Summary
■ International intervention in Afghanistan at the end of 2001 marked less the beginning of a war-to-peace transition and more a new phase of an ongoing conflict.
■ The fundamental contradiction has been attempting to build peace while fighting a war.
■ Post-2001 Afghanistan exemplifies the deleterious effects of exogenous, militarized statebuilding, which has undermined peacebuilding and statebuilding at many levels.
■ The paradox of counterinsurgency doctrine in Afghanistan is that its success depends on a high-capacity regime to put it into practice but that exogenous statebuilding prevents the emergence of such a regime in the first place.
■ The growth of the insurgency, the failures of top-down statebuilding, and the influence of counterinsurgency doctrine all help explain the proliferation of militias since the mid-2000s.
■ Militias are formed to engage in protective violence but often mete out predatory and abusive violence.
■ No necessary or straightforward connection exists between militia formation and state breakdown or collapse.
■ Preceded by several other militia programs, the Afghan Local Police (ALP) emerged as a U.S.-funded effort.
■ ALP militias are less a threat to national-level stability and more a danger that after 2014 an oversized and unevenly trained national armed force will fragment into numerous competing militias.
■ Outsourcing community protection and defense to the ALP—rather than extending state power and legitimacy—may have had the opposite effect.
■ The ALP will not go away, has already left a long-term legacy that Afghans will have to deal with, and is symptomatic of a wider deficiency of the post-2001 intervention.
■ The long-term future of the ALP program remains uncertain. If it continues, however, it should not be expanded. Stronger state oversight and support are needed, and plans should be developed to facilitate the absorption of the ALP into the Afghan National Police (ANP).