Special Deals and Raw Recruits Employed to Halt the Taliban in Embattled Helmand

Sayed Lal has few reasons to love the British. A Nato bomb ripped through his house during a bruising battle with the Taliban, he said.

Eleven relatives - sisters, brothers, nephews and nieces - were killed. "Why did the British need to do this?" said Lal, a 24-year-old with a beard and blazing green eyes.

Unlikely as it may seem, Lal is a key player in a controversial British scheme for a lasting peace in a corner of Helmand. Last October British generals agreed to a peace pact in Musa Qala, a small but strategic district centre in northern Helmand, that ended months of fighting.

Under the terms of the deal, which was negotiated by the provincial governor, British troops and Taliban fighters withdrew from the town. In return local elders were to provide tribesmen for a new police force that would secure the town and keep the Taliban at bay.

Mr Lal was among the first 19 recruits to graduate last month. Despite his family losses, he said the peace deal was paying dividends. "The British drop bombs but the Taliban also persecute us," he said after receiving his new AK-47 and four magazines of ammunition at a ceremony in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. "I am doing this so that nobody else will lose their lives."

The Musa Qala deal has generated much controversy among foreign and Afghan officials as the Taliban continue their winter offensive. Supporters claim it offers a possible template for defeating the Taliban, and a similar deal in Sangin - another centre of vicious combat last summer - is in the making. Peace deals marginalise the insurgents and avoid the bloody tactics that won Nato military victories last year but cost vital public support because of high civilian casualties.

Recognising the mistakes, Nato vowed to change tactics to avoid killing innocent civilians. "I believe the single thing that we have done wrong, and we are striving extremely hard to improve on, is killing innocent civilians," said spokesman Brigadier Richard Nugee.

But critics say the Musa Qala pact represents an effective capitulation to the Taliban that bars British soldiers from a key strategic town while allowing the Taliban to redeploy. There has been strong criticism from US military officials and recently the new Helmand governor, Asadullah Wafa, expressed scepticism about such initiatives. "I am not pro-agreements where there is no government control," he said.

The difficulty is in knowing whether the deal is sticking. At a police graduation ceremony in Lashkar Gah, Musa Qala's new police chief, Haji Malang, said unarmed Taliban were still present: "They are living at their homes in the downtown area but they are not doing anything."

But Malang, a former militia leader, also insisted the central government was slowly establishing its presence. The market was bustling, four schools were open and the Afghan flag was flying over the district centre, he said, although promised development aid had not yet materialised. "Some NGO people came and talked but then they left again," Malang said. A British official said the Afghan government was repairing the battle-scarred town mosque and Britain may fund smaller mosques.

Malang's fledgling force is part of a larger intake of "auxiliary police" across southern Afghanistan which the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, hopes will quell the insurgency. A mix of farmers and former militiamen, they fill the gaps left by the undermanned, outgunned national police in remote areas.

The scheme is a gamble. The policemen are rushed through basic training - two weeks instead of six - and are paid $75 (£38) a month, a salary much less than Taliban rates for gunmen. Critics say the scheme undermines years of efforts to disarm the countryside.

But the auxiliaries have a major advantage: most will be deployed in their home villages, possibly lessening the chances of desertion, corruption and abuse of civilians. So far 368 auxiliary police have graduated in Helmand.

Trainers with DynCorp, the American security contractor hired to train the Helmand auxiliaries, admit the personnel are a mixed lot. During the latest induction of 150 men one recruit was sent home for taking heroin, another for brawling. Some seemed barely 14 years old.

Recruits with scraggy beards and kohl-lined eyes look little different from many Taliban. Some may even have fought with the insurgents, said the Helmand police chief, General Nabi Jan Mullakhel. Therefore guarantees of good conduct from tribal elders were crucial.

After succeeding a notoriously corrupt police chief earlier this year, Gen Mullakhel has become feared and respected in Helmand. British officers say he has personally led fights against the Taliban; stories that he threatened to shoot officers who refused to follow suit further burnished his reputation.

At last week's graduation he gave recruits a rousing speech which may not have been appreciated by the American trainers at his side. "Some days ago the President of Iran announced he will make a nuclear bomb. But here in Afghanistan we are killing each other because of jihad," he said. "Now it is time to rebuild our country."

Britain's other great ally in Helmand, Governor Muhammad Daud, was sacked recently by President Karzai because of his weak tribal base, according to a senior aide. British officials admit the new governor, Mr Wafa, a one-time governor of Kunar province - a hotbed of insurgency, is an unknown quantity.

The silver lining, however, is the firing of Mr Daud's deputy, Amir Muhammad Akhunzada, the scion of a notorious drug-smuggling clan for whom British officials could barely conceal their disdain. A blood feud initiated by the clan stoked tensions in Musa Qala that fuelled last summer's fighting.

The British military is downplaying the Musa Qala deal until it becomes clear whether it can succeed. Any Taliban in the town, they say, are probably part of the estimated 80% of fighters they think can be wooed by the government side.

For now, though, it is simply too soon to tell. "I really hope this one works out," said a retired American policeman helping to train the Helmand force. "Because to some extent, Afghanistan is going to depend on it."

Backstory

Underpaid, undermanned and often corrupted by drugs and smuggling, Afghanistan's police have been swamped by a rising tide of Taliban violence, particularly in the southern provinces. Some have been abducted and killed, often in gruesome fashion. The failures are in spite of massive western funding. German officials have trained police officers while the US allocated $1.1bn for bringing the rank and file up to standard. Yet a recent Pentagon report found that American programme managers could not say how many policemen were reporting for work, and were unable to account for thousands of lorries and other equipment. As in Iraq, the lion's share of the budget has been funnelled through private contractors, in this case DynCorps. In an attempt to stabilise the violence-racked south, the Afghan government is inducting thousands of tribesmen into the police on one-year contracts. Many are drawn from tribal militias. But critics say that the scheme may only re-militarise the countryside - something the international community has spent five years and millions of pounds trying to avoid.