Dexter Filkins reports that the U.S. and Afghan governments have been somewhat successful in supporting the rise of local pockets of resistance to the Taliban:
The American and Afghan officials say they are hoping the plan, called the Community Defense Initiative, will bring together thousands of gunmen to protect their neighborhoods from Taliban insurgents. Already there are hundreds of Afghans who are acting on their own against the Taliban, officials say.
The endeavor represents one of the most ambitious — and one of the riskiest — plans for regaining the initiative against the Taliban, who are fighting more vigorously than at any time since 2001.
This is mostly good news. At a recent Center for American Progress event, the Carr Center's Michael Semple said that the more effective the Taliban are at portraying themselves as fighting an insurgency against foreign soldiers rather than a civil war against other Afghans, the more inroads they are able to make. Anything that undercuts that narrative is a positive development.
The problem is, though, that at some level part of the goal is to leave Afghanistan with a stable civil society, something that militias aren't exactly conducive to. This is, at best, a stopgap measure, and one that Filkins writes is already having problems because while the U.S. is being careful to keep the groups they're supporting small, the Afghan government has been supporting larger groups that in at least one instance took over and started levying taxes on the locals once they had driven off the Taliban.
The risk of this not working that well is pretty high, which is why Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak seemed so lukewarm on the whole "militia" idea when discussing this kind of approach months ago. It's not like this hasn't been tried before.
-- A. Serwer
