TY  - BOOK
AU  - Reid,Rachel
AU  - Muhammedally,Sahr
ED  - Human Rights Watch
TI  - "Just don't call it a militia": impunity, militias, and the "Afghan Local Police" 
SN  - 1564328066
PY  - 2011///
CY  - New York, NY
PB  - Human Rights Watch (HRW)
KW  - police
KW  - human rights
KW  - violations
KW  - Afghanistan
N1  - September 2011; Includes bibliographical references; Map of Afghanistan. -- Glossary. -- Summary. -- I. Background: The ghosts of militias past. -- II. The growth of abusive militias in the North. -- III. The Wardak Experiment: the Afghan Public Protection Program. -- IV. The Afghan Local Police: "Community Watch with AK-47s". -- V. ALP recruitment and vetting. -- VI. Lessons from the experience of the Afghan National Police. -- VII. Recommendations. -- Acknowledgements
N2  - With US plans to withdraw troops and hand over security to the Afghan government by 2014, the US and Afghan governments have embraced a high-risk strategy of arming tens of thousands of men in a new village-level defense force. Called the Afghan Local Police (ALP), it is the latest in a long line of new security forces and militias the US and other international forces have worked with in recent years to pave the way for the exit of international troops. The Afghan government has also recently reactivated various irregular armed groups, particularly in the north. This report, based primarily on interviews in Kabul, Wardak, Herat, and Baghlan, with additional interviews in Kandahar, Kunduz, and Uruzgan, first surveys attempts over the past decade to create civilian defense forces in Afghanistan. While some efforts have been more successful than others, all have at times been hijacked by local strongmen or by ethnic or political factions, spreading fear, exacerbating local political tensions, fueling vendettas and ethnic conflict, and in some areas even playing into the hands of Taliban insurgents, thus subverting the very purpose for which the militias were created. Against this backdrop, we then provide an account of the ALP one year after it was created, detailing instances in which local groups are again being armed without adequate oversight or accountability. We conclude that unless urgent steps are taken to prevent ALP units from engaging in abusive and predatory behavior, the ALP could exacerbate the same perverse dynamics that subverted previous efforts to use civilian defense forces to advance security and public order
UR  - http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/afghanistan0911webwcover.pdf
ER  -