Hakki
http://www.stratfor.com/fib/topStory_print.php?ID=202881 Afghanistan: Factions Challenging Government's Authority 22 January 2002 (...) Afghanistan is breaking apart faster than the new government is coming together. It is becoming increasingly unlikely that leaders in Kabul will be able to establish any degree of authority in the country. This puts extended reconstruction plans at risk and will encourage the industrialized world to step away from its involvement in Afghanistan. (...) http://www.timesofindia.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=1096483832&prtPage=1 The Times of India Online
Afghanistan may need 30,000 peacekeepers
AFP [ THURSDAY, JANUARY 24, 2002 12:19:44 AM ] KABUL: A senior UN official said Wednesday that Afghanistan may need 30,000 peacekeepers, many more than planned, amid concerns factional fighting and lawlessness will hamper the nation's efforts to recover from more than two decades of war. Reported tensions between rival Afghan militia highlighted the problems facing Kabul's interim government despite pledges of 4.5 billion dollars in international aid. Plans are in the works to deploy a 5,000-strong multinational force in the central Asian country, essentially for Kabul, and more than 1,000 troops are already on the ground. But UN envoy Francesc Vendrell said it may not be nearly enough. Vendrell, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's deputy special representative for Afghanistan, said 30,000 soldiers, empowered to defend themselves if attacked, could be needed. "The international force needs to be deployed beyond Kabul and the Afghans want it -- even the warlords say they want it," Vendrell was quoted saying on the BBC website Wednesday. (...) http://asp.washtimes.com/printarticle.asp?action=print&ArticleID=20020124-63 416088 Warlords arm Afghans in refugee camps Andrew Bushell THE WASHINGTON TIMES Published 1/24/2002 ------------------------------------ MAZAR-E-SHARIF, Afghanistan — Warlords in several Afghan cities have begun arming refugee camps since the arrival of international peacekeepers in Kabul, international aid agencies say. Their goal is to maintain the power vacuum caused by the fall of the Taliban and maintain profits from drug sales and smuggling, according to officials of the interim government in Kabul. U.N. security officials believe the warlords aim to check the influence of the Kabul government headed by Hamid Karzai. The officials say the warlords would see deployment of the peacekeepers in any other cities as an extension of Kabul's power. At present, the international force operates only in Kabul and surrounding areas. Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Northern Alliance commander, began the trend of arming refugees in the areas surrounding the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, according to Haneef Ata of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a private organization helping refugees around the world. The practice quickly spread to other cities throughout Afghanistan. (...) http://www.laweekly.com/printme.php3?&eid=31820 January 25 - 31, 2002
New World Disorder: Reign of Chaos
A letter from Pakistan by Ali Ahmed Rind
Afghanistan’s pain continues.
After two decades of civil war and three years of drought, the most desperate are reduced to eating grass to survive the harsh winter that has set upon towns and villages.
A flu epidemic could kill as many as 15,000 people, and serious health problems are common. The other day, a World Health Organization representative, Lori Hieber-Girardet, told a group of Pakistani journalists about a pregnant Afghani who had no access to a doctor or midwife. “When she found she was unable to give birth, she had to travel for three days through mountains, with the head of her dead baby stuck in her uterus, to reach a clinic,” she said. (...) Even more serious is the general lawlessness terrorizing the country. One in three people in Afghanistan carries an automatic weapon of some kind to enforce the law of the jungle. The work of many relief agencies has been halted over concerns for their workers’ safety. After the Taliban rout, the country has been turned into private fiefdoms overseen by warlords, who are answerable only to their own thirst for more money and power.
As one political analyst commented sarcastically about the country’s interim leader: “Hamid Karzai is Lord of Kabul only as he has never been lord of any part of Afghanistan before the Taliban’s coming into power back in the mid-1990s. Everyone else has got back his lost empire that they held before the Taliban’s coming to Kabul.” (...)