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Karzai agrees to creation of village defence force | The Afghan government has approved a program to establish local defense forces that American military officials hope will help the country’s remote areas thwart attacks by Taliban insurgents. Though details of the plan are sketchy, but Americans have been insisting
that such a force needs to be established to combat rising violence. The Afghan
government has agreed to the proposal after over 12 days of talks. Gen. David
H. Petraeus, the new NATO commander, is reported to have overcome the objections
of President Hamid Karzai, who was worried that the presence of such forces could
harden into militias that his weak government could not control. In the end, the
two sides agreed that the forces would be under the supervision of the Afghan
Interior Ministry, which will also be their paymaster. “They would not be militias.
These would be government-formed, government-paid, government-uniformed local
police units who would keep any eye out for bad guys — in their neighborhoods,
in their communities — and who would, in turn, work with the Afghan police forces
and the Afghan Army, to keep them out of their towns. It is, he added, “a temporary
solution to a very real, near-term problem,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon
spokesman, at a briefing in Washington on Wednesday. The program borrows from
the largely successful Awakening groups that General Petraeus created in Iraq,
though the two programs would not be identical, the New York Times reports. Unlike
the Iraqi units, the Afghan forces would not be composed of insurgents who had
switched sides. They would be similar as a lightly armed, trained and, significantly,
paid force in a nation starving for jobs. In fact, the program runs the risk of
becoming too popular — it will create a demand in poor communities around the
nation that could turn it into an unwieldy and ineffective job creation program.
While some American officials said the forces could have as many as 10,000 people
enrolled, Afghan officials indicated that they wanted to keep them small, especially
in the beginning. American military officials said they would be intimately involved,
and that United States Special Forces units, which have created smaller-scale
programs locally, especially in southern Afghanistan, would continue to set up
and train the forces. |
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