Afghanistan Update

April 05, 2005

by Robert Nolan

Despite the relative success of elections last October that legitimized the leadership of President Hamid Karzai and the generally upbeat mood surrounding Afghanistan's development since the U.S. overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, a desire to manage and accelerate economic development and long-term security measures is emerging from Kabul. This week, Karzai and company sought greater control over development funds they say have been poorly managed by international organizations, and the U.S. announced that its 18,000 troops on the ground in Afghanistan will turn their attention to Afghanistan's poppy production, which the UN says accounts for 87 percent of the world's supply of opium. A rise in Taliban attacks after a particularly harsh, and therefore quiet, winter is also being met with renewed vigor.

Managing Afghan Aid

“We are keenly aware of our people's expectations,” said Karzai at the opening of the Afghan Development Forum in Kabul this week, revealing growing pressure from his supporters to provide tangible results as he settles into his first official term as president. “Let this government take full responsibility for our country's development.” Indeed, there is much work to be done in a country the United Nations 2004 Human Development Report deemed the sixth worst off in the world in terms of living standards, noting that “the fragile nation could easily tumble back into chaos.”

The Afghan president's remarks, however, were not directed at his constituency alone.

On hand were a number of representatives from donor nations that provide more than 93 percent of Afghanistan's $4.7 billion annual budget, only $1.6 billion of which is managed solely by the Afghan government. “Capacity will not be built if aid is delivered off budget and the government has little knowledge of what is being done and how much it costs,” the World Bank's South Asia Vice President Praful Patel told attendees. Karzai made it clear he hopes to reverse this trend. “I want the international community to concentrate on building Afghan capacity,” Karzai said according to a Financial Times report. “Imported capacity from abroad is not a long-term solution to our problems.”

Donor governments, including the U.S. and Britain, were quick to offer support for the Karzai initiative. While the U.S. said it would double current aid levels to $5 billion, Britain announced it would hold another donor's conference on the eve of a G8 meeting of foreign ministers in June. The conference would be the third major event for donors since a 2002 forum in Tokyo that raised pledges of $4.5 billion and a 2004 meeting in Berlin that garnered promises of $8.3 billion.

Afghanistan observers, however, wonder whether or not more aid is the solution to the country's problems. “Reconstruction throughout the country has been faltering; funds promised by international bodies and states have not been delivered in anything like the amounts agreed upon,” writes Tom Engelhardt in Mother Jones. “Most nongovernmental aid organizations, many of which largely abandoned the country because it was so perilous for their workers, have yet to return or are just barely testing the waters again; and what economic growth there is seems to exist largely thanks to the drug trade, which is said to account for 60 percent of the country's gross domestic product.”

Opium

As technocrats in Kabul remain rightly focused on Afghanistan's development concerns, the U.S. military, long preoccupied by the search for Osama bin Laden and his Taliban supporters, are now beginning to address in earnest the country's thriving opium trade. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Afghanistan currently accounts for a whopping 87 percent of the world's illegal opium, an industry that reportedly employs nearly 10 percent of all Afghans.

Dismayed with the inability of British-led efforts to curb Afghanistan's production and trafficking in illegal drugs, the Pentagon has requested $257 million in emergency funds to stop the trade, a number the Guardian reports is four times more than last year's request. According to the same report, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the UK would double its aid to Afghanistan's counter-narcotics program to $100 million. Furthermore, the 18,000 U.S. forces on the ground in Afghanistan have been ordered to direct greater attention to the cultivation and distribution of opium, an issue that was largely ignored in the American-led hunt for Al Qaeda terrorists and their supporters.

“Washington is finally treating the issue with the seriousness it deserves,” said an editorial in the New York Times, outlining the drug trade's negative impact on “the recent spate of encouraging progress in Afghanistan.” “Apart from the damage that opium, transformed into heroin, inflicts on users worldwide,” the Times writes, “the trafficking also lines the pockets of armed militia leaders and corrupt local officials, giving them the means to resist President Hamid Karzai's efforts to promote security, development and democracy.”

Security and U.S. commitment

Along with a bumper opium crop, a rise in militant attacks on American and Afghan forces following a particularly harsh winter have U.S. commanders preparing to dig in once again, despite what most say is an overall decline in anti-government violence. “The number and severity of attacks against Afghan and coalition forces has increased compared to the winter,” said U.S. military spokeswoman Lieutenant Cindy Moore, according to Lebanon's Daily Star. “This shows that some in the Taliban and other anti-government insurgents will continue to destabilize Afghanistan through violent acts.”

Such attacks, however, have not prevented President Karzai from moving forward on an amnesty program for former members of the Taliban, whom he called “sons of the soil” in a recent interview published by the Christian Science Monitor. “I am the elected representative of the people of Afghanistan and would be happy to have all those who want to work for the development of the country under my government,” he said.

As Karzai continues to seek greater control over Afghanistan's development and lays the political groundwork parliamentary elections scheduled for November, one thing is certain: the U.S. is in Afghanistan for the long haul. Despite the departure of the much-adored Afghan-born U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad for Baghdad, officials announced this week that the U.S. has allocated $83 million to upgrade its military bases in Afghanistan as part of a long-term “strategic partnership” that also includes the training of the country's 70,000-strong army. “We will continue to carry out the mission,” U.S. Brig. Gen. Jim Hunt told the Boston Globe, “for as long as necessary to secure a free and democratic society for the people of Afghanistan.”

Still, many say that Afghanistan is unlikely to shed its “stepsister” status on a U.S. foreign policy radar that remains focused on Iraq. “Time and time again, assets have been pulled away from Afghanistan to fuel U.S. efforts in Iraq. And even though much of Iraq has been smashed up in the last two years of fighting, the damaged fabric of Iraq cannot compare with broken Afghanistan after a couple of decades of war,” writes H.D.S. Greenway in the Boston Globe. “What Afghanistan needs from the West is 20 years of steady, unrelenting aid and support. But given the industrialized world's attention span and America's all-absorbing distraction in Iraq, it is unlikely to get it.”

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