Chalweshti, arbakai and lashkar: the tribe's own enforcers

At a glance

• A jirga decides; it keeps no police. The men who carry out its ruling are a band of about forty, called by names such as tsalweshti or salwaikhtee, the arbakai in Loya Paktia, and the lashkar when the whole tribe is called out. [2, 3, 10]

• Mohammed Osman Tariq, an engineer who worked with these forces in the south-east from 2001 to 2006, describes the arbakai as unpaid, taken in turn from every family, answerable to the jirga of their own tribe, sub-tribe or village, and with power to carry out its decision but not to change it. [2]

• Their sanctions are the jirga's: fines, rifles held as a bond, expulsion and the burning of a house. [2, 3]

• From 2008 Pakistan armed "peace lashkars", and in 2010 Afghanistan founded the Afghan Local Police. The Salarzai elders of Bajaur chose their lashkar themselves in November 2008, with the old penalties. In Adezai near Peshawar a former member says the provincial government forced one on the village. [11, 15]

• The Afghan Local Police was paid, largely with US money, and answered to the Interior Ministry. Human Rights Watch reported in 2011 that Afghans found it hard to tell from arbakai. [5, 9]

A ruling needs hands

A jirga's strength is that its decision is made in the open by men both sides must respect. Its weakness is that it has no jail and no constable. Hakam Shah, a Pakistani High Court advocate, writes that a decision that seems reasonable to both parties carries itself out, but when one side has serious objections "the implementation process becomes difficult, if not impossible". Anyone who then refuses is punished by sanctions the jirga takes from precedent, narkh. [3]

He lists them in order. A person can be excluded from the community. His rifles can be taken and held by the jirga as a bond. He can be fined heavily in favour of the other side. "If non-compliance persists, the Jirga can use force by sending men to burn down the party's house(s)." The last step is to declare him kabarjan, "the arrogant one", who loses the jirga's protection and can be killed by his opponents without consequence. [3] A jirga that places a truce (teega) also takes a deposit from each side, the machalga, so that a breach costs something at once. [2]

Someone has to hold the rifles, collect the fines and walk to the house. The names for those men differ from valley to valley, and so do their numbers and duties.

One job, several names

Raverty, a British officer, printed a Pashto dictionary in 1860. Under tsalwesht in the west or tsalwekht in the east, "forty", he has a word for "a magistrate elected by the Maliks and heads of families amongst the tribes of Daman", so called because they were at first meant to number forty, with a president called the Mir. He sends the reader to Elphinstone's account of Daman. [10] That is a council of judges, not a force, and it shows how old the number forty is in this vocabulary and how far the meaning has moved.

Modern writers use the word for the enforcers. Hakam Shah says a council of tribesmen carries out the decisions of a tribal or inter-tribal jirga and gives its name by area: Salwaikhtee (the "forties") in Waziristan, the lashkar in Afridi country and Rapakian in Kurram. It has about forty members, he says, and its strength is the backing it draws from the people it serves. [3] Tariq gives Salwishti or Shalgoon in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Paltanai in Kandahar, and calls the differences between them technical. [2] The sources spell these words by ear; chalweshti is one more spelling.

In Loya Paktia, the south-eastern Afghan provinces of Khost, Paktia and Paktika, the name is arbakai. Tariq says that in Pashto the word derives from "messenger". A tribal leader he interviewed in 2007 defined them as "a group of voluntary adults who are selected by a special procedure, who carry out the responsibilities to implement the Jirga's decisions, secure the territory of the tribe or the respected community and take action against those who want to perform an illegal act". [2]

How an arbakai is chosen, paid and removed

Tariq's paper is the fullest account in print. It rests on his own work with the arbakai and on interviews with tribal leaders, civil society members and officials. He describes three tiers, tribe, sub-tribe and community, each with its own jirga, its own money and its own arbakai; a higher jirga cannot overrule a lower one except on appeal. [2]

The jirga fixes the numbers for a task and shares them among sub-tribes by their count of adult men. The duty rotates, so that no family is called twice while others are not. Each force is led by an ameer, an Arabic word for commander, which Tariq reads as a sign of Islamic influence. [2]

On pay the sources disagree. Tariq says the arbakai are unpaid, and that serving is an honour while joining a militia is shameful. The jirga raises equal contributions from the tribe for expenses, keeps the machalga and the fines, and pays compensation if a member is killed or maimed on duty. A man who dies on duty is still counted as a living member, so if the tribe wins a land case two years later his family receives his share. [2] Elders who spoke to NPR in 2008 wanted the reverse: they asked the Americans to pay villagers to serve as arbakai. [18] The Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN) keeps to Tariq's picture, calling the arbaki "local, tribal, unpaid, voluntary, non-state and temporary". [7]

What keeps them honest is their own jirga. Tariq gives a case from the Tirizai of Khost. The arbakai were set to guard a young crop of mazarai, a palm used for beds, hats and rope. The jirga heard that their ameer was selling it green, brought eyewitnesses, dismissed him and blacklisted him from ever serving again. [2]

Their tasks, in his account, are to carry out the jirga's decisions, keep order and guard the tribe's boundaries. Between fighting parties they step in first, and the jirga then settles the dispute, deliberately slowly, so that the injured family cools. Anyone who ignores them faces punishment and the destruction of his home. [2]

Camps, buffers and the Mangal

Tariq records several cases. In the Afghan refugee camps near Haripur in Pakistan in the 1980s, elders, teachers and religious scholars formed a council after young men's drug use, truancy and theft grew, and picked twenty-five arbakai, one from each of twenty-five mosques, to patrol day and night. Tariq says the idea came from Zadran tribesmen. [2] In 1992 tribal leaders of Loya Paktia put arbakai between the warring parties in the civil war. The buffer held but their attempt at settlement failed, according to Mohammad Daud, a member of parliament for Paktia who had been an ameer in that mission, for lack of money, sabotage by leaders loyal to one side and failure to take waak from the parties. [2]

In late 2006 the Mangal jirga decided that anyone who took part in insurgent activity would be banished and his house burned. In early 2007 a man installing a bomb meant for police vehicles in Musa Khel district of Khost was killed when it went off early. The jirga burned his house and told his family to leave Mangal land. It banned poppy growing on the same penalty. [2] Tariq gives this as an example of arbakai in counter-insurgency. The cost fell on a family, which lost its home for what one man did, on a ruling with no appeal outside the tribe.

The lashkar: the whole tribe called out

The lashkar is a different body. For defence, Tariq writes, a large force is gathered by the chegha, a common call sounded on drums, and then every adult is required to turn out; the arbakai are for ordinary duties. [2] Raverty glosses lashkar (لښکر) as "an army". [10] Hakam Shah lists "raise an army (Lashkar) to punish an outlaw" among the powers of a tribal jirga, beside declaring war and peace on a neighbouring tribe. [3]

Akbar S. Ahmed, a Pakistani anthropologist and former Political Agent, gives Mohmand cases. In 1915 the Chaknawar Mullah declared jihad against the British and against two Halimzai leaders, Anmir and Inayatullah, and a lakhkar gathered to burn their Gandab villages. Their dilemma, Ahmed writes, was that if they stayed neutral they would be disgraced and "punished through fines and burnt houses by the larger tribe", and if they fought the British they would be first in line for a British expedition. [4] In 1932 a lakhkar of some 2,000 Upper Mohmands crossed into Gandab while the Halimzai were divided, and "burnt the villages of Anmir and his relatives". [4] These were jihad lashkars under mullahs, not enforcement of a jirga's civil ruling, but the penalty was the same. Where a feud has no truce, Ahmed adds, "a tribal lakhkar representing the major clans" may impose one. [4]

Elphinstone, whose account was published in 1815, wrote that when a mullah was injured or insulted, the mullahs could parade with drums and a green standard and gather what they called an army, and so bring their opponents to terms that included "the right to plunder and burn the houses of the chief offenders, and to impose a fine on their abettors". [1]

Salarzai, 2008: the old penalties beside the state

When the Pakistani state and the Taliban fought in Bajaur in 2008, the old words came back. On 3 November about 800 elders of the four Salarzai clans met in Khar. Dawn reported their jirga's decision: it backed the government against the militants and agreed that a tribal lashkar would act "against people harbouring 'miscreants' and criminals", fining them Rs2 million each, torching their houses, confiscating their property and expelling their families. [11] Those are the penalties Hakam Shah lists for defying a jirga, applied to a new enemy.

The lashkar had already begun. On 29 September its men went to Darra, about 30 kilometres from Khar, to set fire to the houses of militants and their supporters and were ambushed on the way back; nine volunteers and four Taliban died, and its chief, Malik Munaseb Khan, said the campaign would go on. [12] On 16 October Dawn reported that the Charmang tribesmen's lashkar had burned insurgents' houses on the day troops destroyed others. [19]

Bajaur's Political Agent, a government officer, praised the Salarzai for clearing "most of its area" and warned that if the tribesmen did not act the government would again launch an operation. [11] On 6 November a suicide bomber killed 16 people and injured 31 at a Salarzai jirga at Batmali where elders were discussing the lashkar; Dawn named lashkar leaders among the dead. [13] The Express Tribune columnist Naveed Hussain put the dead at 25 chieftains and wrote that tens more were killed afterwards. [16] Munaseb Khan was killed by a suicide bomber in April 2011, with four others. [14]

Adezai: a lashkar the villagers say they did not choose

Adezai, a village of 38,000 near Peshawar, shows the other side. Salman Yousafzai wrote in Dawn in 2016 that Khushdil Khan, a former deputy speaker of the provincial assembly, proposed in 2008 that locals help the police, and that Peshawar police began supplying arms. Abid Raza, who had fought in it, told him: "We were forced by the provincial government to raise a lashkar of volunteers." The choice was "either death at the hands of the Taliban, or the chance to redeem ourselves". He puts it at about 3,000 men and says 120 have been killed since 2008. Promised rations, arms and ammunition "never fully materialised". [15]

Villagers judged what it became in different ways. A villager said "our government militarised" the children, and another that "criminals, land mafia and local gangs" supplied its manpower. Javed Aziz Khan of Peshawar thought it necessary but said the government used it and withdrew support when it was dissolved; criminals who joined, he said, "have earned us a bad name". Peshawar's police chief called it a success. Lashkars were dissolved across the province and the tribal areas after the National Action Plan of 2014, and many in Adezai were relieved. [15]

Pashtun commentators had already made the argument in principle. Naveed Hussain accepted that lashkars had worked in Dhog Darra, Ambar and Salarzai, but wrote that "the feuds triggered by lashkars could make Pashtun society, already embroiled in long-running blood feuds, living hell". [16] In October 2022 a jirga of elders from Swat, Buner, Dir, Shangla and Chitral met at Chakdara and refused both a military operation and community committees against militants. Atta Ullah, one of its members, said it was "the prime responsibility of the state to maintain security", and Aftab Khan Yousafzai of the Swat Olasi Pasoon said that many members of the committees formed in 2007 and 2009 had been killed. [17]

The Afghan Local Police

Afghanistan built a police force on the idea. Human Rights Watch reported that the Afghan Local Police was approved in July 2010 and set up by decree on 16 August 2010, with a target of 10,000 men, US funding for 30,000 and 7,000 recruited by August 2011. Its terms called it a "defensive force" without law-enforcement powers; "police" in its name, HRW said, was a misnomer. Many Afghans told its researchers the force was "hard to distinguish from arbakai". [5]

It differed from Tariq's arbakai at the points where he finds their strength. The ALP was paid, answered to the Interior Ministry and was mentored by US special forces; no tribal jirga called it or could recall it. [5, 9] Its safeguard was meant to be the shuras that nominated and vouched for recruits, but HRW found no systematic process and little oversight, and an ISAF official told it: "Who will dare to say no?" [5] Mathieu Lefèvre wrote for AAN in 2010 that earlier schemes (the Auxiliary Police of 2006, the Wardak programme of 2009 and the Local Defence Initiatives) had leaned on the arbakai idea, which had become popular among non-Afghans as "well-meaning, disciplined, traditional community defence forces". In Wardak, he found, 1,100 men were recruited largely through elders, local power brokers and jihadi commanders, bypassing the shura. [6] Tariq had warned of this in 2008. In Tagab in Kapisa, officials armed ex-combatants chosen by men who did not represent the sub-tribes; they joined for money, and when insurgents killed some, "there was no reaction from the people". [2]

Local voices split. In Gizab in Uruzgan an elder told HRW the new arbaki had driven the Taliban out but "disturb and insult the people". [5] In Yahyakhel in Paktika, AAN found the Taliban had expelled 170 people including 70 elders in 2011; a tribal militia cleared the district in a day, the ALP drew about a hundred men from each of three tribes, and an MP said the elders "have considerable control over the ALP men". AAN called this the exception. [7] In Andar in Ghazni, a resident said "the actual tribesmen were not consulted about the creation of ALP"; units extorted and beat detainees, and in 2016 women went to Ghazni city to protest that "arbaki" were breaking into their homes. AAN notes that outside Loya Paktia the word has become an insult. [7, 8]

Funding for the ALP ended on 30 September 2020. The plan was to retire a third, move a third to the police and a third to the army's Territorial Force, about 18,000 men. AAN called its record mixed: some units defended their villages well, others behaved so badly that they pushed people towards the Taliban. [9]

What the old institutions show

Tariq's argument is that the arbakai are self-government without a state: the people who judge also choose, pay and discipline those who enforce, and no one serves for good. He thinks a state could recognise the jirga's control of them without owning them, and that the system is strongest in the south-east, where tribal structure outlasted the state. [2] Yahyakhel fits his picture, and Tagab and Andar fit his warning. [2, 7, 8]

The same sources show limits. Tariq admits that por and bad, giving women to settle a killing, can happen on a jirga's order and clash with human-rights norms, and says Pashtunwali has no death penalty; Hakam Shah writes that in purely tribal areas a jirga can order death, exile or house burning. [2, 3] The burden of a burned house falls on a family. Ahmed notes talk in the Mohmand settled area of jirga members taking bribes, and writes that a jirga is "as strong as the authority and respect in society for the mashar". [4]

The tribes also dealt with the state. Tariq says Loya Paktia sent one man in eight to the state's armies from the founding of Afghanistan in 1747, Hasht Nafari, and one in four under Amir Abdur Rahman, and that the arbakai's border duty was a reason the region was not asked for two years of conscription. In Kunar the government gave the jirga irrigated land for arbakai expenses in the 1960s and 1970s. [2]