Ricks is happy about GEN Petraeus' idea of creating local self-defense forces in Afghanistan. The great benefit of this strategy, as Ricks points out, is that it will give the U.S. some leverage over Karzai, which we badly need. The great risk of this strategy, which Ricks doesn't point out, is that local self-defense forces in Afghanistan have a way of ignoring or rebelling against central governments they don't like. Civil war can be the result.
In 1986, at the peak of the Soviet-Afghan War, Afghan President Mohammad Najibullah began recruiting local militias to deal with the mujahideen. He offered them land, money, political influence, local autonomy, and guns in exchange for local security. This strategy worked very well as long Najibullah could keep the inducements coming. When the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, it enabled him to survive a massive mujahideen offensive and stay in power another three years (one of the ironies of this war is that the Afghan government outlived the Soviet government by four months). One of Mikhail Gorbachev's last acts as Soviet leader, however, was to cancel economic and military aid Afghanistan in December 1991. Najibullah and his rentier state no longer had any way of providing local security forces with what were in effect bribes to fight on its side. And now those groups were heavily armed.
Afghanistan quickly fragmented into nothing more than a state full of armed bands, very few of whom had any loyalty to the state. The civil war that followed was an ugly affair and eventually led to the seizure of Kabul by the Taliban.
I've been convinced that we'll be sending billions in economic and military aid to Afghanistan for a very long time after we're gone. We'll have no choice. Petraeus seems to be easing us in that direction, whether he realizes it or not.
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