BACKGROUND: On October 13, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution which mandates ISAF to operate beyond its present Kabul boundaries. Germany and NATO have also given a green light for up to 450 German peacekeepers, a force separate from ISAF, to deploy to Kunduz in the north of the country as a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT). The British already have a PRT presence in Mazar-e-Sharif with 72 men, and it is planned that they will be followed by others in up to eight different locations, including Herat and Kandahar. Their duty is to provide the local population with basic reconstruction as well as to provide for some security assistance, highly similar to the ISAF mandate but on a much smaller scale. In the third week of October, the DDR process is to begin with a pilot project in Kunduz, followed by two more in Bamiyan and Gardez. At each of these locations, verification teams will screen up to 1,000 persons. The focus will be on low and middle rank fighters, the key for warlords to mobilize. After surrendering their arms, former combatants are entitled to US$200 in Afghan currency, 130 kg of food, career counseling and various other aid packages. If this US$50 million program called the Afghan New Beginnings Program (ANBP) is successful, it will expand on a larger scale to Mazar-e-Sharif and Parwan, including the Panjsher Valley. The ANBP, a three-year project, aims to collect weapons from an estimated 100,000 fighters, 20 percent of which will be permitted to join the Afghan National Army. The initiation of the DDR process has taken time, awaiting necessary reforms in the Ministry of Defense. These concerned primarily the ethnic balance within the ministry, given that since the fall of Kabul, the ministry has been heavily dominated by the Panjsheri Tajik faction of Marshal Fahim. On September 20, it was announced that the ministry had been reshuffled, and two weeks after that clashes began in Mazar-i-Sharif. It is within this context that the UN and NATO finds it appropriate to expand the ISAF mandate. The 300 Afghan police that Kabul sent to the north to overlook the truce after the recent clashes, and to reinstate order, will not be enough against at least 10,000 well-armed militia men.

IMPLICATIONS: The question now is how the expanded ISAF mandate will be used and whether there is still time to revert recent developments in Afghanistan. First of all, the PRTs, which are NATO-lead but separate from ISAF, have a very limited mandate. NGOs that are active in the area have been very critical against these limits. They note that the PRTs are not allowed to interfere with inter-militia fighting, and may not directly intervene in human rights violations. Nor do they have a mandate to stop the regional drug trade. Also, the areas where the PRTs are deployed, and where the ANBP is to begin, are relatively stable and friendly areas, where the security issue is not half as serious as it is in the south. So why deploy security forces to areas where security is less an issue? What makes one skeptic is also the fact that even though the Afghan Ministry of Defense in theory has reformed, in practice the majority of the top 20 officials remain Panjsheris. The Uzbeks, for example, have only two representatives, which makes the Uzbek-dominated Jonbesh-e-Melli militia strongly hesitant in submitting their weapons to what is being perceived as a rival faction, despite the fact that the JM leader, General Dostum, is in fact deputy minister of defense. Some reports also claim that cheap weapons are bought in Pakistan to be handed in to the verification teams, while more modern arms ones are kept. The DDR is not primarily about collecting a certain number of weapons, rather about dissolving the militias’ military structures in favor of rebuilding the Afghan National Army and provide alternatives to warlordism. However, the rebuilding pace is very slow. A new Afghan battalion recently came of the track, for the first time with all Afghan officers conducting a 12-week basic training course. However, the army has only 6,000 soldiers of a planned 70,000. The dropout rate is still an alarmingly high 15 percent, down from about 40 percent in the early days. Parallel to the DDR, President Karzai has also approved a law forbidding political parties from having their private militia, but since some observers claim that there may be up to 800,000 armed fighters in the country, this new law may be hard to enforce. There are also reports of a definite split between Karzai and Minister of Defense Fahim Khan, which deepened while Karzai was abroad recently. Fahim is himself a warlord and leader of the Panjsheri grouping Shura-e-Nazar. Fahim has his own political agenda, which most likely does not include handing over the control of his weapons to someone else. ISAF could play an important role here since ISAF is also involved in training the ANA and some of the ISAF-contributing countries are also equipping the ANA. If ISAF could send a strong signal that it is ready to step up training and funding for an ethnically balanced ANA, and is prepared to fill the security vacuum in the whole country during and after the DDR process, then some of the combatants could follow the call to hand in their arms. Since DDR is also about providing jobs to former combatants, ISAF could increase and expand the number of ongoing labor-intensive reconstruction projects. This could also have an impact on the drug trade since those former combatants, who are not already involved with the narcotics mafia, and won’t join the army, can easily be recruited into the drug trade. Providing jobs and filling the security vacuum is essential for the DDR, and ISAF already has experience in that.

CONCLUSIONS: For the DDR process is to succeed, it is essential for ISAF to step in as an active participant in the demilitarization process, rather than merely as a distant observer. ISAF is also dependent on it, since it can not operate fully in an environment flooded with an estimated 10 million weapons. For the processes of demobilization and building of a national army is to be successful, continued attention is needed to the ethnic balance in the Ministry of Defense. If the Panjsheris are able to cling to power undisturbed, then there will be no demobilization, no efficient Afghan National Army and no security for the Afghan people. In this case, ISAF and the international community will have failed. AUTHOR’S BIO: Shahin Eghraghi served in the Swedish detachment to ISAF in Kabul until Summer 2003. He is currently a Research Assistant with the Program for Contemporary Silk Road Studies at Uppsala University, where his main duties are research into drug trafficking and security issues in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan.