text: Expand Afghan Local Police, Gizab village of Uruzgan province, Afghanistan, April 2011. © 2011 AP Photo 
   
   (Kabul) – Militias and some units of the new US-backed Afghan Local Police are committing serious human rights abuses, but the government is not providing proper oversight or holding them accountable, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The Afghan government and the US should sever ties with irregular armed groups and take immediate steps to create properly trained and vetted security forces that are held accountable for their actions. 
   
   The 102-page report, “‘Just Don’t Call It a Militia:’ Impunity, Militias and the ‘Afghan Local Police,’” documents serious abuses, such as killings, rape, arbitrary detention, abductions, forcible land grabs, and illegal raids by irregular armed groups in northern Kunduz province and the Afghan Local Police (ALP) force in Baghlan, Herat, and Uruzgan provinces. The Afghan government has failed to hold these forces to account, fostering future abuses and generating support for the Taliban and other opposition forces, Human Rights Watch found. 
   
   “The Afghan government has responded to the insurgency by reactivating militias that threaten the lives of ordinary Afghans” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Kabul and Washington need to make a clean break from supporting abusive and destabilizing militias to have any hope of a viable, long-term security strategy.” 
   
   As part of its exit strategy, the US military is training and mentoring the year-old village-level ALP force.In March 2011, the commander of the international forces in Afghanistan at the time, Gen. David Petraeus, told the US Senate that the ALP is “arguably the most critical element in our effort to help Afghanistan develop the capability to secure itself.” 
   
   Cases investigated by Human Rights Watch raise serious concerns about Afghan government and international efforts to arm, fund, vet, and hold accountable irregular armed groups. In Kunduz province, militias have spread quickly in recent years. Their increase is a deliberate policy of the National Directorate of Security (NDS), Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, which has reactivated militia networks primarily through the Shura-e-Nazar (“Supervisory Council” of the north) and Jamiat-i-Islami networks, and provided money and weapons without sufficient oversight. 
   
   “Just Don’t Call It a Militia” is based on over 120 interviews with victims of abuses and family members, village elders, witnesses, nongovernmental organization workers, Afghan security, human rights and government officials, foreign military officials and diplomats, journalists, and Afghanistan analysts. 
   
   In most cases of serious abuses documented by Human Rights Watch in Kunduz, no action had been taken against those responsible. For example, in Khanabad district in August 2009, a militia killed four men due to a family dispute. An NDS official confirmed that the police could not arrest anyone involved in the killing because of the militia commander’s connection to the provincial chief of police and a local strongman who is closely involved with abusive armed groups. A prosecutor who is also the father of one of the men killed told Human Rights Watch, “No one has helped me, and I work for the government, so what about the other people? Who will listen to them?” 
   
   “Patronage links to senior officials in the local security forces and the central government allow supposedly pro-government militias to terrorize local communities and operate with impunity,” Adams said. 
   
   At the same time, the rapid build-up of the ALP has contributed to concerns about whether it will be a law-abiding force, Human Rights Watch said. Created in July 2010 at the behest of the US, the force is supposed to supplement the Afghan national army and police at the community and village levels. The Afghan Local Police is seen by the US military as a way to address the pressures of trying to hand over control of security to the Afghan government by 2014. 
   
   Village shuras (councils) are tasked to nominate and vet members of the ALP, whose units report to the district chief of police. Units trained for only 21 days are being armed and deployed in areas where there is limited Afghan national army and police presence. As of August, 7,000 men had been recruited to the force. Plans are under way to arm and train up to 30,000. 
   
   Afghan and US officials told Human Rights Watch that the ALP has improved security in some areas. In some communities, local residents interviewed by Human Rights Watch welcomed the new force and cited improvements in security. But other residents said the new police had not been properly vetted, citing criminal and insurgent elements being absorbed into the force. Many complained that the ALP, like other irregular armed groups, is not held accountable when implicated in abuses. 
   
   Although the force is fairly new, Human Rights Watch documented several serious abuses by its members. In February in Shindand district in Herat province, for example, an ALP unit raided several houses, stealing belongings, beating residents, and illegally detaining six men. In another case, the ALP have been accused of beating teenage boys and hammering nails into the feet of one boy, but have not been arrested. 
   
   In Baghlan province, former fighters with the Islamist Hezb-i-Islami, including a local strongman, Nur-ul Haq, have been recruited into the ALP. Haq and his men have been implicated in killings, land-grabs, and abductions. But the police have refused to investigate the allegations, telling Human Rights Watch that they are unable to question suspected ALP members due to their connections with powerful government officials and US special forces. In April, four armed ALP members in Baghlan abducted a 13-year-old boy on his way home from the bazaar and took him to the house of an ALP sub-commander, where he was gang raped. He escaped the next day. Although the assailants’ identities were well known, no arrests have taken place. 
   
   In Uruzgan province in December 2010, a local strongman, Neda Muhammed, detained six elders after they refused to agree to provide men to the ALP. Some ALP members in Khas Uruzgan have been implicated by local officials and residents in illegal raids, beatings, and forcible collection of ushr (informal tax). 
   
   Afghan and international proponents of the ALP point to safeguards, such as the Afghan Interior Ministry control over the ALP, village shura vetting of members, and training and mentoring by US special operations forces. But the national police lack adequate command and control structures, and the ALP often far outnumber the national police in the districts where they operate, Human Rights Watch said. Interior Ministry officials have also conceded to Human Rights Watch that such safeguards had also been promised for many of the previous community defense initiatives that ended in failure. 
   
   Previous programs to create local defense forces have been hijacked by local strongmen or by ethnic or political factions, spreading fear, fuelling vendettas, and in some areas even playing into the hands of Taliban insurgents, Human Rights Watch said. One example was the Afghan National Auxiliary Police (ANAP), created in 2006, which was barely trained, underwent minimal vetting, had poorly defined rules of engagement, had high levels of infiltration, and was highly corrupt. Another, the Afghan Public Protection Force (AP3) in Wardak province, was hijacked by local strongmen and became involved in beatings and intimidation. 
   
   “While there is a need for more security at the village level, the Afghan and US governments should be very careful not to repeat the mistakes of militias past,” Adams said. “If quick corrections are not made, the ALP could end up being just another militia that causes more problems than it cures.” 
   
   Human Rights Watch called on the US and Afghan governments to avoid the rush to set up new units of the ALP around the country without proper vetting, oversight, and accountability mechanisms, as has occurred with some units. 
   
   Human Rights Watch also urged the Afghan government to investigate all allegations of abuse by militias and the ALP, to allocate adequate resources to investigate complaints, and to create an external complaints body to act on reports of abuses by the ALP and other police forces. 
   
   “Pressure to reduce international troop levels should not be at the expense of the rights of Afghans,” Adams said. “The Afghan government and its supporters need to understand that insecurity does not come only from the insurgency. Poor governance, corruption, human rights abuses, and impunity for government-affiliated forces all are drivers of the insurgency, and these issues need to be addressed if true stability is to come to Afghanistan.” ||||| Updated 2 p.m. 
   
   Ten years of war. Two years of an accelerated effort to train Afghans to take over that fight, at an annual cost of $6 billion. And not a single Afghan army battalion can operate without assistance from U.S. or allied units. 
   
   That was the assessment made by the officer responsible for training those Afghan soldiers, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell. Out of approximately 180 Afghan National Army battalions, only two operate “independently.” Except that “independently,” in Caldwell’s National Training Mission-Afghanistan command, means something different than “independently” does in the States. 
   
   Those two “independent” battalions still require U.S. support for their maintenance, logistics and medical systems,” Caldwell admitted when Pentagon reporters pressed him on Monday morning. 
   
   “Today, we haven’t developed their systems to enable them to do that yet,” Caldwell said. 
   
   Building up foreign armies isn’t easy. During 2008′s battle for Basra, Iraqi forces relied heavily on U.S. and British support — and still saw more than a thousand desertions. That was four years after then Maj. Gen. David Petraeus took over the training of the Iraqi military. 
   
   For the past two years, Caldwell’s overseen a big push to expand, professionalize and train Afghan soldiers and cops. Caldwell has gotten bodies into uniforms: the Afghan army and police total 305,516 today, up from 196,508 last December, and they’re “on track,” Caldwell says, to reach 352,000 by November 2012. 
   
   Caldwell praised Afghan police officers during the Taliban’s audacious attack on Kabul earlier this month. Two separate cops “literally did a bear hug” on separate suicide bombers in different places around the city, sacrificing themselves in the process. “Policemen were doing heroic deeds,” Caldwell said. 
   
   But most of Afghanistan’s men in uniform can’t read at a kindergarten level, much less understand the instrument panels on a helicopter or the serial numbers on their rifles. 
   
   That’s one reason why it’ll be years before the U.S. takes its training wheels off the Afghan soldiers’ bikes. Although the Obama administration plans to turn the war over to forces Caldwell trains by 2014, Caldwell told Danger Room in June that the Afghans will need U.S. training until as late as 2017. 
   
   That is, if attrition doesn’t get in the way. Caldwell expressed alarm that 1.4 percent of Afghan cops and 2.3 percent of Afghan soldiers walk off the job every month, saying that if “left unchecked [attrition] could undo much of the progress made to date.” Yet last week, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta testified that attrition rates are “as much as three percent per month. 
   
   Asked by Danger Room about the increase, Caldwell simply said that the “goal we’ve set” is a 1.4 monthly attrition level across both forces. In the Afghan National Army, attrition “has been steady over the last year. We have not seen the decline,” Caldwell said. 
   
   Then there’s the nagging issue of human rights. “U.S. officials have for years been aware of credible allegations that newly-installed Kandahar police chief [Brigadier General Abdul] Raziq and his men participated in a cold-blooded massacre of civilians,” writes Matthieu Aikins, in a gut-wrenching new expose for The Atlantic. Yet Raziq has been showered with cash and official praises from the highest level of the American-led coalition in Afghanistan. 
   
   Caldwell has instituted an additional 18 hours of training on respecting Afghans’ rights into the eight-week course that the typical would-be Afghan cop takes. But Caldwell doesn’t train every Afghan cop. Members of a program called the Afghan Local Police — founded in 2010 by Petraeus to recruit auxiliaries against the Taliban — has been implicated in “killings, rape, arbitrary detention, abductions, forcible land grabs, and illegal raids by irregular armed groups,” according to a Human Rights Watch report issued this month. 
   
   Special Operations Forces are responsible for turning these groups into respectable units. When Danger Room asked if it was time for Caldwell to take over that training, Caldwell said, “We’ve not been asked to at this point… If there is a request for us to help and become engaged in that, we obviously would. But at this point, I think the special forces element that has the responsibility for that clearly sees and understands what that report says. We all take that very seriously.” 
   
   With insurgents assassinating the man in charge of negotiating a peace deal, the Afghan security forces are the backbone of the U.S.’ long-term plan for Afghan security. During his Senate testimony on Thursday, Panetta called their development “one of the most notable successes” of the war. 
   
   Yet not only can no Afghan army battalion operate without U.S. aid, the U.S. has been purchasing them a lot of creature comforts. Caldwell said that his command recently stopped buying air conditioning units for Afghan barracks, replacing them with fans instead — part of an effort to pare down the $6 billion that it costs to keep the Afghan security forces going. Caldwell said he expects that number to drop — in part because someday Afghanistan won’t be ravaged by insurgency (maybe, hopefully) — but he doesn’t know how much it’ll drop by, or by when. 
   
   “I’m still very realistic about the challenges out there,” Caldwell said. 
   
   Update: I misheard Caldwell during today’s Pentagon briefing when he discussed the goal he’s set for monthly attrition rates. Thanks to his public-affairs officer, Lt. Col. Shawn Stroud, for alerting me to my mistake. 
   
   Photo: Flickr/DVIDSHUB ||||| Abdul Raziq and his men have received millions of dollars’ worth of U.S. training and equipment to help in the fight against the Taliban. But is our ally—long alleged to be involved in corruption and drug smuggling—also guilty of mass murder? 
   
   Above: Afghan General Abdul Raziq, seen here with American forces during a joint 2009 patrol near the Pakistan border (Emilio Morenatti/AP) 
   
   Shyly, at times smiling with weak adolescent bravado, the two young men recounted to me how they were beaten and tortured. It was July, and we were sitting at a table in the cavernous restaurant where they both work, in the stupefying summer heat. They slouched forward with their arms on their knees, frequently glancing down toward their open sandals, at toes where livid burns from the electrical wires were still visible. 
   
   I will call them Najib and Ahmad, though their names, like others in this article, have been changed to protect their safety. Both 23 years old, they looked like gangly young men who should be playing basketball on the street outside their house, or perhaps video games inside. But here in Kandahar City, the linchpin of the U.S. military’s campaign against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, they had found themselves the victims of America’s Afghan allies. 
   
   One afternoon in June, two younger boys who worked at the restaurant, ages 12 and 14, had been stopped by the Afghan National Police while carrying home leftovers from an afternoon wedding. The boys, who were each paid about $60 a month, explained that they always took home leftover meals for their families. But this time they were arrested and accused of bringing food to insurgent fighters hiding outside the city. 
   
   Around 11 o’clock that night, police showed up at the restaurant and arrested Najib and Ahmad as well, accusing them of having sent the younger boys out to feed the Taliban. They were taken to police headquarters, where they were handed over to men wearing the mottled gray-green uniforms of the Border Police. 
   
   “They said, ‘We are going to beat you,’” Ahmad recalled. 
   
   The Border Police were a new sight in the city: rough-looking types with wraparound shades and bandoliers of grenades, who could be seen lounging at checkpoints throughout the city and guarding installations such as the governor’s palace. Though restricted by Afghan law to operate only in international airports or within 50 kilometers of the border, they’d entered the city on May 29 when their boss, Brigadier General Abdul Raziq, was appointed acting chief of police in Kandahar province, following the assassination of his predecessor. Raziq was well known as a warlord and suspected drug trafficker who had waged a brutal campaign against the Taliban. He was also a close ally of both President Hamid Karzai and the U.S. military. 
   
   Inside the station, the policemen tied a scarf to Najib’s handcuffs and hung him from the ceiling until he felt as if his arms were being pulled from their sockets. Then two men—one in uniform and holding a black metal baton, the other in plain clothes and wielding a length of cable—began beating him across his hips and thighs. A third man, also in plain clothes, questioned Najib: “What was the name of the commander you were bringing food to? How often do you bring food to the enemy?” Sobbing, Najib pleaded his innocence. In a nearby room, Ahmad could hear his friend’s screams, though he was spared for the time being. 
   
   When the beating was over, Najib and Ahmad were taken outside and thrown into the back of an armored Humvee, where they lay all night with their wrists still tightly cuffed, suffocating in the stiflingly hot, enclosed interior. 
   
   Early the next morning, they were taken to the governor’s palace, a long, low white compound fronted by a series of arches, jointly guarded by American soldiers and Border Police, where U.S. and Afghan officials meet on a daily basis. The police brought them around the back, to a filthy room that smelled of human waste, where they were shackled to the wall next to two other prisoners. Then, one at a time, they were taken to a second room, empty except for a gas-powered generator. 
   
   Najib went first. He was forced to lie on his back, and wires leading to the generator were attached to toes on both his feet. A group of Border Police crowded around him, jeering and spitting snuff on his face. “Tell us the truth,” they commanded. Then they switched on the power. “It felt,” Najib told me, “like my whole body was filled with moving knives.” 
   
   After he passed out from the pain, it was Ahmad’s turn to be tortured. When the two awoke from the ordeal, they were placed in separate rooms. In the evening, they were taken to police headquarters to see Abdul Raziq himself. 
   
   Raziq is just 33 years old, slender and boyish-looking, with a square jaw and a widow’s peak that tufts up beneath the embroidered pillbox cap he favors when he’s not in uniform. Uneducated but clever and charismatic, he is, despite his youth, one of the most powerful warlords in southern Afghanistan. He controls a militia of several thousand men, as well as the lucrative drug-smuggling routes that pass through his territory, which includes a key trading town called Spin Boldak, near the border with Pakistan. 
   
   That June evening, Najib and Ahmad were seated facing Raziq, who asked them to explain why they had been arrested. They told him about the younger boys who would take leftover food home to their families, and whether it was because they had not confessed, or because their stories had checked out, Raziq ordered them released. 
   
   Najib and Ahmad complained to me of suffering nerve damage in their wrists from being cuffed for two days, and both said they’d had problems with their kidneys since the electrocutions: Ahmad, who had the more-severe burns, urinated blood for three days afterward. I examined the wounds on Ahmad’s and Najib’s toes—distinct circular burn marks that were still raw and unhealed—and I spoke with a number of their co-workers, who corroborated their claims. I was also given photos of their injuries taken immediately after they were released, and was told their story independently by a source inside the Kandahar police department unhappy with the abuses taking place under Raziq. “That’s what happened to them, when they were innocent,” this official said. “Think of what they do to the guilty.” 
   
   What happened to Ahmad and Najib is not an isolated incident, but part of a larger pattern of abuse that has occurred wherever Raziq has been in power, first in his outpost of Spin Boldak and now in Kandahar City. Raziq has long been publicly suspected of drug trafficking and corruption; allegations that he and his men have been involved in extrajudicial killings, torture, and illegal imprisonment have been trickling out for years. Raziq categorically denies all such charges, telling The Atlantic, “When someone works well, then he finds a lot of enemies who try to ruin his name.” 
   
   Last fall, Raziq and his militia were given a starring role in the U.S.-led military offensive into Taliban-controlled areas west of Kandahar City, a campaign that boosted his prestige immensely. Mentored by an American Special Forces team, Raziq’s fighters won public praise from U.S. officers for their combat prowess. After the offensive, Raziq was promoted to brigadier general—a rank requiring a direct order from President Karzai—in a January ceremony at the governor’s mansion. As Ben Moeling, who was until July the State Department’s senior official in Kandahar province, explained to me at the time, the promotion was “an explicit recognition of his importance.” 
   
   Nor was that promotion the only evidence of Raziq’s continuing ascent. In May, when Karzai appointed him chief of police for Kandahar province, Raziq accepted only on the condition that he also remain in charge of Spin Boldak, the seat of his economic and tribal power. So, in a move that enabled him to retain both jobs, Raziq was appointed “acting” police chief in Kandahar. 
   
   While beatings in police custody have been common in Kandahar for as long as there have been police, a number of Afghan and international officials familiar with the situation there told me that Raziq has brought with him a new level of brutality. Since his arrival, Raziq has launched a wave of arrests across the city in coordination with the government intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security. One human-rights official who has conducted prison visits in Kandahar told me that the number of prisoners is up more than 50 percent since Raziq’s arrival. In July, even the U.S. military seemed to have realized that the situation was out of hand, when American and NATO forces quietly halted the transfer of detainees to Afghan authorities in southern Afghanistan, because of credible allegations that prisoners had been severely abused while in police and NDS custody. 
   
   Though Raziq has risen in large part through his own skills and ambition, he is also, to a considerable degree, a creation of the American military intervention in Afghanistan. (Prior to 2001, he had worked in a shop in Pakistan.) As part of a countrywide initiative, his men have been trained by two controversial private military firms, DynCorp and Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, at a U.S.-funded center in Spin Boldak, where they are also provided with weapons, vehicles, and communications equipment. Their salaries are subsequently paid through the Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan, a UN-administered international fund, to which the U.S. is the largest contributor. Raziq himself has enjoyed visits in Spin Boldak from such senior U.S. officials as Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and Generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus. 
   
   In public, American officials had until recently been careful to downplay Raziq’s alleged abuses. When I met with the State Department’s Moeling at his Kandahar City office in January, he told me, “I think there is certainly a mythology about Abdul Raziq, where there’s a degree of assumption on some of those things. But I have never seen evidence of private prisons or of extrajudicial killings directly attributable to him.” 
   
   Yet, as a 2006 State Department report shows, U.S. officials have for years been aware of credible allegations that Raziq and his men participated in a cold-blooded massacre of civilians, the details of which have, until now, been successfully buried. And this, in turn, raises questions regarding whether U.S. officials may have knowingly violated a 1997 law that forbids assistance to foreign military units involved in human-rights violations. 
   
   Among a certain group of Kandaharis, the rough outlines of the massacre in question are well known. But nailing down a consistent, detailed version of what took place required two years of cross-checking with a diverse set of sources, including tribal elders, human-rights workers, police officers, and government officials. Most important, I was eventually given direct access to information and photos from a suppressed police investigation into the episode. 
   
   On March 20, 2006, Shin Noorzai, a burly smuggler in his mid-30s, arrived with 15 companions at the guesthouse of an acquaintance, Zulmay Tufon, in Kabul. It was the eve of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, occasion for Afghanistan’s biggest festivities, and the capital city’s bedraggled trees were strung with fallen kites and the first buds of spring. 
   
   Shin had grown up in southern Afghanistan during the violent, turbulent times of the anti-Soviet and civil wars, and had once been jailed in Pakistan for kidnapping a man. His companions, though, were a mixed group. Some were smugglers, but others were simply friends from the vicinity of the Afghan-Pakistani border, farmers or traders accompanying him on a trip to Mazar-e Sharif, a northern city famous for its new-year celebrations. 
   
   According to an acquaintance of Shin’s who was also present at the gathering, he and his friends had arrived at the invitation of another man, Mohammed Naeem Lalai, an old friend of Shin’s who was then working as an officer in the Border Police. It was Lalai who had persuaded Shin and his friends to stop in Kabul on their way to Mazar. As the group sat down to dinner, Shin’s acquaintance, a fellow tribesman, watched uneasily, nervous about the company Shin was keeping. He offered to make the trip with Shin instead. “Come with me to Mazar,” he said to him. 
   
   Shin replied that he was going to travel up to Mazar with Lalai. But first, he said, Lalai was taking him to another house where music and entertainment were promised. That night, as darkness fell over Kabul, Shin and his 15 companions left the house with Lalai. Their friends and families would never see them alive again. 
   
   At the second house, Shin and his friends were apparently drugged. Unconscious, they were bound and gagged, then loaded into vehicles with official plates, one of them a green Ford Ranger with the seal of the Border Police on its doors. 
   
   Driving along back roads, the cars made their way 500 kilometers south to Kandahar province, and by the next morning arrived at Spin Boldak, where Abdul Raziq, then a Border Police colonel in his mid-20s, was waiting for them. 
   
   Raziq and Lalai had together lured Shin and his associates to Kabul. The tribes to which Raziq and Shin belonged had been feuding over smuggling routes, and Raziq held Shin responsible for the 2004 killing of his brother. Shin had been a marked man ever since. His 15 companions were just going to be collateral damage. 
   
   Raziq and his men loaded their captives into a convoy of Land Cruisers and headed out to a parched, desolate stretch of the Afghan-Pakistani border. About 10 kilometers outside of town, they came to a halt. Shin and the others were hauled out of the trucks and into a dry river gully. There, at close range, Raziq’s forces let loose with automatic weapons, their bullets tearing through the helpless men, smashing their faces apart and soaking their robes with blood. After finishing the job, they unbound the corpses and left them there. 
   
   Arriving back in Spin Boldak, Raziq reported to his superiors and to the press that he had intercepted “at least 15” Taliban fighters infiltrating from Pakistan, led by the “mid-level Taliban commander Mullah Shin,” and had killed them in a gun battle. “We got a tip-off about them coming across the border. We went down there and fought them,” Raziq told the Associated Press the next day. It was the beginning of a cover-up that would go all the way up to President Karzai in Kabul.
target: – Ten years and $66 billion later, not one Afghan battalion is operating on its own. That was the conclusion of Lt. Gen. William Caldwell today as he set new benchmarks for training Afghan soldiers and expressed alarm over the attrition rates of Afghanistan's men in uniform. In charge of the training, Caldwell admitted that even the two so-called "independent" military units still require US backing for "maintenance, logistics, and medical systems." Most Afghan soldiers read below the kindergarten level, Wired reports, preventing them from using complex equipment. Afghan police are also dogged by corruption allegations that include mass murder as well as rape, arbitrary detention, and abductions. Meanwhile 2.3% of Afghan cops and 1.4% of Afghan soldiers are quitting every day. Caldwell said the US must continue training until 2017 and aim to reduce attrition rates to 1.4% across the board. “I’m still very realistic about the challenges out there,” he said.