Inside the Shadowy Militias Luring Unsuspecting Afghans to Fight, or Die

Afghanistan’s poor are being deceived into defending outposts from the Taliban, sometimes under the guise of construction work — a scheme partially bankrolled by the government.

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan — A network of shadowy power brokers and warlords, bankrolled by the Afghan government and the national police force, is luring disadvantaged people into joining militias, sometimes under false pretenses, out of a growing desperation to hold territory around highways in the country’s north, according to former militia members and local officials.These key arteries, which are the few means of road travel between the provinces, have increasingly become the front line for an emboldened Taliban insurgency.

To protect them, local officials in Balkh Province are manning highway outposts with often untrained Afghans, who are given little more than a rifle and the promise of a paycheck if they survive. Others have been offered construction jobs, only to arrive and realize there is no repair work to be done. The militia members are dropped in areas too dangerous to flee and only picked up weeks or months later, dead or alive.The crooked recruitment practice is the latest indication that Afghanistan’s security forces have been hollowed out by degrading morale and poor recruitment as Taliban attacks continue at an unrelenting pace across the country.“My son lacks any military experience, he is disabled,” said Sayed Mir, whose son Jawed nearly died at an outpost after being shot in the neck. “He is not someone who should be taken to war.”

Balkh Province was once one of the most stable provinces in the country. Its position along the border with Uzbekistan and on a key trade route from Turkmenistan lifted the local economy after the U.S. invasion in 2001. But in recent years, stability there has steadily declined as the government in Kabul has struggled with controlling provincial leadership and supplying the north with a sufficient number of security forces. In July 2020, Sayid Jawad, a resident of Balkh, thought he had been hired to rebuild a government outpost destroyed by Taliban attacks for $150 a month, the kind of money he hadn’t earned in a long time.

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There Are Spying Eyes Everywhere—and Now They Share a Brain

Security cameras. License plate readers. Smartphone trackers. Drones. We’re being watched 24/7. What happens when all those data streams fuse into one?

ONE AFTERNOON IN the fall of 2019, in a grand old office building near the Arc de Triomphe, I was buzzed through an unmarked door into a showroom for the future of surveillance. The space on the other side was dark and sleek, with a look somewhere between an Apple Store and a doomsday bunker.

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Along one wall, a grid of electronic devices glinted in the moody downlighting—automated license plate readers, Wi-Fi-enabled locks, boxy data processing units. I was here to meet Giovanni Gaccione, who runs the public safety division of a security technology company called Genetec.

Headquartered in Montreal, the firm operates four of these “Experience Centers” around the world, where it peddles intelligence products to government officials. Genetec’s main sell here was software, and Gaccione had agreed to show me how it worked. He led me first to a large monitor running a demo version of Citigraf, his division’s flagship product. The screen displayed a map of the East Side of Chicago. Around the edges were thumbnail-size video streams from neighborhood CCTV cameras. In one feed, a woman appeared to be unloading luggage from a car to the sidewalk. An alert popped up above her head: “ILLEGAL PARKING.”

The map itself was scattered with color-coded icons—a house on fire, a gun, a pair of wrestling stick figures—each of which, Gaccione explained, corresponded to an unfolding emergency.He selected the stick figures, which denoted an assault, and a readout appeared onscreen with a few scant details drawn from the 911 dispatch center. At the bottom was a button marked “INVESTIGATE,” just begging to be clicked.Citigraf was conceived in 2016, when the Chicago Police Department hired Genetec to solve a surveillance conundrum.

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Lasers, cannons, effigies: The surprising science of shooing vultures away

As hundreds of vultures flock to an Alabama school, many have wondered: How to scare off the birds? Science has an answer.
BY ELIZABETH ANNE BROWN

FOR SEVERAL MONTHS, a flock of more than a hundred black vultures has settled atop Opelika Middle School in east Alabama. They peer down at students as they arrive, soar in lazy spirals over soccer practice, and streak the field’s floodlights with feces. Despite administrators’ best efforts, the birds keep coming back, unnerving some students who have to walk past a gauntlet of vultures every day. In response to a nuisance report from the school superintendent, a local U.S. Department of Agriculture representative recommended shooting several of the birds and hanging their corpses upside-down in nearby trees. These “effigies” swinging in the wind should serve as a warning to the rest of the flock to steer clear, the USDA representative said, according to a memo from Opelika Mayor Gary Fuller.Community members balked, pointing out that the birds play an important ecological role in the disposal of dead animals and pose no threat to students. Some even like the vultures being around. Others argue there must be a less grisly way to get the scavengers to disperse.And the science backs them up. Since the early 2000s, researchers have developed an arsenal—more like a toybox, really—of tools to humanely encourage vultures to move along. It’s dramatic fare, from fireworks and air cannons to lasers. Welcome to the whimsical world of vulture dispersal.

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Vultures are protected in the U.S. by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which makes it illegal to harass or kill them, even on private property. Violators can face penalties of up to $15,000 and six months in prison. Obtaining a special nuisance permit from the USDA opens up a range of options to legally harass the birds, however, including shooting a few to make effigies. Effigies have been popular among USDA wildlife managers since 1999, when researchers first piloted freeze-dried turkey vulture carcasses as a dispersal agent in Ohio. In one field study, vulture populations at communication towers shrank by over 90 percent within days of an effigy’s installation and stayed low for months after it was removed.But effigies aren’t a silver bullet, especially when it comes to black vultures, says Bryan Kluever, a biologist at the USDA who studies interactions between humans and wildlife. In 2012, a Florida early childhood education center hung three vulture carcasses in trees in hopes of banishing an unwelcome flock of hundreds of black vultures. The birds stayed put, which wasn’t exactly shocking to researchers who had watched the group devour the carcasses of other vultures that died on the property.

"Common vulture mischief includes peeling off shingles, stripping caulking from windows, and yanking the rubber off windshield wipers."
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