Afghan Women's Mission

From Noor Khan in Kandahar

The Sunday Herald

Gunmen ambushed a convoy carrying election workers into a remote Taliban stronghold, killing two and bringing to 12 the number of people slain while preparing for the landmark presidential vote.

Meanwhile, the US military urged the Afghan government to take “immediate action” to find those behind recent deadly attacks on relief workers that have further restricted reconstruction efforts.

At least 30 militants shot at the jeeps from the joint Afghan-UN electoral body on Friday as they passed through Char Cheno, a district of central Uruzgan province, said governor Jan Mohammed Khan.

Khan said Hassan Khan and Khathari Jan, two members of a team registering voters for the joint Afghan-UN electoral commission, were killed and all four vehicles destroyed by fire after being strafed with assault-rifle and machine-gun fire.

Guards in the convoy shot back, forcing the assailants to retreat into the mountains, Khan said. One Taliban fighter was captured, he said, but gave no further details.

Uruzgan and neighbouring Zabul have been the scene of some of the worst fighting in recent months, and attacks have increased as the nation gears up for its first post-Taliban election on October 9.

Six US soldiers were wounded, two of them seriously, in Zabul on Friday when insurgents mounted attacks with a mortar and explosives, the US military said.

The military initially listed eight injured soldiers, but said yesterday that they were mistaken and gave further details of the attacks.

In the first incident, insurgents attacked a 10-vehicle convoy near Daychopan, a notorious trouble spot, with a truck-mounted mortar.

Major Scott Nelson, a US spokesman, said one vehicle was hit, injuring four soldiers with shrapnel. US troops returned fire, injuring and capturing two of the assailants before the rest retreated.

Two of the soldiers were treated and returned to duty. The other two were in a stable condition and would be flown to a military hospital in Germany, Nelson said.

Rebels also set off a roadside bomb near Zabul’s provincial capital, Qalat, as another Humvee was passing. Two soldiers were injured, but quickly returned to duty.

Twenty-one American soldiers have died in action this year, already the worst tally for the US military since it entered Afghanistan in 2001.

The toll on aid workers is higher still, after the execution-style slaying on Tuesday of two Afghans from a German agency in southeastern Paktia province brought the total to 24. It was unclear who carried out the killing, but aid officials have dismissed police suggestions that the motive was robbery.

The incident follows the June 2 killing of five workers from Medecins Sans Frontieres in a previously peaceful northwestern province which prompted the relief group to withdraw from Afghanistan after 24 years.

MSF said it was dismayed at the failure to arrest local commanders suspected in the killings and the US military said that it, too, expected more.

“Senseless acts of violence like the ones against Malteser [aid agency] and Medecins Sans Frontieres … require immediate and deliberate action to bring those responsible to justice,” Nelson said.

Malteser Germany and the UN refugee agency, which were working together on a project to help former refugees, have suspended operations in the region.

08 August 2004

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Inter-Press Service, Thursday August 5th, 2004

By Thalif Deen

NEW YORK – The United States and the United Kingdom are being accused of undermining the work of international humanitarian organizations in Afghanistan by misusing aid to advance their military interests.

“There are times when aid agencies need the support of the military – as in Bosnia – but we are concerned about the increased involvement of the US and UK military in the provision of aid,” said Caroline Green of Oxfam International.

“Our impartiality is vital for us to carry out our work on the ground but this has become undermined by the United States giving aid to people not on the basis of need but in exchange for information,” Green told Inter Press Service (IPS).

Besides aid agencies, humanitarian assistance – including food aid and relief supplies – have also been provided by coalition forces, including the US, the UK, France, Germany and Italy, according to the US State Department. “Communities that we work with have become confused as the lines between aid agencies and the military have become blurred in Afghanistan,” Green said.

Those charges have been strongly endorsed by several other international aid organizations, including Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF or Doctors Without Borders), Christian Aid and Concern Worldwide. Last week, MSF pulled out of Afghanistan after having provided humanitarian assistance there for nearly 24 years. The reasons for the organization’s withdrawal included a deterioration of the security environment in Afghanistan and, more important, the misuse of humanitarian aid by US military forces in the country.

MSF also said it was unhappy with the lack of progress in a government investigation of the killing of five of its aid workers in the northern province of Baghdis in June, presumably by insurgents. MSF, which employed about 1,400 local staff and 80 international staff, ended all its operations last week.

“In Afghanistan, the US-backed coalition has constantly sought to use and co-opt humanitarian assistance to build support for its military and political ambitions,” said Michael Neuman, program officer at MSF. “By doing so, providing aid is no longer perceived as being a neutral and impartial act, and this is endangering humanitarian aid workers and this is jeopardizing assistance to the Afghan people – the assistance which is needed,” Neuman told IPS. In May last year, MSF complained to the US and other coalition forces about the distribution of a leaflet in southern Afghanistan that included a picture of a young Afghan girl carrying a bag of wheat. The leaflet said that if humanitarian assistance was to continue, Afghans needed to pass information to the soldiers about all insurgent forces in the country, including remnants of the the former Taliban regime and members of al-Qaeda.

Neuman said MSF has been raising general concerns about the blurring of humanitarian and military objectives for years. “We have done this is at meetings with officials for different countries, including the United States and UK,” he said. Wherever there are coalition forces – or even UN agencies – mixing political and humanitarian mandates, “you will continue to see a danger for impartial, neutral and humanitarian action”, he said.

“Humanitarian assistance is only possible when armed actors respect the safety of humanitarian actors. This is why we are calling on the coalition to cease all activity which tries to put humanitarian aid in the service of their political and military objectives,” Neuman said.

The coalition in Afghanistan, also called the combined joint task force, includes troops or logistical support from the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, Belgium, Jordan, Norway, New Zealand, Denmark, Italy, Germany and France.

Green said Oxfam International respects the decision of Medecins Sans Frontieres to withdraw from Afghanistan. “We understand why MSF feels that their position has become untenable. Oxfam International is gravely concerned about the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, which is increasingly affecting the ability for humanitarian and development organizations to work. We are also concerned about the inability of the government and the international community to do anything about the situation.”

In 2004, six staff members from Oxfam partner organizations have been killed in attacks in provinces previously considered to be relatively safe. “However, we feel strongly that Oxfam is providing important services to the poor people of Afghanistan and the risks we face are currently manageable and we feel that we are able to continue working in Afghanistan,” added Green.

Most aid organizations and UN agencies have pulled out their international staff from another violence-ridden country – Iraq – primarily because of the security situation there. Green said Oxfam decided to cease direct operations in the occupied country in April. “We had already withdrawn all international staff from Iraq in August 2003 after the bombing of the UN headquarters. The deteriorating security situation has made it virtually impossible for our staff to work effectively and this is why we made the decision to end our operations there,” she said. Just after the bombing, which killed over 20 UN employees, including undersecretary general Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN withdrew all of its international staff from Iraq. They are currently operating out of Jordan and Cyprus.

“The issue of non-governmental organizations [NGOs], military and humanitarian work is not a new one,” Manoel de Almeida e Silva, a UN spokesman in Kabul, told reporters last week. “It is not new in Afghanistan and it is not new elsewhere.” He said it was an issue that NGOs have raised “with great concern, and we at the United Nations have played a role in facilitating and helping in the dialogue between the military and the NGOs”.

US President George W Bush told reporters on Monday that he regretted MSF’s decision to close shop in Afghanistan. But at the same time he trumpeted the fact that more than 8.6 million Afghans had registered as voters for the October presidential elections, 90% of those eligible, according to the United Nations.

(Inter Press Service)

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By Dr Michael A Weinstein

What is the other transition – the one in Afghanistan, not Iraq – going to look like, if it occurs at all?

Experts are in agreement that the transition is in trouble. Throughout its history as a field of conflict between contending empires and great powers, Afghanistan has developed a formula for survival that has helped it to keep its territorial integrity and indigenous authority system, despite its dizzying ethnic diversity and the external pressures that have been exerted on it. That formula – a weak central government allowing comprehensive power to local and regional leaders – is always vulnerable to civil war, which has been a staple of Afghan existence and threatens to break out again.

The troubles in Afghanistan and the uncertainty of its transition are rooted in the possibility that the bargains and compromises necessary for restoring the country’s political paradigm will not be made or will not be strong enough to prevent relapse into civil war, or at best a failed decentralized state, with the national government only fully controlling the capital Kabul, as is currently close to the case.

Afghan social organization Afghanistan’s history of invasions that kept compounding ethnic diversity precluded the country from achieving integrity through a strong centralized government. Instead, the sense of belonging together was achieved by a complex system of nested loyalties rooted in localities. The unit of Afghan social organization is the qaum, a network of affiliations that is most intense in the family, in which are nested wider loyalties to tribe, clan, occupation, ethnic group, region and finally to the continued existence of the country itself, but not necessarily to the current regime. Qaums function to provide their members with mutual aid and to protect them from outside groups. The degree of support and protection is greatest at the local level and becomes more attenuated in broader contexts, in which boundaries between qaums shift in response of changing balances of power.

Qaums are societies within a society. They have allowed Afghanistan to survive over centuries, through a common interest in local autonomy, against external threats. Their strength – fierce defense of local control – is also their weakness: each qaum is suspicious of the others, and when they cannot agree, they are prone to take up arms. The widest qaum – the state, which in the Western model has no structural competitor – is for Afghans a more or less useful facility for other qaums, not an object of loyalty or devotion. Afghan nationalism is social, not political.

Since World War II, attempts to submit Afghan society to centralized rule have been calamities, due to internal resistance and external intervention. The communist regime, which seized power in 1978 and attempted to impose land reform and secularization, was met with militant opposition, which brought the Soviet Union into the conflict, leading to a civil war and war of liberation, under the banner of Islam. The opposition forces were aided and abetted by the United States, and were able to overthrow the communists in 1992, three years after the Soviets had withdrawn their troops. Having won the war, the coalition of mujahideen fell apart into the traditional qaum pattern, in which authority was now firmly in the hands of warlords, who continued the civil war among themselves.

Concerned about its neighbor’s instability, Pakistan supported a movement of Afghan refugee religious students, which became the Taliban militia. The Taliban promised to end the civil war and unite Afghanistan around an Islamist state. The Taliban’s victory in 1996 ushered in a period of religious fascism that provided relative security at the cost of state terrorism, but did not break the qaum system. When the United States removed the Taliban militarily, because the regime had provided a haven for al-Qaeda before September 11, 2001, the familiar pattern reasserted itself, with civil war prevented only by the presence of multinational forces.

Afghanistan’s recent civil wars have left it with a hyper-militarized form of its social paradigm. At present, a weak transitional government in Kabul led by Hamid Karzai is protected by foreign troops and does not exert effective control over the rest of the country, which is divided among local and regional warlords with primary affiliations to clans and particular ethnic groups. Taliban persecutions and the resentments sparked by civil war have sharpened ethnic divides, lessening the will to compromise.

The Taliban have regrouped as guerrilla forces determined to impede the formation of a stable Afghan government. The primary condition for centralized state control – the disbanding of local and regional militias – has not been realized: Approximately 40,000-50,000 fighters are still under the control of the warlords, dwarfing the fledgling Afghan army.

Prospects for transition Given the deep-rootedness of the qaum system and the military power of local strong men, it cannot be expected that Afghanistan will achieve a Western-style market democracy. The most that can be hoped for by Western powers is some form of bargain among the contending groups to share power through granting one another autonomy. Any greater centralization is unlikely because the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) powers are unwilling to expend the resources even to attempt to achieve it.

Afghanistan is a poor agricultural country without strategic resources. The NATO powers, led by the US, need to keep it from once again becoming a base for Islamic revolution, but their vital interests extend no further than that. They would be unwilling even to lend sufficient support for a Middle Eastern style one-party crony dictatorship to take hold. Indeed, Afghanistan has the lowest international troop-to-population ratio of recent interventions (1:1,115, as compared with 1:161 in Iraq).

The NATO powers are banking on the election of Karzai to Afghanistan’s presidency on October 9. A member of Afghanistan’s Pashtun plurality, Karzai is beholden to the occupying forces and follows pro-Western foreign policies.

It is still not certain that the election will be held, given efforts to sabotage it by the Taliban and warlords who are threatened with loss of their power. Although 70% of eligible voters have been registered, the figure is only 10%-15% in predominantly Pashtun areas where the Taliban resistance is active. Where registration has been successful, voters are likely to follow the leads of local strong men, many of whom have been suppressing political opposition.

Whether or not elections are held on October 9, the question will remain whether the various forces in Afghan society can reach a pact with each other to prevent civil war.

Recent developments in the run-up to the election show fissures emerging between political leaders from different ethnic groups, raising the probability that a successful bargain will not be made. On July 22, Uzbek strongman General Abdul Rashid Dostum resigned from the transitional government and announced his candidacy for president. Five days later, Yonus Qanooni, a Tajik who had been shifted from the important post of interior minister to education minister in an effort to satisfy Pashtun interests, declared his candidacy. At the same time, the first vice president of the transitional government and its defense minister, Mohammed Fahim – a Tajik backer of Qanooni – was dropped from Karzai’s electoral ticket.

In Afghanistan’s ethnic demography, the Pashtuns constitute approximately 40% of the population, the Tajiks about 20%, the Hazaras another 20%, the Uzbeks 5% and an array of other ethnic groups the remainder. Politically the groups are not unified and their factions cross ethnic lines, depending on local issues. Nevertheless, Dostum’s and Qanooni’s candidacies pose the possibility that Karzai will not receive a majority in the first round of voting and will have to face a run off with the second-place candidate. Karzai’s position is strengthened by his retention of Abdul Karim Khalili, a Hazara, as second deputy president, but the Hazaras also have their own presidential candidate in Mohammed Mohaqiq. A coalition of convenience of Qanooni, Dostum and Mohaqiq could pose a strong challenge to Karzai if he does not win a majority in the first electoral round.

If the presidential election is held successfully and Karzai wins a clear majority, his hand will be strengthened for making the deals with warlords across ethnic lines that will open the possibility for Afghanistan to regain its traditional political pattern of a weak central power presiding over strong local power centers that are satisfied with their degrees of autonomy and their shares of resources and offices. If he loses the first round with a plurality and wins a run off, he will be in a weaker position and divisive tendencies will assert themselves. If Karzai loses a runoff, especially to a non-Pashtun, stabilization will be difficult to achieve and renewed civil war will loom as a possibility, requiring long-term commitment of foreign military forces if the NATO powers choose to try to prevent that outcome.

Whatever the election’s result, certain conditions will persist in Afghanistan that have international ramifications. The country is likely to remain a major provider of heroin, a destabilizing influence on Pakistan, a field for the eastward expansion of Iran’s influence and, if decentralization goes too far, a staging base for Islamic revolutionaries once again. Those conditions will be alleviated by a successful political agreement, but they will not be eliminated. In the absence of massive economic and military aid from the industrial powers, which is unlikely to come, Afghanistan will remain on the brink of becoming a failed state or will become one yet another time.

Conclusion

Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan is not threatened with secession or breakup. It is not an expression of modern Western colonialism, but an exceedingly complex society that has been subject to imperialism throughout its history and has kept its integrity through the delicate balances and overlapping affiliations of the qaum system. With no real external support for modernization from the outside, that system is reasserting itself as the blessing and the curse that it has always been.

Afghanistan functions most successfully when the decentralized forces that compose its society trust one another sufficiently to compromise over common concerns and let the rest devolve to localities. The country’s political system breaks down into civil war when that trust is lacking, unleashing cycles of defensive aggression. Recent civil wars have eroded trust and left authority over the qaums in the hands of warlords, who have gained in influence over other traditional authorities, especially elders and clerics.

The most likely future for Afghanistan is severe instability that Western powers, expending limited resources, will attempt to contain, but will not be able to resolve.

Published with permission of the Power and Interest News Report, an analysis-based publication that seeks to provide insight into various conflicts, regions and points of interest around the globe. All comments should be directed to content@pinr.com

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The Guardian, Thursday July 29, 2004

Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor

One of the world’s leading frontline aid organisations, Médecins sans Frontières, is pulling out of Afghanistan after 24 years because of a deterioration in security.

MSF, a neutral group which depends primarily on private donations, has a reputation for sending medical staff into troublespots regarded by other agencies as too dangerous. This is its first pullout from any country since being founded 33 years ago.

The organisation, which worked in Afghanistan through the Soviet occupation, the civil war and the Taliban, said yesterday that the US-led coalition put aid workers at risk by blurring the line between military and humanitarian operations.

The surprise withdrawal is a setback for the Afghan government and the US in their attempts to persuade the international community that security in the country is improving in the run-up to the twice-delayed presidential election, now scheduled for October. A UN election worker and a person registering to vote were killed yesterday in a bomb attack in Ghazni, south of Kabul.

Thirty-two aid workers have been killed in Afghanistan since March last year. Five MSF workers were killed at Badghis, in the north-west of the country, on June 2.

Before the attack, MSF had 80 expatriate staff in the country and 1,400 local staff, covering 13 provinces. The remaining 15 expatriate staff are leaving and the local staff are being made redundant. MSF aims to be out of Afghanistan by the end of August.

Vickie Hawkins, who returned to Britain two weeks ago after leading the MSF mission in Afghanistan, said yesterday: “While the security situation has deteriorated over the last year, what is a new feature is this targeting issue which has never happened before in Afghanistan and this is what makes us take the situation so seriously we felt we have to withdraw.” She said the line between aid and the military had been blurred since US soldiers, after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, dressed in civilian clothes and drove around in the white Land cruisers favoured by aid agencies.

More recently, the Pentagon was forced to apologise for leaflets dropped on villages which threatened to withhold aid unless information was forthcoming about al-Qaida and the Taliban. Britain has distanced itself from this campaign.

Introduction by Nato of provincial reconstruction teams, which are joint military-civilian bodies, had added to the confusion. She said the British military in particular was pursuing these operations.

MSF was unnerved by a Taliban accusation that its members were spying for the US. Another factor in the decision was the Afghan government’s failure to act after an inquiry into the murder of the MSF workers, which, Ms Hawkins said, had identified a local warlord rather than the Taliban as being linked to the killings.

Afghanistan is not MSF’s biggest programme but it is symbolically important. MSF’s reputation for working in almost any condition arose, in part, from pictures of staff travelling into Afghanistan in the early 80s with medical equipment on donkeys.

Ms Hawkins said MSF would only consider returning to Afghanistan if the Taliban withdrew the spying charge, the Afghan government made a serious effort to hold accountable those responsible for the MSF killings, and there was a reduction in the targeting of aid workerss.

On the row over blurring of the line between aid and the military, Britain says the blame should be on the Taliban and al-Qaida for targeting aid workers.

The Foreign Office said: “We regret MSF’s decision … but we understand individual agencies have to make different decisions on security.”

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The New York Times June 8, 2004 Tuesday

By CARLOTTA GALL

President Hamid Karzai has accepted the support of powerful mujahedeen leaders for the presidential elections scheduled for September, indicating he will continue an alliance with them in a future government. His move has dismayed many Afghans who were hoping that the nation’s first democratic elections would herald an end to the power of the warlords, who have dominated politics for the past decade.

Mr. Karzai is far and away the leading candidate to win a five-year term as president, with Afghanistan’s first pre-election opinion survey putting his approval rating at 85 percent. The leaders of the powerful Northern Alliance faction have already said they will not field a candidate and will support Mr Karzai, who is scheduled to meet with American soldiers at Fort Drum, N.Y., on Tuesday to personally thank them for their help in Afghanistan.

Mr. Karzai met last Thursday with the former president and leader of the Jamiat-e-Islami party, Burhanuddin Rabbani; the leader of the Ittehad-e-Islami, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf; and with some of the most powerful mujahedeen commanders, including Gov. Ismail Khan of Herat Province. All pledged support for him. The education minister, Yunus Qanooni, also publicly expressed his support this week. The defense minister, Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, and four other important Pashtun mujahedeen party leaders have done the same, presidential aides said.

Mr. Karzai insisted Thursday that he had not made a deal with the faction leaders and was opposed to a coalition government. Yet it is clear that Mr. Karzai, rather than testing his popularity by standing alone, has opted to join forces with the mujahedeen, men who fought the jihad, or holy war, against the Soviet occupation in the 1980’s and who have been his traditional allies over the years.

”The president welcomed the offer of support of the two parties,” the presidential chief of staff, Umar Daudzai, said in an interview this week. ”These are the two distinguished leaders of jihad whom we always respect, and the president of course was also a leader of jihad, and therefore there is no reason that the president would not accept their offer.”

Impartial observers say there is more involved than camaraderie among fellow former jihadis. ”He knows it is the most important thing to make a bargain with the jihadis,” said one Western diplomat. ”He came to power with them, and he is not going to change the political dynamic,” he said.

Other officials explained it is not Mr. Karzai’s style to go it alone, and his strategy has always been a ”big tent policy,” to co-opt the warlords rather than confront them.

But his joining forces with the jihadi leaders, many of whom still retain armed militias and pay only lip service to the central government, has dismayed some.

”The deal that has taken place is against the national benefit and the will and desires of the people of Afghanistan,” said another presidential candidate, a doctor from Kabul, Massouda Jalal.

She accused Mr. Karzai of agreeing to give half the cabinet posts to Mr. Sayyaf and Mr. Rabbani in return for their support in the elections. Mr. Karzai was concerned that he could not win the election without their support, she said.

A coalition with the mujahedeen would prolong the many problems facing the government, she said. ”With this coalition, the reconstruction of Afghanistan will not take place, collection of weapons will not take place, we will keep on having instability and anarchy, the unfairness of the current situation will not improve, and the free will of the people will not be implemented,” she said.

Underscoring the precariousness of the security situation, United States military officials said one American soldier was killed and two were wounded Monday when an explosive device detonated under their Humvee near the town of Deh Rawood in Uruzgan Province in the south. The attack was the latest in a stretch of violence that has intensified during the last few weeks.

Technocrats in the government, who have battled with the mujahedeen leaders to push through reforms, particularly in the areas of disarmament and reform of the police, military and intelligence service, expressed their concern that without a genuine popular mandate, the future president would not be able to achieve much change.

”The next government must have legitimacy to carry out a difficult series of reforms,” said Ashraf Ghani, the finance minister. ”It is the people of Afghanistan who are the only judges of legitimacy. We must ensure that the people exercise that right.”

The jihadi leaders said they had decided to endorse Mr Karzai’s candidacy in the interests of stability and national unity.

”Afghanistan is at a very sensitive, historic moment,” Mr. Rabbani said. ”We need security and trust in each other and national unity. If we do not think of these things, reconstruction will not go forward, and this attention of the international community is our only opportunity.”

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George Bush and Tony Blair made grand promises when they took on the Taliban. They sound hollow now. What does it all mean for Iraq?

The Independent/UK, May 25, 2004

by Kim Sengupta

The road from the village of Ozbin Khol is safe no longer. The eight aid workers packed into a Toyota LandCruiser were keen to get to their destination, Sarobi, before nightfall. But a punctured tire stopped them. Two young men, carrying Kalashnikovs, their faces covered by keffayahs, came out of the darkness, lined up the passengers and opened fire, killing five.

The killings, in Paktika province, south-east of Kabul, were at the end of February. The next month, gunmen burst into a guesthouse near the southern city of Kandahar, killing three more aid workers. Two weeks ago, two Europeans, one with a Swiss passport, were stoned and stabbed to death at Bagh Chilsthan, just 15 minutes’ drive from the center of Kabul.

Reports of the murders appeared in the international media, briefly, because the victims were either from the West, or had links with international relief agencies. There have been other deaths – 15 children killed by United States warplanes in raids while attempting to eliminate a warlord in December. Another dozen Afghans were killed in the next few weeks, either enemy combatants, said the Americans, or the result of collateral damage among civilians.

In Herat, internecine fighting between forces of the warlord, Ismail Khan, and the governor sent by Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul led to the deaths of 100 people, including Mr Khan’s son.

These are snapshots of a continuing conflict in Afghanistan, a war of attrition taking place largely in the shadows with the focus of the world’s media firmly fixed on Iraq.

The Afghan war was, of course, the first chapter of the War on Terror launched after 11 September. After a relatively quick and casualty-free campaign – for the American military, if not Afghan civilians – George Bush declared victory. Tony Blair pledged: “This time we will not walk away”, as had happened following the war the mujahedin fought against the Russians with Western money and arms.

But that, say many Afghans, is exactly what the United States and Britain have done. And just as the official end to hostilities in Iraq has been followed by unremitting violence, so the war has returned with a vengeance in Afghanistan. With international interest concentrating on Iraq, aid money has dried up for the Afghans. The military bill for the Pentagon, so far, is $50bn (£27bn). The money for humanitarian work, on the other hand, has been $4.5bn. Out of that, much of the $2.2bn earmarked for this year has been diverted to military projects and emergency relief from long-term development.

Even where aid money is available, the security situation is preventing distribution. The five men killed in Paktika worked for the National Solidarity Program (SDF), which is now pulling out of 72 areas in the country.

Ihsanullah Dileri, the organization’s head of co-ordination said in his Kabul office: “This is a very bad, very desperate situation. We had $60,000 to spend on each of those 72 areas, now this cannot be done.

“All these areas are badly deprived, with poor people lacking basic facilities. But I am afraid the security simply is not there for us to continue with our work. It is too dangerous.”

Barbara Stapleton, of the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief (ACBAR) an umbrella body representing 90 national and international aid agencies, added: “We are very concerned about security and the deterioration of the situation. Impunity rules in the country. It’s not just the NGO [non-governmental organizations] community, but the Afghan people at large who are exposed to these levels of insecurity.”

There is also evidence that the American military is using aid as a means of acquiring intelligence. Delivering blankets and food to refugees at Dwamanda in the south, Lieutenant Reid Finn had no hesitation in telling journalists: “It’s simple. The more they help us find the bad guys, the more good stuff they get.” Teena Roberts, the head of Christian Aid’s mission in the country, said: “The result of this is aid workers have become targets. I have not come across the use of aid in this way before.”

After the fall of the Taliban, the streets of Kabul used to be busy until the 10pm curfew. Now they are deserted by eight in the evening, with the headlights of a few solitary cars hurtling through the darkness. Foreigners travel in convoys, with armed guards. Amanullah Haidar runs a stall 100 yards from the Mustafa Hotel in the city center, one of the few places deemed to be safe for the expatriate community to meet in the evening, where the two brothers who run it carry pistols in shoulder holsters, and guards with semi-automatic rifles man the main door.

“We are disappointed by lack of progress, lack of money, lack of jobs,” said Mr Haidar, a Tajik former Northern Alliance soldier. “I remember all these people who came here from Europe and America and told us how they are going to help us. But where are the factories and the offices we thought we would get? What about the elections we were promised?”

President Hamid Karzai was forced to put back to the autumn elections because of the instability. Only 1.6 million out of 10.5 million eligible to vote have registered. In the Pashtun belt, where Taliban influence is still strong, the number of women registered is below 20 per cent.

The emancipation of women, subjugated by the fundamentalist Taliban, was one of the stated objectives of the West. Even before the war ended America’s First Lady, Laura Bush, declared: “Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”

According to an Amnesty International report, however: “Two years after the ending of the Taliban regime, the international community and the Afghan transitional administration, led by President Karzai, have proved unable to protect women. The risk of rape and sexual violence by members of armed factions and former combatants is still high. Forced marriages, particularly of girl children, and violence against women in the family are widespread in many areas.”

After the war, dozens of girls’ schools reopened throughout the country. But an Islamist resurgence has seen many of them closed down through intimidation. Families who still dare to send their female children for education can pay a terrible price. Earlier this month, three young girls, aged eight to 10, were poisoned in eastern Afghanistan, apparently as punishment for attending lessons.

The government points out, however, that four million pupils are enrolled in schools this year – including one third of the country’s female children.

Twenty-five years of war have destroyed what there was of Afghan infrastructure. In a number of regions, such as the Shomali Plain, the Taliban and their Pakistani allies destroyed centuries-old irrigation systems in a scorched-earth policy against the Northern Alliance.

Following the last war, attempts were made to restore water and power. But systematic strikes by the Taliban on power lines and irrigation projects, and murders of foreign engineers, has ground much of it to a halt. At present, just 9 per cent of the population have access to electricity. Safe drinking water is estimated to be restricted to 6 per cent. The World Bank has authorized a $40m loan for water projects, but while work can begin with the funds in the north and west, it is deemed to be too dangerous in the Pashtun belt of the south and east.

The UN has stressed irrigation is essential for agriculture in a country where the overwhelming majority of the population live in rural areas. However there is no shortage of one particular crop – opium. Poppy cultivation reached a new high last year. According to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the area of cultivation has grown from 1,685 hectares in 2001 to 61,000 hectares in 2003. The country has the dubious distinction of accounting for 75 per cent of the world’s output.

FACTS AND FIGURES THAT TELL THE STORY

HEALTH

Pregnancy: One woman dies every 20 minutes in pregnancy/childbirth 2002: Pregnancy and childbirth the leading cause of death in women 500 trained midwives for female population of 11 million

Life expectancy:

2001: 46
2004: 43

Under-five mortality rank:

2001: 4
2004: 4
Measles: 2000: 1,400 cases of measles per month
2003: 40 cases per month

Polio:

1999: 27 reported cases
2003: 7 reported cases
2004: 3 reported cases

CHILD SOLDIERS

8,000 child soldiers in official army
Feb 2004: Government starts to demobilize 2,000 child soldiers 400 children killed each month from landmines

EDUCATION

Four million children in education
1.2 million girls in education; aim to get a million more girls into education

Net primary school enrolment ratio:

1995-99: M:F 53:5
2004: M:F 42:15

Total adult literacy:

1995-99: 32
2004: 36

OPIUM PRODUCTION

2001: 185 tons of opium (reduction of 96 per cent from 1999)
2003: Second-largest opium harvest (after 1999) with yield of 3,600 tons Poppy cultivated in 28 of 32 provinces, involving 1.7 million Afghans. Drug trade income is $2.3bn, more than 50 per cent of Afghanistan’s legal GDP 69 per cent of farmers surveyed intend to increase cultivation in 2004 Nearly 30 per cent of farmers plan to more than double production 43 per cent of non-poppy farmers intend to start cultivating in 2004

Sources: UNICEF SOWC (State of the World’s Children) annual report); CARE International; Afghanistan Annual Opium Poppy Survey 2001); Afghanistan Farmers’ Intentions survey 2003-04); Amnesty International

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by Thalif Deen | May 6, 2004

The growing instability in Afghanistan – a country under virtual military occupation by U.S. and other western forces – has been overshadowed by news of the escalating violence, torture and killings in U.S.-administered Iraq.

But analysts who closely monitor the region say security in Afghanistan remains “tenuous” and “has shown no signs of improvement.” And they predict the explosive situation there might soon turn out to be as bad as Iraq – but on a smaller scale.

The similarities are striking. As in Iraq, insurgents in Afghanistan have not only been attacking the multinational military force but also local police and foreign aid workers.

The Pentagon, responding to charges of torture by US soldiers, said Wednesday that at least 25 prisoners have died in US custody, in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

But unlike Iraq, the potential destabilization of Afghanistan has taken added momentum following last week’s announcement of possible US troop withdrawals from the politically troubled country.

During a visit to the Afghan capital Kabul, General Richard Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, hinted that Washington might gradually reduce its 15,500 troops immediately after nationwide elections scheduled for September.

Any such action, say Afghan analysts, would be a recipe for political and military disaster.

“If the United States cuts the number of troops after the Afghan elections, it would be the clearest confirmation of what many have feared – that the US main interest in Afghanistan is not stabilizing the country or improving people’s lives, but getting Hamid Karzai elected president and making Afghanistan look like a ‘war on terror’ success in time for US (presidential) elections in November,” says James Ingalls of the California Institute of Technology.

Ingalls, a founding director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, also remains skeptical about the ability of the Karzai government to hold “fair and free elections,” postponed till September from the original June timetable.

“The U.S.-backed warlords continue to control parts of the country with impunity,” he told IPS. “If allowed to participate in the political process, they will likely bully and buy their way into parliamentary positions, as they have in the past.”

“Those who don’t get their way will resort to force. They have little incentive to do otherwise,” he added.

“At best,” Ingalls predicted, “the elections will be meaningless because the people have no real choices – who are Karzai’s challenger(s)? – at worst, the elections could spark a new civil war.”

Mark Sedra, a research associate at the Bonn International Center for Conversion, where he leads a project that monitors and analyses security in Afghanistan, is equally pessimistic about the future.

“A significant reduction of US troops in Afghanistan would send a very negative signal to the Afghan people,” Sedra told IPS.

“It would fuel the growing perception among Afghans that the United States and the international community are once again turning their backs on the country – as they did after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union,” he added.

The Soviets, who militarily occupied Afghanistan for over a decade, pulled out in 1989. The Taliban government that followed was ousted by US military forces in late 2001. Washington then installed Karzai, described by many as a US puppet, as the new president.

While insurgent groups such as the Taliban are not in a position to overthrow the central government, says Sedra, they still pose a potent security risk.

“By focusing their attacks on ‘soft targets’ such as aid workers and Afghan government employees, they have effectively halted development work in approximately one-third of the country,” added Sedra, who recently returned from Afghanistan where he managed, on behalf of the United Nations, the security section of the Afghan government study tabled at last month’s donor conference in Berlin.

Reconstruction of war-battered Iraq has come to a complete standstill because of the security situation. Both the World Bank and the United Nations, along with major humanitarian aid groups, have withdrawn all of their international staff because of security fears.

Since the killing of a U.N. aid worker in Afghanistan last November, most international staff working for more than 30 UN agencies have been withdrawn from southern and eastern Afghanistan. As a result, the United Nations has also suspended aid to refugees returning from neighboring Pakistan.

Jean Arnault, the UN special representative in the country, said he was “shocked” by last week’s “brutal slayings” of two local aid workers in the southern city of Kandahar. The two worked for Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance, an international aid organization.

“This and other recent attacks in Kandahar urgently point towards the need to make more forces available to the provincial authorities in order to enable them to uphold the law and facilitate the expansion of reconstruction,” Arnault told reporters last week.

The Taliban, warlordism and the booming opium trade are other current threats to the reconstruction of Afghanistan, according to Sedra.

“The US military presence in the country, while limited compared to Iraq, serves as a powerful deterrent to the outbreak of major hostilities, whether perpetrated by the Taliban or a regional warlord,” he added.

The US military also provides vital support to the multinational International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which is in the process of expanding outside Kabul.

“The timing of the potential troop reduction, however, is also disconcerting, for if elections do take place in September, the period immediately following will likely be extremely tense,” pointed out Sedra.

“It is in the immediate aftermath of the polls that we will see whether the country’s major powerbrokers will accept its result.”

“The withdrawal of even a small number of troops would provide a psychological boost to insurgent groups and terrorists; embolden regional warlords to challenge the central government; and encourage interference in the country’s affairs by regional actors, notably Pakistan and Iran.” he added.

After his return from Kabul last January, UN Special Representative to Afghanistan Lakhdar Brahimi said that despite a heavy western military presence and a two-year-old U.S.-backed government in Kabul, Afghanistan was reduced to a country with no rule of law.

He implicitly criticized the government, the police, the army, the international community and the 4,500-strong ISAF for their failure to resolve the problem of insecurity.

“There is of course, what we see in our press, what we hear about on the radio, what we see on television about bombs that blow up here and there, about rockets that fall here and there,” he said.

“But there is (also) the insecurity we don’t see in the press: the fear that is in the heart of practically every Afghan because there is no rule of law yet in this country,” he added.

(Inter Press Service)

Thalif Deen has been Inter Press Service’s U.N. Bureau Chief since 1992. A former Information Officer at the U.N. Secretariat and a one-time member of the Sri Lanka delegation to the General Assembly sessions, he is currently editor of the Journal of the Group of 77, published in collaboration with IPS. A Fulbright-Hayes scholar, he holds a Master’s degree in Journalism from Columbia University in New York.

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