“It risks being turned into a dangerous shortcut,” one of them said.

In a statement, Human Rights Watch, which has widely documented past abuses by Afghan militias, called on the Afghan government to reject the proposal for another force with inadequate training and oversight.

“The Afghan government’s expansion of irregular forces could have enormously dangerous consequences for civilians,” said Patricia Gossman, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Instead of creating additional local forces, which are hard to control and prone to abuses, the Afghan government, with U.S. and NATO support, should be strengthening training and oversight to ensure that all forces respect the law.”

Over 16 years, the United States has bankrolled a handful of militias, hoping that each of the latest would improve on the previous one’s history of abuses.

The Afghan Local Police, or A.L.P., began in 2010 as a 10,000-strong force but now stands at more than 20,000 members. Despite significant training, American officials concluded that the force had brought about mixed results at best, with only one-third of the areas they patrol seeing improvements in security.

Independent observers and human rights groups have often described the A.L.P. as a source of abuse, with little of the oversight in paper often materializing on the ground. The forces often have served as the extortion wings of local strongmen. The Afghan National Police was supposed to oversee the local police, but that rarely happened.

The National Army has a better reputation for staying above the fray of often nasty local rivalries, but critics worry that drawing it into the same mess could undo hard-gained reforms made over the past year. Creating a new army force that holds territory after the national army has cleared areas is also seen as another step toward a military occupation of the territories, with rule of law and governance often taking a back step.

“Placing the new militia under the army leadership, as opposed to the police-district governor oversight structure of the A.L.P., hopes to increase monitoring and control,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies Afghan security and governance. “However, since the Afghan Army suffers from leadership problems at the unit level, there is no guarantee that army will be significantly more capable of controlling the new militias than the previous police leadership managed with the A.L.P.”