Posted on 02/09/2011 3:37:31 AM PST by marktwain
Operating from a small US Special Forces base on a snow-speckled field here is a newly minted US ally who represents either a brighter future or everything that is wrong with Afghanistan’s troubled past.
The former Afghan insurgent is despised by the head of the provincial council, who calls him “a thief, a kidnapper and out of control.” He is disparaged by police, who view him as a dangerous fighter and dissolute hash smoker.
But to the US military, Noor ul Haq’s past means less than his willingness to fight the Taliban. In these dangerous villages of northern Afghanistan’s Baghlan province, Haq has been installed as a leader of the nascent Afghan Local Police, where he oversees dozens of ragtag gunmen backed by US military muscle.
This US experiment gives villagers AK-47s and a three-week training course and encourages them to protect their neighborhoods from the Taliban. The experiment, being replicated around the country, is the latest and most ambitious US effort to build grass-roots opposition to the insurgency in rural areas where US troops and Afghan security forces are spread thin.
Winning President Hamid Karzai’s backing for the program was an early success for Gen. David Petraeus, who overcame Afghan suspicions that it would add new militias to a stew already brimming with warlords. The local police forces now include nearly 3,000 Afghans in least 14 sites across the country, but US military officials expect them eventually to grow tenfold in size. US commanders hope to establish as many as 50 to 70 sites before the fighting season resumes in the spring.
(Excerpt) Read more at thepeninsulaqatar.com ...
From Machiavelli:
"When you disarm the people, you commence to offend them and show that you distrust them either through cowardice or lack of confidence, and both of these opinions generate hatred."
I pray for it to work every night. My brother in law is carrying out this mission with “The Big Red One”.
There was such a program in Vietnam that was working quite well until LBJ sent in the US Army which in turn immediately f***ed it all up.
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