("They may have looked like a bit of a warlord group," Gordon Rudd said. "I told that to Garner. He said, 'Gordon, I don't like that word.' ") Making matters worse, the police and the Army had not defected; they had disappeared.
The United States and its operatives have to lure away tribal chieftains, warlords and group leaders known as qawms, who joined the Taliban out of fear or self-interest.
Somalia has languished without a functioning central government for more than 20 years, and there have been endless rounds of conflict between clan warlords, religious groups and militias-for-hire.
Weak states were failing with increasing frequency, most of them in Africa but also a handful in Asia and the Middle East, and failed states are known to be hospitable to and to harbour dangerous nonstate actors such as warlords and groups that commit terrorist acts.
More than a thousand militias, insurgent groups, warlords, and armed gangs are currently competing on the overlapping battlefronts.
Other insurgent groups, warlords and criminal networks are responsible for their share of suicide attacks and civilian killings.
Instead militias, warlords and armed groups thrived as UN-backed processes failed to deliver governance or a politics that has popular support.
And when further evidence of Rwanda's continued support to warlords and militia groups emerged, Obama personally urged Kagame to stop supporting the rebels.
In Angola, Sierra Leone and Congo, warlords and terror groups mine diamonds to finance wars -- whose main purpose is control of those very diamond fields.
"The U.S. has not engaged Afghanistan's neighbors — Iran, Pakistan, China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan," writes Sethna, and yet these countries' "historic relationships are decisive" to working effectively with local warlords and ethnic groups.
