Some Police Recruits Impose ‘Islamic Tax’ on Afghans

Afghan Local Police, background, listen to a speech during a ceremony presenting new uniforms for officers in Gizab, Afghanistan, in April.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ghulam Hazrat should be a poster boy for the peaceful reintegration of insurgents who want to switch sides. Six months ago he was a Taliban commander in the troubled Imam Sahib district of northern Kunduz Province. Now he and 10 of his followers are in the process of becoming police officers, at which point the government will start paying them salaries.

In the meantime, however, Mr. Hazrat is raising money the same way he did as a Taliban commander, by imposing an “Islamic tax” on people in his district.

“The government is telling me to fight the Taliban and protect your area so we must ask people for help in order to take care of myself and my friends,” he said in an interview. He and other militiamen who have declared for the government and hope to join the local police, a group known as arbakai, insist that people give the money voluntarily.

Judging by the public outcry, however, the donors see things differently. They are often forced to hand over a tenth of their earnings, just as they were when the Taliban ran things. In Kunduz, where the police training program has been operating since late last year, radio talk shows have been flooded by angry callers complaining about the arbakai militias, meetings of elders have denounced their behavior, and even provincial government officials have expressed concern.

The American-financed program aims to convert insurgents into village self-defense forces called Afghan Local Police, distinct from the existing national police force. It is a favorite initiative of the NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who considers it a key part of his counterinsurgency strategy.

Afghan police officials see it as an inexpensive way to beef up their forces, particularly in remote areas. The Afghan Local Police are organized and trained by American Special Forces units in cooperation with the Afghan authorities and, working at the village level, are paid half of what national police officers earn.

So far the program has trained 6,200 officers in 41 districts, and aims to recruit 30,000 in 100 districts in 14 provinces by the end of the year.

But it has aroused concern among aid workers and United Nations officials, who say it risks empowering local warlords who have little regard for human rights or proper behavior.

Many Afghans fear a return to the warlord days of the civil war years, from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, even more than they fear the Taliban, who came to power in large measure because people were fed up with feuding local militias. A recent study by Oxfam and three other nongovernment groups concluded that the program had “in all cases failed to provide effective community policing,” and has instead produced forces that have “generally been feared by the communities they are supposed to protect.”

A United Nations report in March noted that while the program was still too new to render hard judgments, “Concerns have been raised regarding weak oversight, recruitment, vetting and command-and-control mechanisms.”

The controversy in Kunduz arose just as farmers began harvesting their crops, only to find that many of the new arbakai groups, armed and acting as a de facto police force before they had begun the training program, were demanding their tithe.

“We have many times said through local television that no one should give anything to anyone, and arbakai have no right to collect Islamic tax,” said Sarwar Hussaini, the spokesman for the Kunduz Province police chief.

But refusing to pay can have consequences.

The headmaster and assistant headmaster of the Haji Mir Alam girls’ school in the provincial capital, Kunduz city, refused. Two arbakai commanders with 30 armed men stormed the school on Wednesday, beating both men with rifle butts in front of the students until they fell unconscious, according to Muhammad Zahir Nazam, head of the provincial education department.

“The education department strongly condemns this attack, which was a clear attack on education,” he said. Both school officials were hospitalized and are in comas, he said, and the school has been closed.

A group of 100 tribal elders gathered afterward and denounced the attack. “The government should arrest and bring these people to justice,” said a spokesman for the group, Haji Nesar Ahmad. Mr. Hussaini, the police spokesman, said no official complaints had been filed over arbakai abuses.

But Mr. Nazam, the education official, said he reported the attack to security officials several times, and “no steps have been taken and no one arrested.”



A spokeswoman for the NATO-led military coalition referred questions about the episodes to Afghan officials. The Afghan Local Police “is an Afghan-led program where we’re in a supporting role,” said the spokeswoman, Lt. Cmdr. Kathleen D. Sweetser. She said it helped provide security in “contested areas that are important to the campaign but beyond the reach” of available coalition and Afghan forces.

Kunduz, where there are 1,500 arbakai militiamen and 1,200 slots authorized for Local Police officers, has one of the largest programs. So far, though, only 105 arbakai have graduated to become officers, Mr. Hussaini said. NATO officials say 220 Local Police officers have been trained in Kunduz.

The arbakai militias who have drawn so many complaints are in the early stages of the process. Many have not yet been accepted into the training program.

“If the government gave us food and paid us, then there would be no reason to collect tax from people,” said Mr. Hazrat, the arbakai commander.

Afghan and international officials acknowledge the program has flaws. An international official with knowledge of the program who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the training program had not geared up fast enough to accommodate the numbers of arbakai.

“There’s more demand than there is capacity,” the official said. “Whatever we are doing, we have to do it correctly.”

Mohammad Ayoub Haqyaar, governor of the Imam Sahib district, where Mr. Hazrat’s forces range, said, “The best way to prevent them from taking tax from people will be to hire them as Local Police and start paying them.”

But American rules do not allow the recruits to be paid until they have been trained and vetted by the Special Forces, as well as local elders and Afghan officials. And while the Americans also object to giving them guns and ID cards before then, local governments have handed them out anyway.

Yaar Mohammad, a 40-year-old farmer in the Imam Sahib district, has just harvested 4,600 pounds of wheat from his six acres of land, and the local arbakai asked for 460 pounds of that. “I refused, and they threatened me, and I finally had to give it to them,” he said. In the Khan Abad district, also in Kunduz Province, a farmer named Faizullah has not yet harvested his 12 acres of wheat, but plans to hand over a tenth after the local commander announced in the mosque that everyone had to do so.

“We must give it to them,” he said. “If we don’t then they’ll create problems.”

“People are complaining that arbakai are taking their money and their cellphones and sometimes beating them up,” said Col. Abdul Rahman Aqtash, the deputy police chief in Kunduz. “We’ve cleared Kunduz of the armed opposition, but if the situation continues like this then people will keep their distance from the government and it will prepare the ground for armed opposition.”