Caveats and Concluding Remarks Sample Clauses

Caveats and Concluding Remarks. ‌ As noted earlier, no silver bullet exists to solve the problem of insurgency. Useful though they may be, it is highly unlikely that the deployment of CDFs alone is a sufficient condition for victory. Furthermore, it is equally unlikely that CDFs are associated with no costs other than the cost of armament and remuneration. At least two types of drawbacks are likely to be present. First, as in hearts-and-minds ap- proaches to COIN, one of the most significant drawbacks of arming civilians is the possibility that a portion of CDF provisions will end up in rebel hands through com- bat, defection, or sale for profit. The fact that civilian neutrality is often construed as evidence of defection in civil wars incentivizes CDF recruits to try to collaborate with both warring parties simultaneously. As a result, evidence of duplicity is present to a variable degree in nearly all major cases of CDF deployment. Thus, in the case of the village guards in Turkey, some of its CDF units have allegedly collaborated with both the PKK rebels as well as the Turkish authorities (Xxxx 2007, 783; Xxxxxx and Xxxxxx 1998, 148). Or, in the case of the Guatemalan PAC, Americas Watch Committee reports that “[s]ome army officers [believed] that as much as twenty percent of the civil patrol [. . . ] [collaborated] with the guerrillas” (Americas Watch 1986, 48). Historical evidence suggests that states are well-aware of this danger and have at- tempted to reduce the risk through personnel screening, greater oversight by the mili- tary, the limiting of quantity and quality of armament, and the meticulous accounting of the supply and expenditure of ammunition (Xxxxxx 1994, 97). In Guatemala, the government attempted to minimize the likelihood of CDF collaboration with guer- rillas by integrating its PAC into the military hierarchy. A degree of control was achieved by recruiting military commissioners from the local pool of retired army officers or informants who were then made responsible for overseeing the PAC unit in their community. Selected on the basis of their political allegiance, local heads of PAC units were often ultra-conservative party members without prior military expe- rience. Weapons would be issued to PAC members daily at the start of their duty and collected at the end of it. The PAC heads were required to submit to the military commissioners daily reports of local activities and expended ammunition. PAC heads or patrollers themselves were made responsible for any un...