Britain 'bribes Afghans to fight Taleban'

BRITAIN plans to pay cash "bribes" to tribal elders in Afghanistan's war-torn Helmand province, as part of a scheme to persuade them to take on the Taleban.

UK officials in the capital, Kabul, are bankrolling an Afghan initiative to pay community leaders monthly wages to get them talking to the government.

The Afghan Social Outreach Programme (ASOP) is seen as the first step towards finding influential tribal elders, on a district level, to command irregular forces against the Taleban insurgents.

The elders will be handpicked by Helmand's governor, Gulab Mangal, and are expected to earn about £800 a year for attending up to two meetings, or shuras, a month.

But critics fear the payments, which are some 30 per cent more than civil servants earn, are the president Hamid Karzai's way of bribing tribal elders to deliver votes ahead of elections next year.

American officials are financing a similar scheme in the east of the country, where their troops are based.

Meanwhile, US General David Petraeus is carrying out a strategy review that is expected to advocate closer engagement with Afghanistan's myriad tribal communities, after Barack Obama, the president-elect, takes office next year.

News of Britain's involvement in ASOP came as David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, met Mr Karzai on a surprise visit to Kabul yesterday. Speaking to journalists after the meeting, Mr Miliband was asked about rumours that 2,000 more UK soldiers could be sent to Afghanistan at the request of the US. "It is certainly invented, as far as I'm concerned. I haven't seen any papers come to me saying we need 2,000 more troops," he said.

Western backers say the cash payments are only a way of harnessing informal government structures, so people in remote and war-ravaged provinces can air their grievances to the governor. But Afghan officials insist it is the beginning of a much more ambitious plan to connect with men of fighting age who give their loyalty to village, family and tribal elders before any allegiance to Kabul.

Mr Karzai's spokesman said: "We don't want to create militias, but we need to be empowering tribal arbakai (community forces] and citizen patrols; equip them, not just with weapons but with whatever it takes, so they can protect their territories.

"We have lost a major part of Helmand to the Taleban because we failed to keep the population. We failed to keep the tribal elders on our side. When we lose them, we lose the territory. We should go back to the people."

The cash programme will be piloted in two districts of Helmand in the coming weeks and is expected to be rolled out across the province next year.

However, a western policy analyst in Kabul warned: "It's anti-democratic. If this is perceived as more political patronage, or bribery, it runs the risk of generating friction and resentment."

Charities and non-governmental organisations fear it could legitimise militias and store up problems for the future, after years of international efforts to disarm irregular forces.

Matt Waldman, Oxfam's head of policy in Afghanistan, said: "Given the fragile security situation, ASOP is a high-risk strategy which, if mishandled, has the potential to make matters worse."


Divided tribes make it hard to find elders who will help

THE tribes in Helmand province have been heavily fractured by decades of fighting, and balance of power is now inextricably linked to the drugs trade.

Tribal experts insist it will be harder to identify elders who can deliver security there than in the east. The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force is working with the Afghan Army and police chiefs to agree how the tribal forces will be controlled.

An ISAF source said: "The idea is these forces will take responsibility for keeping insurgents out of their areas, but they need to be able to work alongside Afghan and international forces.

"There are significant command and control issues still to be worked out," he added.

Parallels have been drawn with the Iraqi Concerned Local Citizens groups, which helped to unite Sunni tribesmen against al-Qaeda and other insurgents.

But the problems in Afghanistan are more complicated.

Donald Rumsfeld, the former United States defence secretary, warned this week: "Fractured groups of Pashtun tribesmen on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border do not yet appear willing to unite and take on the insurgents in their midst, as Arab tribes did in Iraq."