Bad Guys vs. Worse Guys in Afghanistan
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One afternoon this summer, in a park beside the Ajmil River, I sat with seven residents of Shahabuddin, a collection of villages in northern Afghanistan’s Baghlan Province. It was the first week of Ramadan, and the park was almost empty, but still the men — some middle-aged, others stooped and gray-bearded — whispered conspiratorially and became silent whenever anybody walked close. Several minutes into our conversation, one of the younger men, who’d been mutely worrying at a piece of grass, rose and abruptly stalked off. The others, embarrassed, apologized for him. “If Nur-ul Haq finds out we spoke to you,” one of them explained, “he will kill us.”
Nur-ul Haq is the commander of the Afghan Local Police in Shahabuddin. Since last winter, he has been primarily responsible for the security of the several thousand families living there. As one of the elders warily eyed two men in turbans squatting under some nearby shade, he told me that Haq and his local police had been felling people’s trees and selling them as timber. Another of the elders joined in and named three men whom he accused Haq of murdering. “These three murders are known to everyone,” he said. “Nobody knows how many others he has killed.” The former principal of a local school said that he and his eight brothers were forced to leave their village after they reported to the government that the local police had seized their family’s land. “Nur-ul Haq threatened to come with tanks and take us all out of our home and kill us if we continued to complain about him,” the man claimed, adding that he and his brothers were considering moving to Pakistan.
The elders estimated that more than 100 families had fled Shahabuddin because of the local police. The people were defenseless, they said, and indeed they all seemed cowed and frightened. But before we parted ways, one of them, with a note of defiance, assured me: “Nur-ul Haq has no place in this province. As long as the foreign troops are here, he is king. The minute they go, he should leave the country.” Another agreed: “I bet he can’t stay for one night in Baghlan if there are no foreign troops.” Grinning at the prospect, the old man added, “The people will rise against him.”
Haq’s unit is one of 51 local police forces that have been established across rural Afghanistan over the last year, employing more than 8,000 villagers. Eventually, the force is expected to reach 30,000 in more than 100 sites. The rapid rollout reflects a spirited commitment to the program by the U.S. military, which claims that local police throughout the country have subdued insurgents and helped tip formerly ambivalent communities toward the government. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called the Afghan Local Police “potentially a game-changer,” and Gen. David Petraeus described it as “almost the personification of counterinsurgency.” Every U.S. officer I spoke with considers it essential to achieving a measure of stability in Afghanistan that will be sustainable in our absence. “This is our last shot,” one major told me. “If this doesn’t work, we got nothing…”