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Volume IV,  Number 17              May 30 - June 5, 2004            Quezon City, Philippines







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For all The Grand Rhetoric,
We Have Failed to See Through our Mission in Afghanistan

Independent UK | Editorial

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U.S. soldier in Afghanistan before the occupation (left). Afghan children face Canadian soldier (right).

Two years ago, following the removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Tony Blair promised that the international community would not ignore the plight of the Afghan people, that "this time we will not walk away". We may not have quite walked away yet, but we have undoubtedly turned away - to Iraq. And now our Prime Minister is spraying around pledges with equal conviction that we will "stay the course" there. But life in Afghanistan today is just as cheap as it was under the Taliban and, for all Mr. Blair's promises, it remains a lawless, impoverished state. The Commons Foreign Affairs Committee will warn in July that our failure to rebuild post-war Afghanistan could be repeated in Iraq.

It is salutary to recognize just how badly the world community has failed Afghanistan. For many years, that country's two main exports have been terrorism and drugs. The US-led invasion may have staunched the flow of the first, but it has done nothing to prevent the dissemination of the second. Afghanistan is once again the world's leading exporter of heroin, according to the UN's office on Drugs and Crime. This is hardly the right way to bring it into the web of civilized nations.

But drugs are only part of the story. The failure of the international community to build a stable domestic economy has left many farmers with little option but to turn to drug crops if they want to provide for their families. Economic reconstruction cannot proceed without funds and there has been a notable lack of will shown on this front. According to most estimates, the country requires around $15bn to $20bn over the next five years to build roads, clinics and provide food for people. The international community has pledged only $7 bn. This is nation building on the cheap; unsurprisingly, it is not working.

And then we come to the root of all the country's problems: security, or rather the lack of it. The authority of Afghanistan's President, Hamid Karzai, is limited to the capital in Kabul. Elsewhere, unpleasant warlords such as General Dostum and Ismail Khan run private fiefdoms with no regard to central government. Girls may have been permitted to go to school under the new constitution, but these rights are simply ignored in the provinces.

Unelected and unaccountable, these men rule with a brutality that would have rivaled even the Taliban. And the Taliban itself is far from finished in Afghanistan: in the Pashtun heartlands of the south, they have re-emerged, intimidating local officials and waging a guerrilla war against the American forces.

The 10,000 American troops still stationed in the country regard their primary objective as the elimination of terrorists and, in particular, the capture of Osama bin Laden. Worse, the handful of army-led provincial reconstruction teams are confusing military and aid missions. In the words of one US soldier: "The more they help us find the bad guys, the more good stuff they get". As a result of this, aid workers have become "legitimate targets" in the minds of insurgents.

Nation building from the top down looks to be a vain hope. President Karzai has been forced to postpone elections that were scheduled for next month. This is due to the ubiquitous instability and the fact that only 1.6 million out of 10.5 million people eligible to vote have registered. With each day that passes, the President's legitimacy fades.

Afghans can justifiably point to the emptiness of President Bush's rhetoric of "spreading freedom" and of our own Prime Minister's messianic posturing over the past two years. Just as in Iraq, they claimed to be liberators, but the reality has been different. We have failed to see through our mission in Afghanistan and unless the international community redoubles its efforts to provide security there, the future will remain bleak. As President Bush insists that his nation-building in Iraq is running according to schedule, the abandonment of the Afghans looks not only ill-advised, but a cynical betrayal.

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Afghanistan, the War the World Forgot

By Colin Brown and Kim Sengupta
Independent UK

Tuesday 25 May 2004

'We've got to make sure this time that we do it properly'.
Tony Blair
Friday 5 April 2002

'It's a basket case. It's a forgotten country'.
Eric Illsley, Labour member of Foreign Affairs Select Committee
Monday 24 May 2004

Three years after the overthrow of the Taliban and George Bush's declaration of victory in the first conflict in the war on terror, Afghanistan is a nation on the edge of anarchy.

A devastating indictment of the Allies' failure to help reconstruct the country in the wake of the 2001 conflict is to be delivered in a parliamentary report.

The Independent has learnt that an all-party group of MPs from the Foreign Affairs Committee has returned from a visit to the country shocked and alarmed by what they witnessed. They warn that urgent action must be taken to save Afghanistan from plunging further into chaos because of Western neglect.

As President Bush and Tony Blair unveil their plans today for the future of Iraq through the draft of a new United Nations resolution, the MPs warn that the mistakes of Afghanistan could be repeated with similar tragic consequences in Iraq.

Eric Ilsley, a Labour member of the committee, said: "Afghanistan is a basket case. It's a forgotten country." Shortly after the conflict, Mr. Blair pledged to the Afghan people: "This time we will not walk away from you", as the United States and Britain had been accused of doing following the mujahedin's war against the Soviet Union.

But MPs and international aid agencies say that is, in effect, what has happened. With the focus of Washington and London firmly on Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan has been allowed to unravel. The remaining infrastructure is shattered, opium production is rocketing, and the Taliban and warlords are back in control of large areas.

The committee, chaired by Labour MP Donald Anderson, will charge in their report, due out in July, that Nato and the West failed to fulfil their promise to restore order and democracy to Afghanistan.

They will urge Mr. Blair to press for Nato countries to fulfill their commitments in Afghanistan at the organization's summit in Istanbul at the end of June. The committee believes Nato countries are holding back troops from Afghanistan because they may be needed in Iraq.

The MPs' assessment follows similar warnings by humanitarian organizations. Earlier this month, a report by Christian Aid described how aid efforts were in jeopardy because of Western inaction.

With Nato forces suffering from a shortage of manpower and materials and the Americans concentrating on hunting Osama bin Laden, Western organizations and diplomats, including the British ambassador, Rosalind Marsden, are dependent on private security firms for protection. Mr. Ilsley said: "It's very worrying. We arrived in Kabul and found our ambassador has a private security firm acting as her bodyguards who look like the Men in Black. They were in civilian clothes and armed to the teeth."

The security situation was so fraught that the committee reported to the Foreign Office that they felt several MPs, including the former minister Gisela Stuart, were in danger during a demonstration in Kabul.

The Nato commander in Afghanistan, Major General Rick Hillier of the Canadian Army, told the visiting MPs that he had asked for 10 helicopters for his force of more than a thousand but not a single aircraft had been delivered.

John Stanley, a former Conservative defense minister, said: "We were told in no uncertain terms by the top Nato general that the situation in delivering Nato expansion in Afghanistan is very disturbing indeed."

Hamid Karzai, President of the interim Afghan government, praised the role of British troops in getting warlords to disarm in his meeting with the parliamentary delegation. Afghan officials say he is under pressure from the US to hold elections in September, prior to the American presidential elections in November, so that President George Bush can show how democracy has been successfully nurtured in the country.

However, the Afghan elections, originally scheduled for June, have already been postponed once due to the unsafe security situation. The UN reports that attacks by the Taliban have led to only 1.6 million out of the 10.5 million eligible electors being registered.

The Liberal Democrat MP David Chidgey added: "The UK troops are doing a wonderful job but we found only 30 looking after an area the size of Scotland. It's a disgrace. Allowing the Afghan operation to remain a forgotten theatre means warlords, funded by drugs profits, will continue to flourish."

Taliban attacks on aid workers has led to many humanitarian projects being abandoned.

May 25, 2004

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