July 15: — After intensive negotiations with Nato military commanders, the Afghan government on Wednesday approved a programme to establish local defence forces that American military officials hope will help remote areas of the country thwart attacks by Taliban insurgents.
Details of the plan are sketchy, but Americans had been promoting the force as a crucial stopgap to combat rising violence here and frustration with the slow pace of training permanent professional security forces — the bottom-line condition for the American military to begin pulling back from an increasingly unpopular war. Many parts of Afghanistan have no soldiers or police officers on the ground.
Over 12 days of talks, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new Nato commander, overcame the objections of President Hamid Karzai, who had worried that the 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,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon spokesman, at a briefing. “These would be government-formed, government-paid, government-unifor-med local police units who would keep any eye out for bad guys — in their neighbourhoods, 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.” The programme borrows from the largely successful Awakening groups that General Petraeus created in Iraq, though the two programmes would not be identical. Unlike the Iraqi units, the Afghan forces would not be composed of insurgents who had switched sides.