively
supporting local warlords, the distinction is often lost on Afghan civilians
who see coalition forces openly interacting with the warlords."
Larry Goodson of the National War College, who participated in the 2002 process
called the loya jirga under which the first post-Taliban Afghan
government was established, told IPS he had recommended from the beginning a
"de-warlordization" process, in which "we took nasty, sleazy characters and
turn them into less nasty, sleazy bosses".
But the warlords were kept on the payroll, Goodson recalls, mainly because the
troops controlled by the former commanders were seen as "force multipliers", in
a situation where foreign troops were in short supply.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in 2006.
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