Vigilantis take on the Taliban

Washington Post:

As he jolted along village roads recently in a pickup truck with a machine gunner standing in the back, Farhad Akbari stopped every few minutes and pointed to another invisible landmark among the mud-walled houses, swaying poplars and rippling wheat fields.

“This corner used to be a Taliban check post, but now everyone can pass freely,” he said with a satisfied nod. “That orchard is where the Taliban used to escape from fighting. We ambushed them and killed seven.” Farther on, he paused by a stream with a dirt culvert.“This is where a mine exploded under two of my men,” he said.

Just a year ago, Akbari, 33, was a construction engineer getting rich off military contracts in Logar province, an hour’s drive south of Kabul. Today he is an armed vigilante, leading villagers and gunmen in a local rebellion against the insurgents who killed his mother in a roadside shooting in July.

Akbari asserts that since taking up arms, he has purged Taliban forces from more than 100 hamlets in Kolangar, a quiet farming region, killing dozens of insurgents in what he called “my uprising.”

He has recruited about 70 young men to his mobile fighting force, including former Taliban fighters. He also works closely with the Afghan Local Police and said he has urged older or jobless men in the area to join the police force and help patrol their villages.

Akbari’s ability to carve out a swath of Taliban-free territory has drawn both praise and alarm from Afghan military and civilian officials in Logar, where the insurgency remains a serious menace despite sustained Afghan and U.S. military pressure.

In contrast to those forces, which are either foreign or recruited from other regions and are spread across large areas, Akbari’s local roots and small mobile force appear to have made him more effective in a confined and familiar target area.

But Logar officials express concern that his freelance exploits could inspire other forms of vigilantism that could undermine the authority of Afghan security forces as coalition troops pull out over the next year.
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The vigilantis show how much more effective grass root efforts are than top down programs run by control freak government programs.  The Afghan government has been reluctant to embrace efforts like Akbari's.  You can see the lack of trust in the criticism.  But it was similar units that helped to break the back of al Qaeda in Iraq during the surge of US forces.  It is how you do a counterinsurgency.