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One of the prime requirements of the Bonn Agreement signed
by the Afghan factions on December 5, 2001 under the United
Nations was the disarmament of warlords and strengthening
of the central government authority. It stipulated that
`upon the official transfer of power, all mujahiddins, Afghan
armed forces and armed groups in the country shall come
under the command and control of the Interim Authority,
and be reorganized according to the requirements of the
new Afghan security and armed forces'. Seven months later
in June 2002, the long-awaited loya jirga or grand tribal
council in Kabul saw exhilaration, dramatic calls for unity
and powerful diatribes against warlords. In an interview
on July 11, 2004 with The New York Times, President Hamid
Karzai named the armed groups led by warlords - rather than
the Taliban insurgencies - as the greatest danger, Afghanistan
is facing. On December 7, 2004, in his swearing-in ceremony
Afghanistan's first popularly elected President, Karzai
vowed that disarming the private militias would be one of
his primary goals in the coming days. Consequently, the
UN-backed, Japan-supported Disarmament, Demobilization,
and Reintegration (DDR) program succeeded in demobilizing
more than 62,000 factional militias, collecting some 36,000
small arms, and storing nearly all militia heavy weapons.
The second phase of DDR under the Disbanding Illegal Armed
Groups (DIAG) program seeks voluntary, negotiated, and forced
disbanding of more than 100,000 members of the illegal armed
groups. Both DDR and DIAG were designed to expand the authority
of Afghanistan's central government as the disarmament efforts
are widely viewed as the lynchpin of the country's stabilization
efforts by the Bonn Agreement of 2001 and the London `Afghanistan
Compact' of 2006.
But the program appears to be a difficult process. The
ground reality is that even after six years of the American
invasion, thousands of men still remain armed under the
shadow of the warlords who control large chunks of the country's
territory and through their oppressive tactics, they rule
their `occupied' area with an iron fist. The program for
the DIAG is `all but moribund, as the south refuses to disarm
in the face of insurgent security threats, and the north
refuses to disarm if the south does not'. A Human Rights
Watch (HRW) report of 2006 stated that political repression
by warlords (includes militia commanders and local strongmen)
is the principal problem in Afghanistan today as they continue
to control private militia forces, wield significant influence
and engage in criminal activity with impunity in most parts
of the country. Due to the increasing threat of insurgency
which is spilling out of the south, the Karzai government
is rearming the tribal pashtuns in the name of Afghan National
Auxiliary Police to fight against them, which is in turn,
influencing northern commanders to reengage. And therefore,
`even many ex-combatants that participated in the DDR process,
faced with unemployment have begun to rearm'.
As a result, the country remains fragmented and the seeds
of civil war look intact. These conditions also leave the
nation at risk of once again becoming a threat to itself
as well as to the international community.And, since the US attacked the country and overthrew the
Taliban regime, it apparently became Washington's responsibility
to help implementing the Bonn declarations and `Afghanistan
Compact'. But the style of American military operation and
policies so far sets a different trend. Instead of working
towards the disarmament of warlords, the US made them its
war allies for its own military and strategic reasons. In
many parts of the country, the US Special Forces have provided
huge amount of money, vehicles and sophisticated weapons
to warlords and military commanders in the hope of using
them to fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban remnants.
As a result, the factional and regional warlords are more
powerful today than ever before. The US is betting that
these people who caused so much misery to Afghanistan (in
fact they are still fighting among themselves) will somehow
help bring about peace and stability to this 26 years war-torn
country. But in reality, the opposite is happening, and
their support to the warlords is only aggravating the problem
from bad to worse. Therefore, the US policy, designed to
further the stability of Afghanistan by giving economic
and military aid to the warlords have been misguided and
detrimental towards the peace process because warlords maintain
their authority only by preventing the emergence of a functioning
state.
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