The United States and its coalition allies are struggling to find a way out of the military morass of Afghanistan. The radical Islamists of the neo-Taliban have expanded their control over more and more territory in the southeast of the country, making some districts no-go areas for the state and the international community and leaving other districts treacherous after dark. (1) The number and ferocity of deadly attacks against coalition forces, Afghan authorities and civilians has skyrocketed, making July and August 2009 the bloodiest months of the war thus far. (2) Violence plagued the August 2009 presidential election.

U.S. commanders are seeking to apply lessons from the operational success of the Sunni Awakening policy pursued in the Iraq "surge" of 2007. In Iraq, Sunni tribal elders who had earlier supported Al Qaeda in Iraq were paid by U.S. forces to use their militias instead to guard their neighborhoods and villages and support the Iraqi government. As the Awakening movement spread throughout Sunni areas, violence plummeted. (3) These militias are now being integrated into the Iraqi national security forces.

In Afghanistan's Pashtun areas today, where neo-Taliban insurgents have their ethnic base, U.S. commanders hope to put a similar program in place. But that idea is a mistake. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the region that now forms the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, British colonial troops tried something similar. They used their intelligence resources to identify local power brokers, or maliks, and paid them off for their support. Their system of payments became hereditary and was eventually enshrined in independent Pakistan's constitution, because those who received the payments--the so-called "official maliks"--used the money to buy local support and make themselves indispensable for state security. These official maliks formed a new class hierarchy in the FATA that bred local resentment. In more recent times, this resentment helps explain local support for radical Islamism as an alternative to the perceived corruption of the existing system.

Outside funding, whether provided by external forces like the United States or by the state of Afghanistan, will simply cement the control of local militia commanders over local populations, turning them into new warlords. This may provide short-term stability, but the plan is short-sighted. By funding and supporting new local warlords, the United States and its allies will be planting the seeds for a future round of radical Islamist backlash against warlord rule. What appears to be an operational exit strategy now will simply ensure that the strategic problem of Afghanistan endures, forcing U.S. troops back into the country again when it once more becomes an Al Qaeda haven next door to Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

CURRENT POLICY

Tribal militias were already tapped by the United States and its allies to provide security for Afghanistan's presidential election on 20 August 2009. Now the goal is to make this program permanent. The Jalrez District in Wardak Province has been a year-long "test case" for the new U.S. military plan, but it has not worked all that well since people are reluctant to be seen as working for the government when the Taliban is watching. (4) Nonetheless, the plan is to provide cooperating militia members with a salary of $120-$150 per month, which is generous by Afghan standards. Meanwhile, the government of Afghanistan is creating a new state agency, the Independent Directorate for the Protection of Highways and Public Property, to take over the program from the United States in the future. (5)

General Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said that he is ramping up intelligence collection to understand tribal dynamics and find local power brokers for coalition forces to engage in these programs. (6) There is no publicly available evidence about how the United States chooses power brokers for this program, but those choices likely reflect the advice of David Kilcullen, who was the senior counterinsurgency advisor to Gen. …