U.S. Is Urged to Step Up Action to Keep Peace in Afghanistan

Eight months after launching a lightning military campaign in Afghanistan, the United States is in danger of losing the peace unless it takes swift action to defuse ethnic rivalries, limit the powers of warlords, ensure wider security, improve aid distribution and cope with the flood of returning refugees, warn an array of officials and experts.

As a loya jirga, or grand council, convenes here in the capital today to choose new leaders for the nation, many Afghans are increasingly concerned that their country’s needs are being shifted to the back burner as the U.S. moves its diplomatic focus to crises elsewhere in South Asia and in the Middle East.

Doubts about the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan permeate the gratitude felt by the millions being fed, educated, employed and advised by programs funded by Washington. Bitter memories of the brutality that took hold after the Soviet Union withdrew from the country in 1989--and the United States also began to disengage its aid and political involvement--have left Afghans wary of U.S. promises.

“A lot of Afghan people are still not sure if the United States is sincere this time or will again disappear after a year or two when the first part of its goals are achieved,” said Abdul Azimi, a law professor and Afghan liaison for U.S. education aid.

Even as it helps, the Bush administration is pushing Afghanistan to assume more responsibility for its own needs.

“We want Afghanistan to be self-reliant, to stand on its own feet, to do the things for itself that it now relies on outside forces for,” said Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-born U.S. citizen who serves as President Bush’s special envoy to the country. “We don’t want Afghanistan to be a security welfare state.”

But many Afghans and international aid groups say Afghanistan is still many years away from any form of self-sufficiency--and actually needs even more assistance to face new obstacles.

“Until we have our own national army and the country is so thoroughly rebuilt that people cannot conceive of returning to a Kalashnikov culture, the Americans have no right to leave,” Afghan Reconstruction Minister Mohammed Amin Farhang said.

Afghan officials and others agree that the most immediate threat to rebuilding the nation is the failure to establish security beyond Kabul. This lack of security, in turn, hinders food and aid delivery and efforts to reshape the local balance of political power, warns a new report by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based independent watchdog group on conflict prevention.

“In the absence of that security presence [throughout the country], fear that the U.S. and the international community are disengaging and that extremists offer the only alternative for protection is already resurfacing in popular consciousness,” said Martti Ahtisaari, a former president of Finland and now the chairman of the International Crisis Group.

Ahtisaari compared the current delicate stage in Afghanistan to turning points in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda, where the international community failed to prevent massacres or political collapse.

He said recent clashes in southeastern, northern and central Afghanistan indicate that the security situation is deteriorating.

The warlords and militias that divided up the country in 1992, precipitating the civil strife that allowed the Taliban to take control in 1996, are once again assuming control, warns Human Rights Watch, an international monitoring group based in New York.

Human Rights Watch and others say the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan opened the door for the reemergence of the warlords when it opted not to extend the peacekeeping International Security Assistance Force beyond Kabul.

Officials with Human Rights Watch charge that some warlords are making a grab for power by “brazenly manipulating” participation in the loya jirga. The warlords are drawing up their own lists of delegates for the gathering--which will decide who will rule Afghanistan until elections expected in 2004--and forcing the local populations to accept them, the rights group asserts.

“If they succeed, Afghans will again be denied the ability to choose their own leaders and build civil society,” said Sam Zia-Zarifi, the Human Rights Watch senior researcher in Afghanistan. “This is a make-or-break time for Afghanistan’s future.”

The United States is helping to assemble an Afghan army, training the first 500 men for a force targeted to reach 60,000. But even if all goes well, the army isn’t expected to be at full force for five years.

And unless the Bush administration and its allies do more to deal with the internal political tensions, a new military is likely to crumble into rival and warring factions, regional experts warn.

Worsening ethnic tensions further complicate the situation. Disillusionment with the way power has been distributed among the Pushtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and other ethnic groups since the so-called Bonn Agreement outlined a new political structure for Afghanistan in December has sparked “deepening factional and ethnic tensions” in most areas outside Kabul, the International Crisis Group says.

Afghans, meanwhile, complain that U.S. aid so far has done too little to repair the physical wreckage of 23 years of war and that the international community has hesitated to invest heavily in housing or infrastructure before peace is more secure.

The problems are reflected on the streets of Kabul, a city teeming with squalid new camps created by hundreds of thousands of refugees who have flocked back from neighboring Pakistan and Iran and who feel unsafe anywhere but in the capital. Many are once again stranded, living under tarpaulins spread over shattered walls.

“If [the United States] had provided more assistance in the first days of the interim administration, the political benefits of peace would have been more obvious to the average Afghan citizen,” Farhang said, referring to the six-month term of acting Prime Minister Hamid Karzai.

U.S. aid officials tend to agree that the delivery of relief has been ponderous, but they argue that the delays were unintentional. They also insist that the benefits of a widening presence are visible, even if indirect.

But the instability has crippled several aid efforts, with relief workers facing kidnapping, robbery and even death. And relief efforts often come second to the effort to eliminate remnants of the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

“Military priorities so overshadow humanitarian ones that insufficient attention is being paid to the critical funding shortfalls facing relief agencies,” said Roberta Cohen of the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. “The World Food Program still needs to deliver emergency food to 9 million Afghans--about 40% of the population--but it’s 40% to 50% underfunded. Food distribution could come to a halt by the end of this month.”

Williams reported from Kabul and Wright from Washington.