Afghan local police having success against Taliban

Rowan Scarborough:
A small, little-noticed counterinsurgency force that was created in the ninth year of the Afghanistan War is proving to be the key for U.S. troops to leave the country in victory.
The Afghan Local Police (ALP) is becoming so effective that Interior Minister Bismillah Khan Mohammadi privately protested to U.S. commanders that too few of these units were being formed in the north, his power base, a defense official told The Washington Times.
The U.S. military now is shifting gears and establishing more units there.
The relatively tiny force is part of a Village Stability Operations program designed to defeat the rural insurgency that is the Taliban. But a little more than a year after it was created, the ALP is leading commanders to think it is the answer to the long-vexing problem of holding a village afterNATO troops clear it of the enemy.
“I think it’s going to continue to be an important mechanism for holding the ground in Afghanistan,” Marine CorpsGen. John Allen, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week.
 The Afghan Local Police is unlike the Afghan National Police, which uses volunteers from various regions to patrol and protect areas far from home. The local force is dedicated to one village and is made up of men chosen by anti-Taliban village elders for their loyalty.Trained by U.S. special-operations forces, such as Army Green Berets, local police are geared for defense, not offense. 
“The Taliban are very threatened by the ALP because the significant terrain, the key terrain in the counterinsurgency, is the human terrain,”Gen. Allen said. “And the Afghan Local Police deny the human terrain to the Taliban.”...
Ironically, these are the forces that Karzai and the central government most opposed, viewing them as a dangerous militia.   Apparently we do not have the same problem with treachery with he local forces.  It appears to be one of the few bright spots in this god forsaken country.

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