LONDON - The Taliban have regained control
over the southern half of Afghanistan and their
front line is advancing daily, a group closely
monitoring the Afghan situation said in a report
this week.
The report on the
reconstruction of Afghanistan marking the fifth
anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on
the US is based on extensive field research in the
critical provinces of Helmand, Kandahar, Herat and
Nangarhar.
"The Taliban front line now
cuts halfway through the country, encompassing all
of the southern provinces," says a report by the
Senlis Council, an
international policy think-tank with offices in
Kabul, London, Paris and Brussels.
The
report from Senlis, which has reported extensively
on Afghanistan over recent years, says: "A
humanitarian crisis of starvation and poverty has
gripped the south of the country." The report
blames "the US-and-UK-led failed counter-narcotics
and military policies" for this situation.
"The subsequent rising levels of extreme
poverty have created increasing support for the
Taliban, who have responded to the needs of the
local population," the report says.
"We
are seeing a humanitarian disaster," said Emmanuel
Reinert, executive director of the Senlis Council.
"There are around Kandahar now camps with people
starving, kids dying almost every day, and this is
obviously used by the Taliban to regain the
confidence of the people, and to regain control of
the country."
The poppy-eradication
program has been a disaster, he said. "It is a
direct attack on the livelihood of the farmers, so
there is a clear connection between the
eradication and this humanitarian crisis. All this
is being used by the Taliban to say ... 'When we
were there we were maybe hard and cruel, but you
could feed the family; now look what's going on.'
They are more and more providing support [and]
social services to the local population."
The US-led nation-building efforts have
failed because of "ineffective and inflammatory
military and counter-narcotics policies", the
report says. "At the same time, there has been a
dramatic underfunding of aid and development
programs."
The disastrous policies could
have created the very circumstances for a growth
of terrorism that the United States set out to
fight, the report says.
"The US policies
in Afghanistan have re-created the safe haven for
terrorism that the 2001 invasion aimed to
destroy," Reinert said. "The reason that the
international force [has been in] in Afghanistan
for the last five years is to make sure that
Afghanistan will never again be a safe haven for
international terrorists."
But the rise of
the Taliban is still short of a rise in terrorism,
he said.
"Right now we cannot say we see a
lot of foreign elements; we see the Taliban in
Afghanistan," he said. "We see basically the
neo-Talibans as they are called - they are
Afghans, they are people from the communities,
they are from the Pashtun tribes who have been
fighting in the south for so many years. In a way
it is a civil war which is being waged over
there."
Hunger is leading to anger, the
report says, adding that lack of funding from the
international community means the Afghan
government and the United Nations World Food
Program are unable to address Afghanistan's hunger
crisis. "Despite appeals for aid funds, the US-led
international community has continued to direct
the majority of aid funds towards military and
security operations."
Reinert said: "Five
years after [September 11, 2001], Afghanistan is
still one of the poorest countries in the world,
and there is a hunger crisis in the fragile
southern part of the country. Remarkably, this
vital fact seems to have been overlooked in the
funding and prioritization of the foreign policy,
military, counter-narcotics and reconstruction
plans."
Consequently the international
community has lost the battle for the hearts and
minds of the Afghan people, the report says..
The report warns of difficult conditions
in makeshift, unregistered refugee camps of
starving children and civilians displaced by
narcotics-eradication and bombing campaigns.
These camps also accommodate families who
have left their homes because of violence and
fighting, the report says. Some are there because
their homes have been destroyed by coalition
forces' interventions in the "war on terror" and
the current heightened counter-insurgency
operations, it says.
"Right from 2001, the
US-led international community's priorities for
Afghanistan were not in line with those of the
Afghan population," said Reinert. "It is a classic
military error: they did not properly identify the
enemy."
The report says military
expenditure outpaces development and
reconstruction spending by 900% - US$82.5 billion
has been spent on military operations in
Afghanistan since 2002 compared with just $7.3
billion on development.
The large numbers
of civilian casualties and deaths have also fueled
resentment and mistrust of the international
military presence, the report says. There were 104
civilian casualties in Afghanistan in the month of
July alone.
Faced with the return of the
Taliban, the US and the international community
must immediately reassess the entire approach in
Afghanistan, the report says.
"Emergency
poverty relief must now be the top priority," said
Reinert. "Only then can we talk of nation-building
and reconstruction."
The rise of the
Taliban is rapid, he said. "You cannot make peace
with the real command of the Taliban. We have to
attack the root cause of the growing power of the
Taliban, which is poverty [and] the
counter-narcotics policy. We have to cut the
Taliban from their base so that they will become
what they were five years ago, a very small group
of isolated terrorists. That's not the case
anymore. Now they are a large part of the
population because of the failure of the
development policy."
Reinert said: "In a
year we will have a situation where the legitimacy
of the Kabul government will be weakened to a
point where [it] will not be able to [keep] the
country together."
