A New Model Afghan Army

Anja Manuel and P. W. Singer

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2002

Summary:  Afghanistan's peace remains tenuous. Rival warlords still control separate militias, and distrust of government abounds. Only a national army can secure the peace. Yet the Afghans have been slow to create one, and the international community has not helped much. The United States must jump-start the process before war breaks out again.

Anja Manuel is an Attorney with Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. P. W. Singer is Olin Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and Coordinator of the Brookings Project on U.S. Policy Towards the Islamic World.

AN UNEASY PEACE

An unforeseen result of the U.S. military's stunning success in Afghanistan was the overnight suspension of that country's vicious, 23-year-old civil war. Afghanistan's future -- including whether it again degenerates into a terrorist base -- now largely depends on what is made of this precious opportunity.

In countries recovering from civil war, the most critical requirement for long-term peace is the demobilization of the formerly warring parties and their integration within a unified military. Angola and the former Yugoslavia provide cautionary tales about the difficulties of military reintegration; Mozambique and South Africa give more hopeful examples of how building a cohesive army can help solidify peace after a national conflict.

In Afghanistan, the process of military integration has barely begun, but it is already close to collapse. Not only are perennial ethnic, factional, and religious disputes hampering progress, but the political elements of postwar transition are moving ahead without the requisite military corollary. Indeed, the interim administration inaugurated in December 2001 never answered basic questions about the size, composition, and tasks of a national army. Meanwhile, the international community remains ambivalent about how it will assist, and what little aid it has promised has been slow in coming.

The dangers of continued delay are growing by the day. The U.S. and allied forces entered Afghanistan to rout the Taliban and al Qaeda; demobilizing the country's many warring factions was not on the agenda. Thus, the operations may have abruptly suspended the civil war, but they have created only a tacit truce without dismantling the full war-fighting capabilities of the armed groups. Many of these groups may now be tempted to either reject the peace process or manipulate it to their advantage. If they do, Afghanistan could plunge straight back into war.

MOTLEY CREW

Civil wars can yield three types of disgruntled local parties, or "spoilers," who can derail peace processes. "Limited spoilers" are simply suspicious of promises made by the peace brokers and demand additional guarantees that they will be treated fairly; "greedy spoilers" seek to take all they can get from the postwar reconstruction, even beyond the point of diminishing returns; and "total spoilers," feeling they have no stake in the peace, will try to make it fail at all costs. Unfortunately, Afghanistan today contains archetypes of all three.

In addressing these spoilers, the new national government will need to exert its leadership over a nation in which mistrust of central authority runs deep. Afghanistan as a state was created by late-nineteenth-century British imperialists along borders that, like most colonial divisions, reflected little historical or ethnic logic. The government has usually been controlled by the largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns, who nevertheless make up fewer than half of Afghanistan's roughly 26 million people and are themselves riven by tribal fissures. Hobbled by the Pashtuns' own divisions and opposition from other minority groups -- such as Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras -- the government's power outside of the capital, Kabul, has always been limited.

The long history of strained relations between Pashtuns and other ethnic groups makes many Afghans natural limited spoilers. Indeed, they have good reason to view promises of peace with skepticism. Most recently, ethnic relations deteriorated under the predominantly Pashtun Taliban, who came to power pledging to end the post-Soviet chaos and warlordism but instead exhibited equally vicious behavior themselves. The U.S. military intervention last fall then tipped the scales of power in favor of the Taliban's main foe, the Northern Alliance, composed mainly of minority ethnic groups from the north. The interim government established at a UN-brokered peace conference was nominally led by the Pashtun noble Hamid Karzai, but the non-Pashtun leaders of the Northern Alliance wielded the real power in Kabul, with a subset of Tajiks controlling key ministries and the former secret police. Many ordinary Pashtuns thus suspected that the interim government was just a vehicle for minority ambition.

Years of warfare have also created a constellation of regional warlords, quintessential greedy spoilers, who stand to lose a great deal in the transition to a new government. These warlords' power comes from their personal forces of thousands of loyal armed troops, funded by their control of local trading and smuggling routes. Although many of the rival warlords made public statements supporting military integration after the interim government took over, none has made any significant effort to disarm. Several, despite their uneasy truce, have faced off against each other in minor struggles over territory and power. These greedy spoilers remain only nominally linked to the central government and may try to undermine it if they are not given a significant role.