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The Afghans call them the “upset brothers,” the low- and mid-level fighters who are fighting for money or to gain revenge for some perceived injustice, or because they are being coerced, rather than for ideological reasons or out of a lust for power. The phrase has caught on with ISAF.
It is these “upset brothers” at whom the reintegration initiative is targeted.
“The reasons why people fight will be different in different villages and different communities in different parts of the country, but a lot of the drivers of instability and a lot of the drivers for the reasons why these individuals fight are indeed rectifiable,” said Col. Chris Kolenda, a special adviser to ISAF commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal and director of strategy for reintegration.
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Coalition officials have monitored insurgents talking about the reintegration effort, Flynn said. The essence of the conversations is that the insurgents want to know what the finished reintegration plan will be, he added.
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The most high-profile example of insurgents seeking to reintegrate occurred in the wake of the killing of Ghulam Yahya Akbari on Oct. 9, the so-called “Tajik Taliban” commander, who, together with his two sons, had carried out a reign of terror across parts of western Afghanistan.
After his sons were killed late this summer, “Yahya became even more relentless in his prosecution of suicide attacks and rockets into Herat airfield, etc.,” Flynn said. Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan conducted “a very effective man-hunting campaign against him, and it eventually paid off,” he said.
“When he was killed it was like the weight of the world was taken off a couple of fairly large swaths of people,” Flynn said. “The prices of foodstuffs went down in certain bazaars and markets out there because Yahya was jacking them up ... More bazaars opened up. And then, of course, once this sort of weight of intimidation came off of the shoulders of these people, many of the fighters said, ‘Hey, I’m done.’”
As a result of the coalition killing “a guy who acted as though he was invincible … somewhere between a hundred and 200 fighters [have given up],” Flynn said. “That’s pretty significant.”
In the case of Yahya, it required killing a commander to persuade his fighters to give up. In Helmand, all it took to get “a couple of hundred” insurgents off the battlefield was for coalition forces to remove some local Taliban commanders from their targeting list, Flynn said.
Some of those fighters have reintegrated into their communities, “and some provide intelligence — and it’s still very dangerous for them,” Flynn said, adding that “in some cases” coalition forces are paying the former insurgents for that intelligence.
But while the coalition forces may pay for intelligence, they are determined not to pay insurgents simply to quit fighting. “This is not a ‘pay for don’t play, pay for don’t fight’ sort of scenario,” Kolenda said.
ISAF officials are at pains to stress that there is a difference between reintegration, which is aimed at low- and mid-level fighters, and reconciliation, which refers to political accommodation with senior insurgent leaders.
The officials are adamant that arranging political reconciliation is not their job. “That’s the business of the government of Afghanistan, and we’re absolutely not getting involved in that,” Dutton said.
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