Poppies legacy: soldiers and civilians still pay with their lives for leaders’ mistakes

At a time of year when world leaders should be keeping faith with the victims of past wars, the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan is preparing to repeat, yet again, a failed tactic that backfired on Soviet occupation forces in the 1980’s, as well as Western armies since 2001.

Gen. David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, will recommend to President-elect Barack Obama that tribal militias be raised to combat the Taliban, especially along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Together with an Iraq-style surge of U.S. and NATO troops, the plan would flood Afghanistan’s conflict-ravaged southern provinces with the greatest number and variety of combatants seen in the region since the Soviet war years.

History tells us that the Soviets’ use of tribal and regional militias was a factor in escalating the war, and resulted in increased support among Afghan civilians for the anti-Soviet mujahideen resistance.

One of the Red Army’s most despised local militia commanders, Rashid Dostum, is still wreaking havoc today. Skyreporter photographed the old rogue striding into Hamid Karzai’s investiture in Kabul in December, 2001 – at the side of one of Gen. Petraeus’s predecessors, Tommy Franks.

After forcing the Taliban regime from power, the Bush administration supported private armies like Dostum’s. This was in the false hope that the militias would enable U.S. resources to be shifted to the impending invasion of Iraq, without losing ground to the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Today, Gen. Petraeus and his staff appear not to have grasped the complexities of the country's ethnic and tribal rivalries. Their plan would benefit the same Pushtun strongmen that have distorted the character and performance of the Karzai regime in Kabul, thanks to the culprits' promotion by the Bush administration.

The U.S. leadership ignores one of the main causes of lawlessness in Afghanistan today: there are already 2,000 private militias in existence, totalling some 120,000 men in arms, according to the joint UN-Afghan disarmament agency.

At least 500 of these groups are controlled by prominent figures within, or connected to, the Western-backed regime. And they don’t fight the Taliban – many are used to enforce smuggling, land grabs and drug trafficking.

A boom in private armies among the southern tribes would further undermine the questionable authority of the Afghan National Army – the creation and training of which has been, until now, a key goal of the U.S. and its foreign allies.

As for Afghanistan’s experiment in fostering democratically elected governments, the prognosis is even worse. According to one international specialist who helped supervise Afghanistan’s first two elections: “From an electoral perspective such a strategy could potentially have serious consequences on the ability of candidates to campaign freely, unless these tribal groups have clearly defined rules of engagement and they are properly trained.

“Let's not forget that most Afghans see the current insurgency problems in the south being caused by the government deliberately pitting one tribe against another. While there were problems with the electoral process in 2004 and 2005, it was in the south and east where there were gross violations of the process, particularly with respect to voting and counting.”

Clearly, 30 consecutive years of chaos in Afghanistan has done little to enlighten the West’s great generals and their political masters. As any seasoned Afghan hand will tell you, the country is long past due a surge of common sense, not more combatants.

Which is the sentiment, of course, of the final lines of Canadian military doctor John McCrae’s poem In Flanders Fields, written on another battlefield 93 years ago:

If ye break faith with us who die


We shall not sleep, though poppies grow


In Flanders fields.