AFP Interview: Afghan vote process speeds up disarmament

KABUL, Oct 1 (AFP) - In both of Afghanistan's official languages, Dari and Pashtu, disarmament is a dirty word, which partly explains why progress in removing weapons from militias has been slow until now, according to the head of the program.
"The Afghans disliked the word disarmament. To disarm in Dari or Pashtun is a demeaning word," Peter Babbington, director of the Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) program told AFP in an exclusive interview.
But the word 'DDR' has now entered the lexicon of both languages, and with the country's first presidential election just over one week away, disarmament deadlocks have begun to thaw, he said.
"This election is forcing the issue. It is moving now, albeit stuttering, but it is moving," Babbington said.
By September 24, 16,861 militiamen had handed in their guns and begun the process of moving toward a civilian life in a country wracked by more than two decades of conflict.
They are a fraction of the tens of thousands of militiamen who were working under local commanders, believed to number between 40,000 and 60,000.
However, Babbington said that the numbers are deceptive as many commanders had phantom soldiers drawing paychecks.
When the disarmament process began a year ago the Ministry of Finance was paying salaries for around 100,000 militiamen.
Disarmament teams have yet to find a single militia corp that has as many men as the commander originally claimed, he said.
In one example in southeastern Khost, a province gripped by a Taliban-led insurgency with fighters coming over the border from Pakistan, one local commander was claiming salaries for 1,760 men. Disarmament teams on the ground could only find 760 soldiers.
Regardless of the numbers, as Afghanistan faces a presidential election threatened by Taliban militants on October 9, much of the country is still under the sway of local militia commanders.
A recent report by Human Rights Watch said warlords posed a greater threat to polls than the Taliban-led insurgency, and pointed out that disarmament has proceeded much more slowly than had been hoped with recalcitrant commanders reluctant to give up their private armies.
Babbington said the program "would barely scratch the surface of the number of weapons" in Afghanistan. The process aimed to break up the structures of local militia forces rather than confiscate every gun in the land, he said.
"We are not producing the final solution here, but trying to create a normality where you have an opportunity to put into place normal structures of administration and bureaucracy," he said.
Militia commanders did not have standing armies but were still likely to be able to summon forces at short notice.
"At the end of the day if one of these strong warlords says, 'I want the troops to come in,' these guys will drop their shovels and ploughshares and will join up," Babbington said.
The aim of the disarmament program was to provide many of the tens of thousands of fighters with alternative livelihoods so that they were less willing to be at the beck and call of local commanders.
"The majority are delighted to get something out of this whole process," he added.
"Reconstruction is booming so we will train them to be a carpenter, a concrete specialist, a road-builder and while they are doing that vocational training we pay them a stipend."
Disarmament had to be an Afghan-led process because there were not enough US-led or NATO troops to enforce disarmament.
"DDR that has gone on in Africa, in Cambodia, in Timor even in the Balkans, there has been a military force from outside that has imposed itself on the country."
The impression that foreign forces could enforce disarmament was "completely wrong," Babbington said. "We had to make this an Afghan-owned project."
With the removal of warlord Ismael Khan as governor of Herat province disarmament had speeded up in western Afghanistan.
Progress was being made in the Panjshir valley, the heartland of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, with an emphasis on locking away heavy weapons.
Many so-called warlords were "bully boys and when they are faced down they turn out to be fairly shallow," Babbington said.
"But at the end of the day people are wary of taking on a bully boy because he can still hurt people."
Which is why progress on cantoning tanks and other heavy armaments was vital, "because just to have a couple of tanks rolling down the road can really intimidate people."