US supporting abusive Afghan militias, triggering civil war: Report

According to a recent article published in Antiwar.com, the controversial policy of training Afghan militias that the US is pursuing in Afghanistan is likely to be merely a ploy to initiate civil war in the country after US troops pullout.

    The strategy is said to be the brainchild of CIA Director David Petraeus, who also devised a similar scheme in Iraq with the so-called ‘Sunni Awakening’ that brought local militias together against al-Qaeda.

Petraeus has said that the Afghan Local Police (ALP), created in July 2010, is “arguably the most critical element in our effort to help Afghanistan develop the capacity to secure itself.”

    However, backed by the US, the ALP has been committing brutal crimes against Afghan civilians. A Human Rights Watch report published last September “documents serious abuses, such as killings, rape, arbitrary detention, abductions, forcible land grabs, and illegal raids by irregular armed groups in northern Kunduz Province and the Afghan Local Police (ALP).”

The report documents that in April “four armed ALP members in Baghlan abducted a 13-year-old boy on his way home from the bazaar and took him to the house of an ALP sub-commander, where he was gang raped.”

The ALP has even been accused of “beating teenage boys and hammering nails into the feet of one boy”.

Yet no arrests have been made despite all the vicious crimes of the ALP against the people and the perpetrators being well known.

“Mark my words, the moment the Americans leave, the civil war will begin,” an Afghan named Abdul Nasir, recently told the New Yorker weekly.

“This country will be divided into twenty-five or thirty fiefdoms, each with its own government,” he asserted.

The remarks come at a time when insecurity continues to rise across Afghanistan despite the presence of some thousands of US-led forces in the war-torn country.

The US-led war in Afghanistan, with civilian and military casualties at record highs, has become the longest military conflict in American history.