Defeat in Afghanistan 'real possibility': Ashdown

Reuters

February 13, 2008 at 6:32 AM EST

LONDON — NATO is in disarray and the West faces defeat in Afghanistan unless it overhauls its counter-insurgency and reconstruction strategy, Britain's Paddy Ashdown wrote in an article published on Wednesday.

Mr. Ashdown, who was rejected last month by Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the post of senior UN envoy to the country, called in the Financial Times for renewed efforts to win Taliban moderates away from the insurgency.

"With fighting in Afghanistan now entering its seventh year, no agreed international strategy, public support on both sides of the Atlantic crumbling, NATO in disarray and widening insecurity in Afghanistan, defeat is now a real possibility...

"We have not lost in Afghanistan ... But we will lose if we do not start doing things differently," he warned.

Mr. Ashdown said the consequences of failure in Afghanistan would be appalling.

"Global terrorism would have won back its old haven and created a new one over the border in a mortally weakened Pakistan," he said.

Mr. Ashdown called for more co-operation between international military and civilian efforts and a greater focus on governance and the rule of law across in a country where corruption and lawlessness is widespread.

Of an international security effort which has at times caused civilian casualties, he said: "Breaking up the Taliban by winning over the moderates is a far better route to success than bombing and body counts."

U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban government in 2001, but Taliban rebels launched an insurgency two years ago and violence has risen sharply since then.

Washington has called on NATO allies to send more troops to Afghanistan and to commit more of them to the south of the country where the Taliban insurgency is strongest.

AFGHANISTAN: Pneumonia spreads as winter deaths top 800

Photo: Merlin

A medical team from the NGO Merlin was overwhelmed by crowds in a district in Badakhshan where seven children had died from pneumonia

KABUL, 14 February 2008 (IRIN) - Over 170,000 patients with pneumonia and other acute respiratory infections have been diagnosed and treated at health centres across Afghanistan in the past month, the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) has reported.

At least 100 pneumonia patients, most of them children, died in the same period, Abdullah Fahim, a spokesman for MoPH, told IRIN on 14 February.

Among the victims were seven children in Badakhshan Province, northeastern Afghanistan, where a medical team from the UK charity Merlin treated 270 pneumonia patients on 30 January.

On arrival in snow-covered Shar-e-Buzorg District of Badakhshan the team was "soon overwhelmed by people seeking help while some were lying in the snow", according to Sophia Craig, head of Merlin in Afghanistan.

Officials are also concerned about the spread of winter diseases in Ghor, Daykundi, and Nooristan provinces where many food-insecure communities live in rugged and inaccessible areas.

"Many people are susceptible to pneumonia and acute respiratory infections due to food-insecurity, prevalent lack of awareness about diseases, and hygienic problems," Craig said.

Harshest winter in 25 years

Parts of Afghanistan are facing their harshest winter in 25 years, and over 800 people have lost their lives, according to Afghanistan's National Disasters Management Authority (ANDMA).

About 91 people have also had their limbs amputated because of frostbite, health officials in Herat Province, western Afghanistan, reported.

Over 730 houses have been destroyed and 316,055 livestock have died in the wintry conditions.

Afghanistan is still under the national public health emergency declared on 8 January, and about 30,000 health workers and 19,000 volunteers have been asked not to go on leave and/or travel abroad until the emergency is over, the MoPH's Fahim said.

Officials say tens of thousands of vulnerable people across the country have been provided with medical care and treatment, and many lives have been saved.

"We have adequate medication and staff, but our major challenge is accessibility," said Fahim, adding that the MoPH had asked the NATO-led Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Badakhshan for air support to deploy medical teams to some inaccessible areas.

Heavy snow has blocked roads in several of Afghanistan's 34 provinces, making humanitarian access virtually impossible, but Sophia Craig of Merlin praised the MoPH's response as "very good".

Rice and Miliband visit Afghanistan as US demands more European troops

By Harvey Thompson
9 February 2008

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband arrived in Afghanistan February 7 on an unannounced visit aimed at publicizing the military support of the two main occupation powers for the regime of President Hamid Karzai.

The visit comes after Rice, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Miliband met in London in a public show of support aimed at applying pressure on NATO countries—especially Germany and France—to send more combat troops to the volatile southern regions of Afghanistan. Speaking after the meeting, Rice said, "I do think the alliance is facing a real test here. Our populations need to understand this is not a peacekeeping mission.... This is a different fight from what NATO was structured to do."

The backdrop to these events was an announcement by Britain that is would be sending 600 additional troops to Afghanistan, bringing the total number of UK troops there to around 7,800. Defence officials have reported that all three regular battalions of the UK Parachute Regiment will provide the main support of the 16 Air Assault Brigade when it takes over in April from the existing UK infantry brigade currently based in Helmand province, Southern Afghanistan. Pressure on the army has meant the brigade has had to scavenge troops from other regiments to fill manpower gaps. It is believed to be the first time so many paratroopers have been sent on a joint combat mission since World War II.

A significant contingent of the newly deployed British troops could be sent to the town of Musa Qala in Helmand province, which was recaptured from the Taliban in December but remains in a precarious position.

The Rice-Miliband visit to Afghanistan coincided with a meeting of NATO defence ministers in Vilnius, Lithuania, which was dominated by the mounting crisis in Afghanistan.

Against a background of transatlantic recrimination over troop contributions to Afghanistan and where to deploy them, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, speaking during a Senate hearing on Pentagon spending plans, said, "I worry a great deal about the alliance evolving into a two-tiered alliance, in which you have some allies willing to fight and die to protect people's security, and others who are not.... And I think that it puts a cloud over the future of the alliance, if this is to endure and perhaps even get worse. There are allies that are doing their part and are doing well. The Canadians, the British, the Australians, the Dutch, the Danes are really out there on the line and fighting, but there are a number of others that are not."

Gates had earlier said that he had yet to receive any replies from a letter he had sent to all defence ministers in NATO asking them to contribute more troops and equipment to Afghanistan. "I've been working this problem pretty steadfastly for many months at this point, and I would say that I am not particularly optimistic," Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

These and other comments indicate a number of serious fault lines opening up in the military alliance over Afghanistan, as the US, aided in particular by its junior partner Britain, seeks to push the other European powers further into the Afghan quagmire than they wish to go.

In the past few weeks; the Dutch government called in the US ambassador for a dressing down after Gates bluntly said the Europeans were no good at counterinsurgency. Gates seemed to have retreated, but then wrote a stern letter to Berlin demanding that German soldiers put their lives on the line in combat in the dangerous South instead of enjoying the relatively comfortable conditions of the North.

An angry German response followed. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany's limited mandate was "not up for discussion." The former German foreign minister and leading member of the Green Party, Joschka Fischer, however, signalled a warmer response amongst official opinion that also includes two former Bundeswehr generals.

Meanwhile, Canada warned NATO that it might pull out of Afghanistan by 2009 unless other countries deployed more troops to the areas experiencing the heaviest fighting.

There have also been criticisms of British military policy in Afghanistan by at least two US generals. Britain's role in Afghanistan was also openly criticised for the first time by Karzai, just before he vetoed the expected appointment of the former British MP and paratrooper, Lord Paddy Ashdown, to the position of UN envoy to Afghanistan. Some commentators have pointed out that this may be part electioneering, as Karzai needs to shrug off his image as a Western puppet before elections due next year.

Writing in the Guardian newspaper ("The war that can bring neither peace nor freedom"), Seumas Milne offered this analysis on Karzai's present position: "Karzai was, after all, installed by the US after the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001 and subsequently confirmed in bogus US-orchestrated elections three years later. If even someone regarded as a US-British stooge, whose writ famously barely runs outside Kabul, is reduced to protesting in public that his western protectors are doing more harm than good, that not only makes a mockery of the idea that Afghanistan is an independent state. It also strongly suggests this is a man who recognises that the occupation forces may not be around indefinitely—and he may have to come to more serious terms with the local forces that will."

A senior NATO diplomat said in Vilnius, "Events in Afghanistan have become a motor for the transformation of the alliance."

Victoria Nuland, the US ambassador to NATO, commenting on the recent Pentagon decision to send a further 3,200 US Marines to Afghanistan, said, "We will again challenge our allies to match us soldier for soldier, euro for dollar."

Daniel Korski of the European Council on Foreign Relations, said, "The Anglo-American strategy in Afghanistan has hit an absolute low mark. If European countries are unwilling to send more troops, trainers and civilians to the Afghan mission, then the US needs to do so itself. To halt a spring offensive by the Taliban, more than 10,000 extra troops would be needed. It's now a question of surge or succumb."

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the failure of NATO's mission in Afghanistan could result in terror attacks in Western countries. Speaking ahead of the Vilnius meeting, and echoing comments made earlier by Rice, he told the BBC, "This is the front line in the fight against terrorism, and what is happening in the Hindu Kush matters, because if terrorism is not dealt with in Afghanistan, the consequences will be felt not just in Afghanistan and the region, but also in London, Brussels and Amsterdam."

US President George Bush is to meet with Scheffer on February 29.

Despite the joint photo-shoots and public shows of unity over the past few days, it is clear that there is a growing swell of tensions threatening to erupt amongst the major powers over Afghanistan. The worsening situation for the occupation forces is the main driving force behind these tensions. To give just one indication of the changes since the initial US-led invasion, between 2001 and 2005 there were just five suicide bombings across Afghanistan; in 2007 there were 140.

In the period immediately following the 2001 US-led invasion, the faked pretext of redressing the atrocities perpetrated in New York on September 11 of that year and the rapid overthrow of the universally discredited Taliban regime served to mask the differences between the imperialist powers occupying Afghanistan. Rice sought again to revive this deception during her recent visit to London, declaring, "A failed state of Afghanistan brought us the worst terrorist attack in the United States in our history."

Today it is a changed situation. The invasion of Afghanistan by the US was always about the assertion of America's geopolitical interests in the central Asian region and its strategic control of land and resources. A share of that control was also the reason for the participation of the lesser powers such as Britain.

The major European powers, however, are not simply prepared to bow to demands to rush to the Bush administration's aid as a result of the failure of its efforts to stabilise Afghanistan and secure its control without gaining influence for themselves. It is based on such calculations that France is reportedly considering sending troops to fight in Southern Afghanistan's Kandahar province.

AFGHANISTAN: ICG report calls on donors to "make decisive change"

Photo: Akmal Dawi/IRIN

Despite over US$15 billion in aid money spent in Afghanistan since late 2001, the country is still the fifth least developed in the world. Less than 40 percent of the population have access to safe drinking water

KABUL, 7 February 2008 (IRIN) - The international community must "accept mistakes" it has made in the past six years or more in rebuilding and developing Afghanistan, and should now "summon the means and resolve to make a decisive change", the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) said in a report.

The report "Afghanistan: The need for international resolve", released on 6 February, comes amidst growing calls for a dramatic change in the way international donors have engaged militarily and politically, and spent over US$15 billion on reconstruction, development and humanitarian activities in Afghanistan since late 2001.

Oxfam International and some other aid agencies have also called for an "overhaul" of international aid policy towards Afghanistan.

"Afghanistan is not lost but the signs are not good," warns the ICG. "The international community would do better to accept that mistakes have been made and rectify them," it said.

According to the ICG, although international actors have never maintained executive authority in Afghanistan they still control most of the military and financial resources available to the war-torn country.

Poor coordination

Poor coordination mechanisms among about 60 donors, and between donors and the Afghan government, have increasingly been highlighted as the fault-line of rebuilding and development efforts in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is not lost but the signs are not good.

Major donors and international actors in Afghanistan such as the USA, the UK, the European Union, NATO and the UN have managed large resources and identified priorities through separate and mostly uncoordinated structures, the ICG, Oxfam and other aid organisations say.

The ICG report said: "Despite growing calls for 'coordination', international efforts are marred by inability to agree on priorities and plans, even with regard to counter-insurgency."

The Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board (JCMB) - which has 23 international and seven Afghan members and is tasked with overseeing progress according to the Afghanistan Compact - has failed to work effectively at home and has only become a "travelling jamboree", attending meetings around the world, the report said.

There is a need for the establishment of a "Contact Group" of key international players who should regularly meet in Kabul, New York and other capitals to "steer strategic planning of the international engagement", and enable the JCMB to concentrate on work inside the country, the ICG recommended.

Strengthen UN's role

The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) - which was established in March 2002 and whose mandate has been endorsed by the UN Security Council annually - played a leading role in implementing the December 2001 Bonn Provisional Arrangements on Afghanistan.

However, in recent years UNAMA has lost "much of its policy leadership role" due to a lack of coordination among multiple actors and the way international involvement has been designed, the ICG report said.

Photo: WFP

The ICG report criticised the poor coordination mechanisms of some 60 donors operating in Afghanistan

"The UN has failed to seize the initiative and perform the function of coordinator and driver of international efforts set out in its mandate," it said.

Dan Mcnorton, a UNAMA spokesman in Kabul, said the ICG report highlighted some of the key challenges facing Afghanistan, and which need to be addressed by the Afghan government, donors and other players, but he rejected ICG's statement that UNAMA's leadership role had diminished.

"The situation now is different to what it was two or three years ago, but UNAMA is not weak," he said.

UNAMA has over 200 international and about 800 national staff in 17 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces.

The UN Security Council has tasked UNAMA with promoting humanitarian coordination, in addition to its critical role of harmonising the promotion of reconstruction, development and human rights in post-Taliban Afghanistan.

The ICG has called on the UN Secretary-General to ensure that UNAMA receive sufficient resources to fulfil its mandate. It also calls on UNAMA to improve coordination with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force and other major players.

"Afghanistan is a multilateral effort… it is a test not just in itself or of nation-building and conflict management, but of 21st century multilateralism," the ICG report said.