AID CARROT DANGLED OVER AFGHAN LEADERS.
Rival Afghan leaders, striving to reach a peace accord that ends years of fighting, have been made well aware that their country's economic future depends largely on their success in forging a sustainable settlement, reports the Financial Times (p.2). As negotiations continue in Bonn, western donors are expected once again to press that point at a conference due to begin in Berlin on Wednesday.
Over the past week, UN officials brokering the agreement between four rival Afghan groups, have spelled out the message. "The message is very clear. If you fight, you would get nothing from the international community," said one western official on Sunday. "But if you can have a political settlement, you stand to gain from the promise of billions of dollars flowing in."
The UNDP estimates Afghanistan will need $7 billion to $12 billion in reconstruction assistance for the first five years of what is likely to be at least a 10-year project, the story notes. The World Bank estimates the country will need $25 billion, though diplomats say that figure is unrealistic.
La Tribune (France, p.10) meanwhile reports on a conference of donors in Islamabad last week, noting that all the participants at the conference, including the UN, Afghan NGOs, and the World Bank, believed that the defeat of the Taliban and the prospects of peace in Afghanistan represented an exceptional opportunity to launch an ambitious reconstruction program.
"We have to catch the political will before it moves on to the next crisis somewhere else," the FT (12/1, p.2) quotes UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown as saying.
The news comes as the Wall Street Journal Europe (p.1) reports that after hitting a rough patch over the weekend, the UN-sponsored talks in Bonn on the future of Afghanistan were back on track late yesterday, as delegates appeared to move closer towards an agreement that could pave the way for creating a broad-based government in the war-torn country. After extensive consultations with the four Afghan delegations in Bonn, UN Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi pulled together points on which the UN believed all parties generally agreed.
These include a transfer of power from the Northern Alliance to a more broadly representative government that would initially create an interim government that would stay in power for about six months. A loya jirga, or traditional gathering of Afghan elders, would then appoint a transitional government that would serve some two years and write an Afghan constitution, paving the way for elections.
The points presented by Brahimi contains provisions to ensure the representation of Afghan women in positions of power, the story cites UN sources as saying. Mieko Nishimizu, Vice President of the World Bank for South Asia, said disarmament efforts and a genuine change in the gun-culture mentality depended on a greater role for women in Afghan society, AFP notes. "Gun ownership is about men. Men make war not women," she said. "Afghan women must be given the chance to raise their boys according to their own values-solidarity and respect."
Meanwhile, George Soros, chairmain of the Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Institute, writes an op-ed in the Washington Post (p. A21) entitled 'Assembling Afghanistan' that the US and its allies are winning the war in Afghanistan. But the danger is that a short-sighted vision of what our role should be once the Taliban have been removed from power still could lose the peace.
Acting as paymaster also would require some form of military protection for aid workers. But if such a force were directly linked to the delivery of effective aid services, it could not be seen as an infringement of national sovereignty. The United Nations would play a clearly defined interim role, with its leadership lasting perhaps a year or two until a newly elected national government was able to take over. The long-range reconstruction programs would remain the responsibility of the World Bank and other development institutions, Soros opines.
Such a plan is not perfect, but it is the best way to avoid the pitfalls of the past. If the U.S. government refuses to follow it now it will have to shoulder the responsibility for failure later.