Afghanistan Imperiled (Page 2)

Lahore

Washington has begun to help build a new national army, but this will take years to achieve. And this policy is directly undermined by continued US funding of the warlords. Even though the majority of the 1,500 delegates to the Loya Jirga harshly criticized the warlords, the Pentagon has renamed them "regional leaders," giving them a legitimacy that Afghans themselves are unwilling to bestow.

At the end of August the Pentagon finally appeared to be getting the message. "I do think increasingly our focus is shifting to training the Afghan national army, supporting ISAF, supporting reconstruction efforts--those kinds of things that contribute to long-term stability," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told me in an interview at the Pentagon.

Also, for the first time US officials appeared to be seriously concerned about lack of funds. "My single biggest concern is that the economic aid that was promised at the Tokyo conference, which I think is crucial not just for economic purposes but for political and security purposes, is just not coming through at the levels that were pledged," Wolfowitz said. The January Tokyo conference pledged $4.5 billion for reconstruction, of which donor nations promised to give $1.8 billion this year. "Barely 30 percent of what was promised for this year has been delivered," Wolfowitz added. He said the United States now had no objections to expanding ISAF beyond Kabul and would urge the Europeans to step up aid deliveries.

However, the Pentagon's apparent U-turn is only providing a halfway-house policy. It would like to see ISAF expand but wants others to do the job; Washington has ruled out using US troops as peacekeepers. It would also like others to provide more reconstruction money; in September several US officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, harshly criticized the Europeans for their slowness in providing funds.

Yet Washington's own contribution has been half that of the European Union. So far this year the United States has given $300 million, nearly all of which has been spent. In contrast, Washington is spending an estimated $1 billion a month on the Afghan war effort--a fact that has been strongly criticized by the UN's special representative for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi; the EU envoy to Kabul, Francesc Vendrell; and Karzai.

Given the lead US role in the war and the unilateralism that the Bush Administration has turned into a mantra vis-à-vis Iraq, other countries are unlikely to respond to either initiative unless Washington shows the way. "The United States has to play a leadership role in providing both greater security through contributions to ISAF and funding for reconstruction, if it wants other countries to step up to the line," says a European ambassador in Kabul. That appears increasingly unlikely as the US military machine prepares to attack Iraq. In his meeting with Bush at the UN General Assembly in mid-September, Karzai voiced fears--as do almost all Afghans--that war in the Middle East will lead Washington to forget Afghanistan, just as it did after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal.

The war against terrorism has shown notable successes with the breakup of Al Qaeda cells and large-scale arrests in Karachi, Singapore and Buffalo in September alone. But the Afghanistan/Pakistan region is the key to insuring that Al Qaeda does not re-emerge as a military force under a new Islamist or nationalist guise. Everywhere else in the world, Al Qaeda operates underground and in secret. In Afghanistan it rockets US troops in broad daylight.

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