Notes
1. The ANSF are composed of the Afghan National Army (ANA), Afghan National Police (ANP), and National Directorate of Security (NDS). The total project strength of the armed forces is currently at 352,000, but plans are to reduce it by 100,000 after 2014.
2. Research for this paper was funded by the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Kabul and the United States Institute of Peace. The authors would also like to acknowledge the invaluable feedback provided on an early draft of this paper by Antonio Giustozzi, Mark Sedra, Astri Suhrke, and Torunn Wimpelmann.
3. These findings are based on a structured, focused comparison of provincial case studies in Wardak, Baghlan, and Kunduz, complemented by interviews in Kabul and a review of the secondary literature. Provincial and Kabul-level field work was conducted from September 2011 through July 2012 by Aziz Hakimi. This was followed up by a field visit to Kabul in November 2012 by both authors. A total of 160 interviews were conducted with a range of key informants, including Afghan officials in Kabul; provincial governors and police chiefs; local elders; provincial council members; ANA, ANP, and NDS personnel; serving and former ministers; International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and U.S. special operations force (SOF) officers; journalists; and civil society activists. Research of this nature faces significant challenges in relation to security, ethics, and methodology. We have attempted to mitigate these challenges through a range of strategies including mixing methods, triangulation of data, careful deliberation over research ethics, collaborating closely with local partners, and drawing on long-standing relationships in the field.
4. The various stated goals of the interveners have included: counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, statebuilding, development, democratization, counternarcotics, human rights, and gender equity. Other factors that were less openly acknowledged include: reorienting the NATO alliance, strengthening diplomatic ties between Western allies, countering the influence of enemies, responding to pressures from domestic voters, and accessing resources or trying to protect existing policy investments.
5. For a critical account of international statebuilding and peacebuilding efforts during the post–Cold War period, see Mayall and de Oliviera (2011).
6. This contradiction essentially boils down to different conceptions of the police force as either a gendarmerie or a civilian police force (Rosenau 2008; Giustozzi and Isaqzadeh 2013).
7. So, for example, the United States resisted the expansion of ISAF forces beyond Kabul, wanting to maintain a light footprint and to prioritize the war on terror over peacekeeping (Maley 2006; Rubin 2005).
8. For a useful overview of the antecedents and emergence of the liberal peace, see Paris (2004). For a critique of the liberal peace as a policy paradigm, see Chandler (2010).
9. Interestingly, in the light of current debates on militias, it was Dostum’s “army of the north,” originally a militia which mostly retained its character for some time as a regular army.
10. The Bonn Agreement (officially the Agreement on Provisional Arrangements in Afghanistan Pending the Re-Establishment of Permanent Government Institutions) was signed on December 22, 2001. Among its provisions were the establishment of an Afghan Interim Authority, an Afghan Constitution Commission, and a NATO-led ISAF.
11. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, use of private and irregular security forces has been extensive. In March 2011, roughly 174,000 contractors were active in Afghanistan and Iraq.
12. The Afghanistan Compact was adopted in January of 2006, when the transition process set out in the Bonn Agreement had been formally completed. The compact lay out a set of political, economic, and security benchmarks agreed between the international community and the Afghan government to be met in the succeeding five years.
13. The ANP is composed of the following sections: the Afghan Uniform Police, 90,500 members responsible for core policing functions; the Afghan National Civil Order Police, an elite constabulary of 14,400 personnel; the Afghan Border Police (ABP), 20,000 personnel responsible for security at airports, land entry points, and border security zones; and the Afghan Anti-Crime Police, 3,400 personnel responsible for the investigative and intelligence capacities of the ANP nationwide (Planty and Perito, 2013, 4).
14. One illustration of this bias is the content of the focused district development training program provided by U.S. police mentoring teams. The program included seven weeks of instruction in military tactics, weapons use, survival strategies, and counterinsurgency operations and one week of training in basic police skills.
15. “Creating paramilitary police forces is a relatively straightforward endeavour, as it requires little or no culturally specific instruction, and can be carried out by rapidly deployable military advisors. Establishing professional, accountable, public-safety oriented police is another matter altogether” (Rosenau 2008, 15).
16. The experience of how non-Western empires policed their unruly frontiers is also relevant. For example, the Ottomans relied on elaborate brokering arrangements to maintain control of the empire’s peripheries: “No matter how strong an empire, it has to work with peripheries, local elites and frontier groups to maintain compliance, resources, tribute and military cooperation to ensure political coherence and durability” (Barkey 2008, 10).
17. The invention of native traditions was a precondition of indirect rule, colonial powers being concerned to establish the credentials of their native allies as “traditional” and “authentic” (Mamdani 2012). Unlike race, 46 CounterinsurgenCy, LoCaL MiLitias, and statebuiLding in afghanistan which was taken to mark a civilizational hierarchy, tribe was a marker of cultural diversity. Natives were said to be tribal by nature; the practice of governing them was called native administration.
18. For a discussion of the tribal security system of the arbaki, see Osman (2008). See also Porter (2009, 198), who in his excellent book Military Orientalism warns against the dangers of the cultural turn in Western militaries. As he notes, in “its more crass forms it recycles old bigotry in the language of political correctness.”
19. For example, Giustozzi stated that by late 1989 or early 1990, a hundred thousand former mujahedin had joined the various types of irregular armed formations (2009b, 54). In Herat, the 17th infantry division numbered 3,400 regular troops and 14,000 militiamen.
20. Geraint Hughes and Christian Tripodi (2009) further distinguish between different types of surrogate forces, namely, individual actors (trackers, interpreters, informers, and agents), home guards, militias, counter gangs, and pseudo gangs.
21. For example, the Sri Lankan government created both types of organizations as part of its counterinsurgency campaign against the LTTE. Home guard units were created among the Sinhala settler communities in the borderland areas of the northeast, and Tamil militias were mobilized to control the Tamil population, generate intelligence, and fight the LTTE.
22. The Afghan Military Forces were part of the formal Northern Alliance forces that had joined the American forces during the invasion. On the other hand, armed groups and militias that did not come under this formal structure were targeted through the DIAG program.
23. On the emergence of the military-industrial-academic complex—comprised of warrior intellectuals and institutions like the RAND Corporation, the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews, Kings College London, and the Carr Center, Harvard University—see Miller and Mills (2010). COIN drew in particular from the experience of the late colonial wars of the 1950s and 1960s. Wars in Indochina and Algeria were quietly reframed not as national tragedies to avoid repeating at all costs but rather as helpful pilot studies in the Long War (Feichtinger, Malinowski, and Richards 2012, 45). For examples of this reframing of the colonial archive as a useful technical resource, see Kilcullen (2009) and Jones (2012). David Petraeus personified a new breed of “warrior intellectuals”; his PhD in history from Princeton University in 1987 was titled, “The American Military and Lesson of Vietnam.” Petraeus subsequently codified his insights in the Army’s official Field Manual 3-24: Counterinsurgency.
24. For example, in December 2006, a joint report by the inspectors general of the state and defense depart-ments found that U.S.-trained Afghan police were incapable of conducting routine law enforcement and that American program managers could not account for the number of ANP officers on duty or the whereabouts of vehicles, equipment, and weapons provided by the Afghan government (cited in Perito 2009, 5).
25. Seth Jones (2012) provides a selective and in some cases misleading reading of previous counterinsurgency operations, including U.S. support to paramilitary forces in Vietnam, Philippines, and Latin America, as well as British colonial efforts in policing its former colonies in Asia and Africa and attempts to draw out their relevance to contemporary Afghanistan and the U.S. efforts there to set up local militias.
26. APPF was discussed in July 2010 at the same time that negotiations over the ALP were under way. It was only created in early 2011 to replace hundreds of private security companies. Karzai issued a decree in August 2010, ordering the disbanding of all PSCs by December 2010. However, following pressure from ISAF and development contractors and NGOs who depended on PSCs for their security, a one-year extension was negotiated until March 2013 (DOD 2011b; Aikins 2012).
27. Atmar characterized this as an attempt to renationalize security, first, by ending the mandate of Private Security Companies, and second, by reviving the tribal tradition of local policing, known as arbaki. For analyses of arbaki, see Osman (2008).
28. Interview, Haneef Atmar, former minister of interior, Kabul, August 5, 2012. For a discussion of Atmar’s thinking on the AP3, see the leaked 2009 U.S. Embassy cable “Unconventional Security Forces—What’s Out There?” (U.S. Embassy Kabul 2009c). The description of the AP3 here is also based on a 2009 MOI strategy paper on file with the author.
29. At the time Seth Jones, the author of the report on which the narrative is based, was a RAND consultant to U.S. Special Forces Command.
30. These additional districts were Arghandab, Kandahar; Chamkani, Paktia; Shindand, Herat; and Posht-e Rod, Farah.
31. A 2010 strategy paper developed by the MOI and the United States stated that the district governor would work with the CDI or village shura to select, vet, and supervise LDI. Individual payments were set at 50 percent of the ANP. Defenders were expected to bring their own weapons (Lefevre 2012, 3).
32. When Atmar was interviewed in August 2012, he criticized the approach SOFs took to LDI, implementing them as ad hoc experiments without government approval and outside its institutional framework.
33. Interview, Rangin Dadfar Spanta, head of Afghan National Security Council, Kabul, April 10, 2012.
34. Interview, Tonita Murray, adviser to ministry of interior, Kabul, November 6, 2012.
35. This was a particular concern of Karzai—and played well to domestic audiences—in his inaugural speech, during which he promised that “within the next two years, we want operations by all private national and international security firms to be ended and their duties delegated to Afghan security entities” (Lefèvre 2010).
36. Interview, U.S. military officers, Forward Operating Base, Maidanshahr, Wardak, December 12, 2011.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39 Interview, Rangin Dadfar Spanta, April 10, 2012.
40. Interview, Hamid Karzai, Kabul, May 7, 2013.
41. Interview, Rangin Dadfar Spanta, April 10, 2012.
42. Interview, Hamid Karzai, May 7, 2013; interview, Rangin Dadfar Spanta, May 5, 2013.
43. Thirty thousand ALP cost $180 million. Per year, one ALP costs $6,000 and one ANA soldier costs $30,000. Telephone interview, Colonel Donald Bolduc, deputy commander of NATO Special Operations Component Command-Afghanistan, London, November 15, 2012. During the Najibullah regime, militia members were paid twice as much as regular soldiers. They also received other incentives, including “enrol-ment prizes,” exemption from military service, provision of electricity and televisions, and offers of military hardware to militia leaders, including armored vehicles and tanks (Giustozzi 2009b).
44. Interview, European embassy official, Kabul, November 2012.
45. Interview, PTRO researcher, Kabul, September 21, 2011.
46. According to Afghanistan’s Central Statistics Office (CSO), the 2011–12 population estimate of Wardak is 558,000. The 2011 Provincial Development Plan (PDP) estimate of population was over 884,000. The Wardak districts include the provincial capital Maidanshahr, Nerkh, Jalrez, Sayedabad, Chak, Jaghatu, Daimirdad, Behsud-e-Markazi, and Hesa-e-Awal Behsud. No reliable figures on the division of population into ethnic groups are available. The PDP and the CSO do not provide breakdown of population according to ethnic groups, which is a politically sensitive topic in an ethnically mixed province with a history of conflict. In 2012, the CSO reportedly decided not to include ethnicity as a variable in its population survey because of political sensitivities. According to a 2004 Swedish Committee for Afghanistan report that relied on 2002 UNHCR figures, the population in Daimirdad is 63 percent Pashtun and 37 percent Hazara, and the population in Nerkh is 80 percent Pashtun, 15 percent Tajik, and 5 percent Hazara. According to the NGO Cooperation for Peace and Unity, 45 percent of the Jalrez population belong to the Kharooti subtribe and 65 percent of the Maidanshahr population are Pashtun (Merkova, Dennys, and Zaman 2009). According to 2011–12 CSO population estimates, one-fifth of the population live in the predominantly Pashtun district Sayedabad and slightly more than that number live in the predominately Hazara district of Behsud-e-Markazi. Hazaras almost exclusively inhabit the two Behsud districts. Tajiks constitute a minority and live mostly in the capital Maidanshahr and Nerkh districts.
47. The 2003 CSO-United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) socioeconomic survey indicates that only about 5 percent of the population has access to electricity, that Maidanshahr only recently received a power line from Kabul, and that the 3,300-kilowatt hydroelectric dam in Chak is producing at one-third of its capacity.
The same survey indicates that 40 percent of the wheat produced in the province comes from the Behsud-e-Markazi district and that about 80 percent of all animal products come from Behsud-e-Markazi, Hesa-e-Awal Behsud, Chak, and Sayedabad.
49. The PDP for Wardak (2011–15) stated that most of these projects lacked a long-term vision of sustainability and were essentially ad hoc and experimental in nature designed to achieve short-term security. As a result, there was a lack of either local community or donor buy-in, and the projects fell victim to interministerial rivalries and exploitation by local power brokers. A widespread view in Wardak was that the local governance project, the AP3, suffered from similar problems.
50. Hizb-e-Islami, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (HIG), is a reformist Islamist movement modeled on the Muslim Brotherhood and was one of the seven mujahideen parties based in Peshawar, Pakistan during the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad. HIG was a favorite of the Pakistani spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, and the CIA and received the bulk of the U.S. military aid channeled through Pakistan’s military. After 2001, the party split into two factions. The political wing is legally operating from Kabul and is part of the Karzai government. The military wing is led by Hekmatyar, who is designated a terrorist by the U.S. government and is believed to be hiding in the eastern mountains of Afghanistan or the semiautonomous tribal areas of Pakistan. Harakat was led by Maulawi Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi, a conservative-traditionalist jihadi party of rural mullahs from whose ranks many of the Taliban movement’s leadership later emerged. After the death of Maulawi Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi, the party was and is (2013) led by Haji Mohammad Musa Hotak from the Jalrez district. Musa is a former Harakat commander and Taliban deputy minister, MP, and currently a senior adviser to Karzai. Itihad was founded by and is led by Abdul Rab-Rasoul Sayyaf, an MP and a senior jihadi leader frequently consulted by Karzai. Itihad enjoyed close relations to Saudi Wahabi groups during the 1980s’ jihad and is believed to have been instrumental in spreading Wahabism in Afghanistan. The extent of Itihad’s current ties with Saudi Wahabi groups is not easily apparent and may not be that significant considering the Taliban’s success in attracting Saudi funding to its jihad against foreign forces. Hizb-e-Wahdat emerged as an umbrella organization to accommodate the half-dozen Shia and Hazara jihadi groups supported by Iran during the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad. Iran’s assistance continued during the factional wars fought among mujahideen parties in the early 1990s and in resistance to the Taliban during the late 1990s. Its founder Abdul Ali Mazari was killed by the Taliban in 1995. After 2001, as rivalries for power intensified among the party leadership, Wahdat split into four groups. Two of the most prominent Hazara politicians, Vice President Karim Khalili and former planning minister and current MP Mohammad Mohaqiq, head two of the splinter groups.
51. Interview, Halim Fidai, governor of Wardak, Maidanshahr, Wardak, December 11, 2011. A similar version of events was narrated by a former Hizb-e-Islami commander currently serving as an ALP commander in Nerkh district. Interview, Commander Mohammad Gul Torakai, Maidanshahr, Wardak, September 13, 2011.
52. Shura-e-Nizar constituted the military wing of Jamait-e-Islami. It was led by Jamiat’s military commander, Ahmad Shah Masoud, and was dominated by commanders from the Panjshir valley.
53. Interview, General Muzafaruddin, former provincial police chief, Kabul, December 29, 2011.
54. Musa was Harakat’s main military commander in Jalrez district with an estimated force of more than five thousand armed men during the 1980s and early 1990s. He served as a Taliban deputy minister of planning. Like his brother Musa, Ghulam Mohammad is a former Harakat commander who fought alongside the Taliban in the 1990s. Interview, Halim Fidai, December 11, 2011.
55. Interview, commander Ghulam Mohammad Hotak, Kabul, August 9, 2012. A similar number was mentioned in an Afghanistan Analysts Network report (see Lefèvre 2010, 10).
56. The recurring conflict between nomadic and settled communities in Wardak often erupts during the seasonal migration of Pashtun nomads, starting in early spring, to the central highlands. These conflicts have a long history, and they developed new layers of complexity during the war years and after 2001. For example, according to an NGO activist from the Hazara community, the Taliban offered to prevent the return of Kuchis to Hazara areas in an attempt to prevent the conflict from further escalating and possibly drawing in American forces, as illustrated by the example of Jim Gant (2009) in “One Tribe at a Time” (see note 165). Interview, civil society activist, Kabul, April 8, 2013.
57. A range of factors has been mentioned to explain the reemergence of the Taliban in Wardak. They include the presence and behavior of foreign forces, a corrupt and predatory government, and persecution of former commanders and power holders who took to the mountains and began fighting. Others include religious motivation and anger over U.S. night time raids, detention in U.S. military prison in Bagram, and civilian casualties linked to air strikes (Ladbury 2009; Merkova, Dennys, and Zaman 2009). A large network of madrasa, mosques, and militant preachers in the central region where Wardak is located has made it easy for the Taliban to recruit men to their cause (ICG 2011). See also Tariq Osman on insurgency in Wardak and Logar (Giustozzi 2009a).
58. The power brokers include Haji Janan, member of provincial council; Abdul Ahmad, former provincial police chief and member of parliament; and Haji Musa Hotak, former member of parliament and adviser to Karzai and Ghulam Mohammad Hotak, former Taliban commander who also briefly commanded the AP3 in late 2009 and early 2010.
59. Interviews, Halim Fidai, December 11, 2011, November 3, 2012.
60. In December 2012, the U.S. Defense Department reported 576 ALP members in Wardak.
61. Interview, member of provincial council, Kabul, January 1, 2012. Another provincial council member mentioned a two-day meeting in Kabul in October 2008 where local elders in the presence of ministers of interior, defense, national intelligence and the governor of Wardak refused to ratify a government declaration meant to show support by local shuras to the AP3 program. Interview, provincial council member, Kabul, December 29, 2011.
62. Interview, Haji Mukhlis, former member of provincial council, Kabul, January 1, 2012; interview, Haji Janan, head of provincial council, Kabul, December 29, 2011.
63. Interview, Ghulam Mohammad Hotak, Kabul, May 9, 2012; interview, Halim Fidai, December 11, 2011.
64. Figures obtained in December 2011 show 350 ALP members in Jalrez district. The total strength of the ALP at the time in Wardak was around 800, down from 1,100 in 2010. This is about equal to the total number of regular police for the whole province. In March 2012, 260 ALP members were demobilized after failing ALP recruitment criteria, further reducing the number to 540. A December 2012 U.S. Defense Department report mentioned 576 ALP in Wardak.
65. Interview, Ghulam Mohammad Hotak, Kabul, May 9, 2012.
66. Interview, Mullah Aziz-ur-Rahman Siddiqi, former AP3 commander, Kabul, December 17, 2011.
67. Interview, commander Mohammad Gul Torakai, Maidanshahr, Wardak, September 13, 2011
68. Ibid.; this point repeatedly came up during conversations between the governor and SOFs during the winter of 2011–12 (author’s observation during the meetings).
69. Interview, Halim Fidai, December 11, 2011.
70. Given that the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO) relies on incident attacks, the presence of the AP3 likely provided more targets to insurgents and could explain the contradiction between statistical and narrative data (see Lefèvre 2010, 12).
71. Hizb-e-Islami affiliated factions in the president’s office, notably Chief of Staff Abdul Karim Khurram, have been accused of supporting Hizb-e-Islami in Wardak.
72. Interview, U.S. Army Special Forces officer, Maidanshahr, Wardak, December 11, 2012.
73. On February 6, 2012, Fidai and U.S. military officials held an information operations ceremony in Sayedabad to introduce the ALP program in Sayedabad.
74. Interview, member of Wardak provincial council, Kabul, December 29, 2012.
75. In September 2012, Halim Fidai was replaced as governor of Wardak.
76. In his letter to Karzai, Fidai mentions a figure of 405 ANP personnel in Wardak, possibly referring to ANP soldiers, excluding support staff. Fidai’s letter to Karzai, March 12, 2012, on file with the author.
77. Interview, senior government officials and local journalists, Wardak, Maidanshahr and Kabul, August 2012.
78. Ibid.
79. Fidai denied allegations that he had provided support to Hizb-e-Islami commanders in Nerkh against Taliban insurgents. He described his proposed solution to local security in the spring of 2012 in more grassroots terms, modeled on the Arab Spring social movements led by the youth and not by armed commanders. It was supposed to be a province-wide campaign, not just restricted to Nerkh. He claims his attempt to bring security to Wardak through popular participation has been misrepresented by his critics (interview, Halim Fidai, August 13, 2012). A similar uprising was to take place in the neighboring province of Ghazni, but was badly timed and, due to interference from the central government, backfired and only took off in Andar district. After almost a year, the uprising in Andar, originally led by a few Hizb-e-Islami commanders who broke ranks with their Taliban allies—and was described by U.S. military commanders as a game changer—petered out. Under intense pressure from the Taliban, who killed most of the original leaders and sixty members of the uprising, the rebels gave up the pretense of independence and accepted help from the government and the U.S. military by enrolling in the ALP program (on the Andar uprising, see Trofimov 2013).
80. The Taliban and Hizb-e-Islami in Nerkh district accuse each other of being someone else’s puppets or spies in what seem like a competition over which group has greater legitimacy to wage jihad against foreign forces and the Western-supported Karzai government. In August 2011, the Taliban explained their military campaign against Hizb-e-Islami in Nerkh by noting that “the Emirate [Taliban] has decided to fight Hezb-e Islami because they are pro-government and get provoked into action [against us] by the government,” said Mullah Bashir, the Taliban’s third-highest representative in the mainly Pashtun-populated Nerkh district. “We give priority to killing Hizb people over Americans because they are obstructing us and preventing us from waging jihad” (Tabee 2011). These internal struggles between Taliban and Hizb-e-Islami help shatter the myth of a unified insurgency.
81. Arming one group in this context can significantly upset the balance of power and lead to new rounds of clashes among rival groups, set off by a negative spiral of competitive rearmament or alternatively defection to the Taliban to secure protection and support.
82. Interview, provincial council member, Maidanshahr, Wardak, April 17, 2013.
83. Despite a number of investigations by government and ISAF/NATO command in Kabul as well as human rights organizations and media, it has not been possible to establish not so much what happened, which is well documented, but which force or forces perpetrated the abuses. The secretive nature of the forces responsible for these abuses, which happened over five months in the Nerkh and Maidanshahr districts, point to the involvement of CIA and what the Afghan government referred to as parallel security structures, meaning Afghan militias trained and financed by the CIA for counterterrorism operations which remained unaccountable to Afghan authorities. Interviews, human rights activists, journalists, government officials, security analysts, and local power brokers in Wardak and Kabul, April 2013.
84. Local power brokers affiliated with Hizb-e-Islami privately complained about the presence and aggressive targeting of Hizb-e-Islami fighters in Nerkh and Maidanshahr districts, areas that are under government control. Instead their preference was to have SOFs move into more remote areas of Wardak, such as upper Nerkh valley where the Taliban had a more prominent presence. In other words, Hizb-e-Islami tried to get SOFs off their backs and direct their firepower against their Taliban rivals. Interview, local analyst, Kabul, April 24, 2013.
85. The statement warned that “if the Americans once again do not honour their commitments and keep on disobeying, then this will be considered as an occupation, and they may expect to see a reaction to their action.” What was more striking about the statement was the fact that “it referred to American forces in Afghanistan as ‘infidels,’ echoing language used by the Taliban” (Nordland 2013a).
86. For the first time, civilian casualties declined by 12 percent in 2012. However, this trend did not last for long. In April 2013, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported an upsurge in conflict-related civilian casualties. Security data released by ANSO for the first quarter of 2013 also showed a dramatic increase in violence, up by 47 percent from 2012. With the transition of security responsibilities from NATO to Afghan forces, the casualty rates of ANSF increased by 40 percent during this period. Some 73 percent of all insurgent attacks were directed against Afghan forces versus 4 percent against foreign forces (Nordland 2013b).
87. In one incident, a local Pashtun villager and his university companion were shot and killed by the AP3 on the Maidenshahr-Nerkh road. Despite many attempts by the victim’s father, a local farmer, the culprits have not been prosecuted for the crime. The commander of the AP3 whose unit shot the young man was released after the district governor of Jalrez intervened in the case. Despite receiving assurances from the governor, the father of the victim lost all hope of seeing his son’s killers behind bars.
88. Author’s observation during a meeting between Afghan officials and U.S. military officers in early February 2012 in Maidanshahr. Members of the Wardak Provincial Council expressed these views in conversation with General Ali Shah Ahmadzai, the head of the ALP in the Ministry of Interior in Kabul.
89. Interview, commander Mohammad Gul Torakai, September 13, 2011.
90. Interview, security analyst, Kabul, November 7, 2012.
91. Interviews, ISAF officials, Kabul, November 5, 2012.
92. Interviews, victims and members of their families, provincial council members, local journalists, human rights activists, and government officials in Kabul, Wardak and Kabul, April 19–25, 2013.
93. The districts are Puli Khumri, Baghlan-e-Jadid, Dahanan-e-Ghori, Dushi, Tala-wa-Barfak, Khenjan, Andarab, Khost-wa-Fereng, Burka, Nahrin, Puli Hesar, Jalga, Deh Saleh, Fereng-wa-Gharu, and Guzargah-e-Noor. During the 1980s, as the mujahideen increased pressure on the Soviet and Afghan forces in Baghlan’s capital Baghlan-e-Jadid, the provincial capital was relocated to Puli Khumri where it has remained to the present day. Although Governor Juma Khan Hamdard tried to relocate it to Baghlan-e-Jadid, he faced stiff resistance from Andarabi strongmen who felt secure in Puli Khumri and did not want to relocate to a majority Pashtun district. The population figure of 741,690 is based on 2003 CSO/UNFPA statistics. According to Afghanistan Statistics Office, the population of Baghlan in 2011–12 was appro