Despite their official-sounding name, the Afghan Local Police (ALP) are not proper police and don’t undergo any police training. Rather, they are a loose collection of militias, initially bankrolled by the US, on the notion that non-Taliban forces would help defend more remote areas from the Taliban.
This hasn’t worked well, by and large. ALP groups have been reported to be on the take when the Taliban need to move through areas, and more often than not, the areas dominated by the ALP have seen abuses committed by the ALP itself, extorting locals and violently participating in long-standing family disputes, using their nominal government imprimatur to do so with impunity.
But still, ALP forces have occasionally fought off the Taliban, and even if the successes are few and far between, the increasingly desperate Afghan government seeks to dramatically expand the ALP program, seeing it as their last real hope to stem the latest Taliban offensives.
Complaints about ongoing ALP abuses were dismissed by Afghan officials who present this as a “matter of survival” for the Afghan government, and are talking adding thousands of new members to these various subsidized militias, with little to no vetting.
European NATO nations are expressing concern about the planned expansion too, saying they don’t want to “invest in anything that even remotely resembles the ALP.” It’s unclear, then, who will be paying for this expansion, though the US is probably the most obvious choice, as they’ve endorsed the program repeatedly and seemed least concerned about the reports of abuses.
Of, course the US gov’t does not care. The Afghan govt is a US lap dog. As long as the dog does not bite the hand that feeds him, the hand does not care who the dog does bite.
You see, the Pentagon and the State Department have never had to be concerned with the money they spent – because Congress doesn't really care. So throwing US taxpayer dollars down rat holes chasing "theories" of how they envision things working out is now second nature. If they had to actually be accountable for the money they spent perhaps this stupid and disastrous idea of "nation building" would come to an end.
Nah….
These militias are a throwback to old ways common in Europe of the past weak states. The police and other government officials are self-funding. Their appointment is a license to be on the take. It is the only pay they get, from a state that has no other power to pay or retain followers.
The Afghan government has no political base, and no financial tax base. It exists because the US props it up. Its only officials must look out for themselves. It was the same with tax collectors in old France, and various officials all over Europe of the period.
Corruption damages a nation, but it is also a way of running a government that can run no other way.
The Afghan government creation never crawled up from that low level, cannot now, and likely never will.
None of this really matters very much. In a fight with a standing army, insurgents always win. neither the US nor the Afghan government will beat the Taliban. Neither the US nor Putin nor Assad will defeat ISIS or the Syrian rebels. Turkey won't defeat the Kurds and Israel won't defeat the Palestinians or Hezbollah. Ultimately, Putin won't defeat the Chechens either.