US enlists ex-warlord's men for Afghan police force

By Claire Truscott (AFP)

RAWHANAY, Afghanistan - Drawing on a cigarette held between his tattooed fingers, Mohammed Daoud is thanked by an American junior officer for dispatching 5,000 Afghan militiamen to join the police force.

Sherzai, a burly Pashtun and ex-mujahideen, was governor of Kandahar from 2001 to 2003

"This would make me very happy to stand side by side with my friends," US Lieutenant Jared Hollows tells the 35-year-old commander and loyalist of former warlord Gul Agha Sherzai in a village in Kandahar.

US troops fighting to control the southern province have cut a deal to bring Sherzai's militia into the police, providing salaries and uniforms in return for help quelling Taliban unrest.

NATO commanders hope such deals can help reverse the tide of the nine-year Afghan war in the crucial months ahead under a strict timetable, as US President Barack Obama is keen to start getting troops out next year.

"We're building an Afghan solution that puts the legitimate power where it belongs -- in the government and in the security apparatus," said US Lieutenant Colonel John Paginini, commander of the 1st squadron, 71st cavalry regiment.

"There is no distinction between them and any other policemen from any other tribe or any other family."

But alliances with men like Sherzai -- former warlords suspected of pursuing personal profit -- are not universally welcomed.

At least 30 US and NATO soldiers died in Afghanistan last week. Record casualty numbers and tough fighting across the south have raised questions about the course of the war, with commanders under intense pressure to show progress.

"The time wasn't right before, but it is now," Daoud assured the Americans in Dand district just south of Kandahar city, the crude tattoos on his fingers apparently self-inked while behind bars during the 1980s Soviet-backed regime.

"They want to serve the district, the province, their country," he added, without elaborating further on the decision to push his men into the police.

The case highlights the complexities behind many of the relationships that US field commanders try to forge with strongmen who can have competing interests in Afghanistan's fractured, tribal society.

US General Stanley McChrystal, commander of the 142,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, has already warned that the Kandahar campaign will be slower than expected because Afghan forces are in short supply and the local population wary.

Named as a future president by his die-hard supporters, Sherzai, a burly Pashtun and ex-mujahideen, was governor of Kandahar from 2001 to 2003 before being relocated to run Nangarhar province on the Pakistani border.

Sherzai counts himself as a Karzai ally, but is reputed to be an arch rival of the president's brother and Kandahar provincial council chief, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is saddled with Western accusations of corruption and drug smuggling.

The governor of Dand, 32-year-old Hamadullah Nazick, who is close to both Sherzai and Wali Karzai, said any public harmony between the pair is fragile, with NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) acting as a sticking plaster.

"I don't think Sherzai and Ahmed Wali Karzai will continue to get along after ISAF forces leave," he tells AFP.

In Daoud's home village of Rawhanay, new policemen proudly told AFP that Sherzai was their boss. The former warlord ran for the presidency against Karzai in 2009, withdrawing only days before the fraud-tainted election.

After bidding farewell to the Americans from his white-painted mud hut, Daoud pointed to the walls plastered with pictures of Sherzai.

"Everyone around here would like Gul Agha Sherzai to be the next president," he told AFP.

But Carl Forsberg, an Afghanistan expert at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW), said Sherzai's militia is likely to continue to answer to him while wearing Afghan police uniform."We should be very cautious about any offer Sherzai makes to integrate his militias into the ANP (Afghan national police) because he will plan to ensure they stay under his influence," he said.

"Sherzai has given clear signals that he would like to reassert himself in Kandahar politics (and) has always understood the importance of having ISAF support."