Military Review English Edition January-February 2014 | Page 28

A Tale of Two Districts
Beating the Taliban at Their Own Game
Lt. Cmdr. Daniel R. Green, Ph.D., U.S. Navy
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not represent the U.S. Department of Defense.

I

N A STRATEGIC district in a nonstrategic province, the fate of the war in Afghanistan
is being decided. Far from where congressional delegations or generals visit, a small
revolution in how the United States fights the Taliban in Afghanistan is taking place, a
change that suggests the war can be won if the right resourcing and approach is adopted.
This new method of war is changing the terms of the conflict with the Taliban all across
Afghanistan in favor of the population and the government of Afghanistan and may be a
sustainable strategy for the future. In the southern Afghanistan province of Uruzgan, the
district of Shahid-e-Hasas was all but lost in 2006, when the Taliban resurgence across Afghanistan began, but thanks to the development of a new and innovative program, which
fights the Taliban on its own terms, the district is recovering. The program aims to defeat the Taliban (as much a fighting force as a political movement) by organizing itself
along similar lines—village-based, long-term, decentralized—blending civil-military approaches seamlessly, while enlisting the population in its own defense. Called Afghan Local Police (ALP), the program is an attempt to provide a bottom-up approach to stability
in Afghanistan by hiring local villagers—vetted by tribal elders, district police officials,
and the Ministry of Interior—and organizing them into defensively oriented forces to protect their own homes and tribal areas from Taliban intimidation. The ALP program is an
outgrowth of Village Stability Operations, which is a holistic initiative to understand the
sources of grievance villages have that separate them from the government of Afghanistan
and prompt them to enlist with, or at least tolerate, the Taliban. Due to the successes of
ALP in districts like Shahid-e-Hasas, the Taliban are struggling to field a force capable of
defeating the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA). This struggle
suggests that an enduring presence in the country that is village based, light, lean, and long
term is a successful and possibly enduring strategy to defeating the Islamist movement.

Lt. Cmdr. Daniel R. Green, Ph.D., served in Uruzgan Province
with the U.S. Department of State on the Tarin Kowt Provincial Reconstruction Team in 2005-2006 and returned to Uruzgan in 2012 for an eight-month tour with the U.S. Navy as a
tribal and political engagement officer. He is the author of The
Valley’s Edge: A Year with the Pashtuns in the Heartland of
the Taliban and is a Fellow at The Washington Institute for
Near East Policy.