WASHINGTON - While more than 140,000 US troops
in Iraq continue trying to impose security in advance of
the June 30 handover of limited sovereignty to the new
Iraqi administration, the security situation in nearby
Afghanistan continues to deteriorate.
With
national elections scheduled for just three months away,
observers say that tribal warlords, as well as resurgent
Taliban forces, appear as strong as at any time since
the Taliban were ousted 30 months ago, making it
increasingly unlikely that the balloting, if it even
goes forward, will be judged free and fair by
international and other observers.
"Trends are
going the wrong way," according to Mark Schneider, the
Washington director of the International Crisis Group, a
Brussels-based conflict resolution think-tank. "Militias
around the country pose a threat to the possibility of
any credible elections taking place."
In
Afghanistan, the US has some 20,000 troops mostly
chasing Taliban and al-Qaeda forces, yet the country
receives little attention.
That was made
painfully clear last week when visiting President Hamid
Karzai, resplendent in his trademark peacock-green cape,
received virtually no media attention at all despite his
address to a joint session of Congress and his joint
appearance with President George W Bush for a White
House Rose Garden press conference, during which he
remained largely silent as his host fended off questions
about US abuses of detainees in both Afghanistan and
Iraq and the domestic economy.
Officially,
Washington remains upbeat about Afghanistan. Addressing
a group at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies on Monday, ambassador William Taylor, the State
Department coordinator for Afghanistan, insisted that
United Nations officials had registered more than 4
million voters to date and that as many as 100,000 more
were being registered each day. He said about 36% of the
registrants were women.
The UN estimates the
total number of eligible voters in Afghanistan at a
little more than 10 million. "If we get at least 6
million voters registered," Taylor said, "that will be a
critical mass."
At the same time, the envoy
admitted that the security situation leaves much to be
desired and could easily interfere with the fairness of
the upcoming election, which will determine the
presidency and the lower house of parliament.
"This is not going to be pretty," he said,
noting that local militias, many of them fueled by
revenues from the thriving opium trade, are likely to
practice intimidation against voters, particularly in
the balloting for parliament.
The lack of
security was made distressingly clear just in the past
few days, as the Karzai-appointed governor of Ghor
province was chased from his capital after clashes
between the provincial army chief and a rival militia
that reportedly killed at least 10 people. The incident
was the third in recent months where a governor had been
forced to flee his post by warlords.
US military
casualties, although still minimal compared to Iraq,
have also risen sharply, even as Washington increased
the number of troops it is devoting to fighting the
Taliban and al-Qaeda in the mainly Pashtun south and
southeast, particularly along the border with Pakistan.
In addition, more aid workers - at least 18,
five of them foreign nationals - have been killed by
suspected Taliban forces than at any time since
US-backed forces ousted the Taliban in late 2001. As a
result, many non-governmental organizations have
withdrawn their staff, bringing reconstruction efforts
to a standstill.
In addition to the US troops,
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has some
6,500 peacekeepers in Afghanistan as part of the
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), all of
whom, however, are confined to Kabul. Another 250
German-led troops make up a provincial reconstruction
team (PRT) assigned to Kunduz, a relatively quiet
northern city.
NATO pledged to provide the
equipment (including helicopters) and troops to supply
another four PRTs to strategic cities around the country
in order to extend Karzai's authority well into the
countryside and stabilize the situation through the
deployment of rapid-reaction forces there, but these
have not been forthcoming - to the great frustration of
the US, as well as Karzai himself.
With US
troops seeking to engage the Taliban and al-Qaeda,
"Karzai's writ is pretty much co-terminous with [the]
NATO-ISAF [forces]," according to John Stuart Blackton,
a counter-insurgency specialist who directs Strategic
Advisory Services, a military consultancy group. He
noted that the weekend's events in Ghor province were
"emblematic [of the] collapse of the central
government's authority".
As to who could take on
the warlords and regional chiefs at this point to extend
Kabul's authority, Blackton said the Afghan National
Army was still too small and inexperienced, while it was
not within NATO's mandate, and the US still considers
the hunt for Taliban and al-Qaeda a higher priority.
NATO's failure so far to fulfill its
commitments, according to Schneider, virtually ensures
that elections in the countryside will not be fairly
conducted in September. "Unless you have an expanded
security force outside Kabul, I don't see how you're
going to have international observers," he said, noting
that three UN election workers, including two British
security experts, were killed by suspected Taliban
forces in Nuristan province last month.
A free
and fair election "is definitely not going to take place
if these militias are still operating", he went on,
noting that the schedule for the disarmament and
demobilization of at least 100,000 militia fighters is
lagging hopelessly behind. Political parties without an
armed wing simply "won't be able to participate in the
elections without fear".
The reticence of
Washington's NATO allies to provide more troops derives
from a number of factors, according to both Schneider
and Blackton.
The fact that the US opposed
ISAF's expansion into the countryside because it feared
that the peacekeepers might interfere with US military
operations until last summer resulted in a serious loss
of momentum, Schneider said. Meanwhile, the Bush
administration's invasion of Iraq resulted in a loss of
political influence - of "soft power" - in the capitals
of its European allies, according to Blackton.
"Afghanistan policy is hostage to Iraq policy,"
he said, noting that Washington's own forces have become
over-stretched as a result of the Iraq occupation, as
well.
Even Taylor, who initially blamed the
"usual suspects" in Europe for NATO's failure to
deliver, admitted that Washington's pressure on its NATO
allies to contribute as well to Iraq had "complicated
the discussion".
Schneider said neither the US
nor NATO/ISAF is taking on the exploding opium
production, which is expected to hit all-time highs this
year, and could account for as much as half the
country's estimated gross domestic product. Much of the
proceeds, according to Schneider and other experts, are
funding militias, some of which have cooperated with US
forces.
