The U.S. military in Afghanistan says it has temporarily halted the training of Afghan Local Police in order to redo the vetting of current members after a string of attacks by Afghan soldiers and police on their international allies.
Forty-five international troops have been killed in a wave of insider attacks in Afghanistan this year, throwing doubt on the ability of Afghan and coalition forces to live and work together during a key time in the transition to Afghan control of security. International forces are set to hand over responsibility for the country’s security to Afghans by the end of 2014.
This is not a new thing.
In the war against the communist-led Viet Cong in South Vietnam, the Navy’s river patrol force PBRs often worked with local militia units recruited from among the immediately local population. Army Special Forces units worked with South Vietnamese organized into civilian-irregular-defense-groups which were also recruited from among th population in the vicinity of Special Forces base camps.
The communists did infiltrate these units, usually by sending trained agents to volunteer for them, but the number of incidents, though in each instance serious, were not like those being encountered in Afghanistan.
The difference seems to be that the idea of communism was an import from the Western countries where it was invented and had to stand the test of acceptance. And as a foreign ideology linked to the culture of the Western colonizers, it was not always widely ‘accepted.’
Instead, family ties, local village loyalties and Confuscianism each had a much stonger impact on their decisions.
In the case of Afghanistan, as it appears from news media reports, it is evident that the dominant loyalty to Afghanis is determined by family ties within an extended family-clan-tribe complexity and by the generally unfying effect of Islam against foreign influence and against foreigners.
And Islam is indigenous to Afghanistan. It is not foreign.
In Afghanistan, Islam unifies while in South Vietnam communism divided.
Further, in the Vietnam War, the communists took their ideological war to the United States and influenced politics in a manner that supported their war effort in South Vietnam while the Afghanis could care less about the USA except for the material support from us that pours into their country.
Getting back to the article discussing the suspension of training of Afghans I have this to say.
If it were possible to return to 1968-69 in South Vietnam, I would not hesitate to once again work closely woith South Vietnamese military forces.
But, I would not want to work with the Afghanis. They have proven that the hatred of militant Islam toward unbelievers is prevalent enough among friendly(?) Afghani forces to make ‘living among them’ and serving along side of them to be an extremely hazardous business.
Its one thing to be in a fire fight with the enemy ‘on the outside’ but when you worry about whether the man next to you is going to shoot you in the back, its a no-win proposition.