US Created 'Toxic, Cancerous' New Police, Security Forces in Afghanistan, Former Envoy Says

© AFP 2023 WAKIL KOHSARUS soldiers stand guard behind barbed wire as Afghans sit on a roadside near the military part of the airport in Kabul on August 20, 2021, hoping to flee from the country after the Taliban's military takeover of Afghanistan
US soldiers stand guard behind barbed wire as Afghans sit on a roadside near the military part of the airport in Kabul on August 20, 2021, hoping to flee from the country after the Taliban's military takeover of Afghanistan - Sputnik Africa, 1920, 06.05.2023
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WASHINGTON (Sputnik) – US efforts to build up local police forces and militias in Afghanistan backfired disastrously and created toxic and cancerous forces that reinforced existing elite corruption instead, former US ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry told a US Institute of Peace meeting.
"In 2009-10, the United States knows [that] it's failing in Afghanistan. The government is weak and fragile [so] they raise local militias for local security," Eikenberry, a retired US Army lieutenant general, said on Friday. "It was a failure due to elite capture [of the new units by established corrupt interests.]"
US diplomats, military and civilian advisers all failed to understand the complexity of local political interests and power structures in Afghanistan and created worse criminality than existed when they went in, Eikenberry said.
"We created these security forces and they proved toxic and cancerous: ...They created more criminality and more narco-trafficking," he said. "We didn't have the local knowledge to do this."
Eikenberry and three other former US ambassadors co-authored a new USIP report, "Elite capture and Corruption of Society," released on Friday, that used case studies from Afghanistan, Mexico, Uganda and Ukraine to analyze the phenomenon of elite capture and examine how US assistance affected the dynamics of elite manipulation in those countries.
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