The tribal awakening in Ramadi, Iraq, was unique in that Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha was able to lead a council of tribal elders, mostly who believed approximately the same things and who saw themselves as part of a coherent Anbar province, to work with the U.S. Marines providing intelligence and policing to assist in expelling al Qaeda in Iraq from the Anbar Province.

There are those, Amir Teheri among them, who believe that part of the U.S. difficulty in Afghanistan has to do with the forced imposition of a centralized power structure in Afghanistan.  But the detractors of such an arrangement have their history as well to which they can point.  There is a dubious past concerning tribal militias that gives the population concerns over the proposed awakening in Afghanistan.

A US-backed plan to form local forces to fight insurgents, like those that had some success in Iraq, has met with alarm in Afghanistan where memories are fresh of the 1990s war between local factions.

The plan, still in a pilot phase, is officially being developed at the request of the government of President Hamid Karzai as a way to empower villagers to protect themselves amid an upsurge in insurgent violence.

But it is being pushed by the United States, Afghanistan’s key ally, with US ambassador to Kabul William Wood saying in late December that there were simply not enough Afghan or international troops to deploy into all villages.

Under the programme, the United States would give members of certain local communities training, clothing and other supplies to “restore their own capacity to protect themselves”, Wood said.

They would be linked into military back-up but the United States would not provide them with weapons, he said, careful to stress that “this is not a recreation of tribal militias or any other kind of militia.”

“We are trying to strengthen the villages, we are trying to strengthen the tribes,” he said, calling these new groups “community guards”.

These groups would likely have weapons. But officials have been vague about who would supply them, with some saying it would be the interior ministry and also insisting the groups could not be called “militias” as they would fall under government supervision.

The guards would be chosen by local-level traditional councils, said Barna Karimi, deputy director of the Independent Directorate of Local Governance (IDLG) set up by Karzai more than a year ago.

The directorate is tasked with reviving these councils, called “shuras”, which fell into disarray during Afghanistan’s three decades of war.

It is starting its work in Logar and Wardak provinces, Karimi told AFP.

Security has plummeted in these two strategic areas, close to the capital and criss-crossed by important roads that are regularly attacked by insurgents and common criminals.

Some of the 20,000-30,000 extra US soldiers due to be in place by summer, in Afghanistan’s own Iraq-style “surge”, are expected to head to these provinces.

Official insistence that the plans for “community guards” do not amount to the establishment of militias has done little to allay public fears amid warnings it could lead to factional warfare like that seen in the 1990s.

Even Karzai, whom the United States has said requested help to create the guards, said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune newspaper last month that the creation of tribal militias would be a bad idea.

“If we create militias again, we will be ruining this country further,” he said. “That is not what I want.”

The communist government of the 1980s poured money into tribal forces because its own security structures were unable to defeat an Afghan uprising against the 1979 Soviet invasion.

Some of these factions grew into powerful forces that later battled each other for control of the government in a devastating civil war that ended only with the Taliban’s seizure of power in 1996.

Observers said it would be better to reinforce the Afghan police and army than set up militias that the government one day might not be able to control.

“We are concerned,” said Nader Nadery from the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.

“We have tried to disarm groups for many years now, and this means to rearm some people,” he said, referring to a UN-backed government programme to persuade the country’s myriad armed factions to hand in their weapons.

Lawmaker Ahmad Joyenda was more emphatic.

“I am totally against militias. They will end up fighting again,” he said.

The government could not even control its own police force, added Joyenda, referring to police corruption.

This analysis suffers from being a bit clunky and simplistic.  The Russian mistake, among other things, was in not conducting counterinsurgency in the rural areas, restricting their presence to the urban population centers.  This is a mistake that the U.S. is currently making in the campaign due to lack of troops.

Yet the account does have dire warnings for the U.S. plan.  The U.S. is currently searching for a plan that doesn’t involve large increases in troop presence, and because none is forthcoming, the only viable option seen is to engineer an awakening on the scale and of the type of the Anbar revolt against al Qaeda.

Yet the problem is just that – this awakening would be engineered rather than natural, and if it’s not a natural fit, then it will fail.  Either way, U.S. forces will be in Afghanistan for a protracted period of time, and force projection will be necessary until a natural solution floats to the top among the flotsam of the wreck that is Afghanistan.