The Afghan government and its Western partners are hoping a massive military assault on a southern Taliban stronghold will leave behind past mistakes and bring the war to an end.
But the success of Operation Mushtarak, under way in Helmand Province with US Marines leading 15,000 foreign and Afghan troops, depends on convincing Afghans they can trust the police and the government, and will be safe, said Mark Sedwill, NATO’s civilian representative in Afghanistan.
“Security and justice — that’s the issue that will determine whether the people of that area transfer and maintain their allegiance to the legitimate government as opposed to the Taliban,” he said in an interview.
PHOTO: AFP
Sedwill was speaking three weeks after the start of a massive push into Marjah, a place, he said, where there was still much to do.
“People are deeply suspicious of the police going in because they have had such a bad experience of the police before,” he said.
“They were abusing their power, they were brutal, there are allegations of murder, certainly beatings and intimidation, predatory when it came to corruption.”
Acknowledging that “three-quarters of insurgents” were local people who fought institutions they saw as corrupt and repressive, Sedwill said many in Marjah saw the government as replacing one evil with another.
“They don’t want the Taliban, they don’t want the abuse of power that was there previously either,” he said.
“Were they really rebelling against the national government of Afghanistan? Not really. They were pushing back against the abuse from which they were suffering. “That population have lived in a coerced relationship with authority both under the Taliban and before it, and they need to be in a better relationship now,” he said.
It is the operation is the biggest of the war, now in its ninth year.
NATO and Afghan commanders have said they do not yet have the target areas of Marjah and Nad Ali under complete control, but civilian police have already moved in to consolidate sovereignty and establish security.
Better trained and equipped police would lay the groundwork for civil services and help prevent the re-emergence of institutional corruption, Sedwill said.
Sedwill said Marjah was a “template” for a new plan that would roll out over the coming 18 months elsewhere in Helmand and Kandahar.
“Mushtarak is a template in that we’re learning lessons,” he said, with Marjah at the “extreme end of the spectrum” because it had never been under government control.
Other targets in Helmand and Kandahar would “be hard in different ways because they are contested — the government does have a presence and so might also be part of the problem, as well as part of the solution,” he said.
The challenge now was to right past wrongs, he said.
“Nobody is under any illusions that things headed in the wrong direction for much of the last eight years,” he said.
“If you look over the past four or five years, security has deteriorated, the insurgency has deepened its grip into the south and widened into the north and west, casualties of all kinds have gone up, governance has flat-lined,” he said.
“Only economic and social sectors have improved,” he said, referring to statistics that showed growth in the number of children in school, rural clinics and other sectors boosted with billions of dollars in aid.
Meanwhile, up to 60 militants and 19 civilians may have been killed in bloody clashes in the north, a police official said yesterday.
The fighting between Taliban rebels and militants loyal to the Hezb-i-Islami insurgent group erupted early on Saturday in Baghlan Province, where both factions are active, provincial police chief Mohammad Kabir Andarabi said.
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