Kimberly Marten, a professor of political scientist at Barnard College and Columbia University is researching the role of war lords in Afghanistan and Pakistan, had a piece last week in the International Herald Tribune and the  New York Times asserting that the Obama Administration and Afghan government had adopted a policy to pay tribal militias to maintain security during the elections, but now wrongfully plan to make it permanent.

I agree with Marten.  She makes a strong case that this policy, initially promoted by David Kilcullen (an Australian who was the senior counterinsurgency advisor to Gen. David Petraeus), is a return to the British colonial military practice of paying Pashtun tribal members in the geographical areas that would later become Pakistan (although Pashtuns live on both sides of an arbitrary colonial-era border between Afghanistan and Pakistan).

Marten argues that by injecting outside money into Pashtun tribal politics, the British disrupted not only local Pashtun tribal politics, but also undermined equality of all Pashtun men, which had been embraced for centuries.  British intelligence officers charted sub-tribes and leaders, known as “maliks” and paid them more.  This practice became entrenched for decades, thus upon independence in 1947, Pakistan not only continued it, but enshrined it in the Pakistan constitution.  The Pakistanis feared the maliks, who were threatening to secede and establish an independent Pashtunistan.

In these Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, which buttress Afghanistan’s porous southern boundary, the maliks work with federal agents, control budgets, set priorities, administer laws and dispense patronage.  According to Marten, corruption abounds and until recently, only maliks could vote. Astonishingly, the British colonial punishment system remains in effect.

Marten notes that those who have been left outside of the malik system (and have not benefited from its patronage) have become a breeding ground for al Qaeda and support for the Taliban.  Poverty-stricken young people, with no prospect for jobs or educational opportunities, have found jihad to be the only outlet available. It is no coincidence that this is now al Qaeda’s home base, creating a major security headache not only for Islamabad, but also Kabul and Washington.

I can think of two other good reasons for not paying the maliks in Afghanistan.  Marten believes that the Afghanistan National Army is the one Afghani institution that instills pride and a healthy sense of nationalism.  Why pay maliks $150 per month when the U.S. objective is to build strong security institutions, enabling Afghanis to eventually assume these responsibilities from ISAF? Let’s put our money to its most effective use in what is already a too costly eight-year war.

Second,  Marten argues that Gen. David Petraeus pursuit of the Sunni Awakening in Iraq was based upon Kilcullen’s hypothesis that the best practice in any tribal situation is to recruit local leaders to enforce the community’s laws and practices.  This is how Petraeus worked with the Sunni sheiks in central Iraq: by paying them, creating the equivalent of another malik system.  Due to the rise of sectarian violence in Iraq and reported targeting of these leaders by the Shiites, it remains to be seen if this practice has indeed been successful.

Why start up another such system in Afghanistan when the evidence of such practices in Pakistan are clearly problematic and the jury remains out on whether the Iraq policy has effectively worked?

Marten is right when she argues that sustainable economic growth is not possible without a stable and secure environment.  Most expatriates I know in Afghanistan, work in compounds, going from compound to compound and having simply not enough direct contact with Afghanis because the security situation is so unstable.  By paying militia, the U.S. recreates a British colonial military policy that undermines its efforts to build an effective Army and police forces,  This policy only reinforces the power of regional war lords, who have long been part of the problem and not the solution in advancing a stable Afghanistan.

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