[A-List] Afghanistan: the blowback continues

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

 US must put Afghanistan back together

Focus shifts from security and combat to reconstruction

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Thursday November 21, 2002
The Guardian

American forces in Afghanistan are embarking on a task that the Bush
administration claimed its soldiers would never do - nation building - and
moving resources from the hunt for al-Qaida to securing the countryside,
Pentagon officials said yesterday.

The change is a tacit admission that the government of Hamid Karzai,
installed with US support, remains incapable of imposing its will beyond the
capital, Kabul. It is the most significant policy shift towards a role the
US had strenuously resisted.

"There has not been an exact day of 'drop your guns and here is a shovel',
but we are going through a new phase where it is less about combat, and more
about stabilisation," a Pentagon spokesman said. "The efforts in this phase
are 75% reconstruction and humanitarian, and 25% security and combat
operations." Three months ago, the proportions were roughly even, he said.

In part, the Pentagon's public embrace of postwar reconstruction could be a
reminder to Muslim countries that the US will not turn its back on
Afghanistan in the event of an attack on Iraq.

But over time, US military officials have recognised that the survival of Mr
Karzai's government depends on bringing greater stability to the rest of the
country.

"This means that like it or not, the US is involved in state building in
Afghanistan," said Barnett Rubin, an expert on Afghanistan at the Centre on
International Cooperation at New York University. "The president said he was
against it, but situations change."

US military officials have discovered that it is an exceedingly slow and
painful process to weld a single Afghan army from the militias of competing
warlords. Meanwhile, there is also resistance from participating states to
expanding the international security assistance force beyond Kabul.

Plans are under consideration for small clusters of US military officers to
set up bases at Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan and at Herat, in the
west, for securing aid projects. About 200 additional civilian affairs
officers are to be involved.

US military personnel have also become involved in the small-scale provision
of aid in medical clinics in rural areas of Afghanistan, as well as
rebuilding culverts and bridges.

The largest reconstruction project - which is funded jointly with Japan and
Saudi Arabia - got under way earlier this month when engineers arrived to
rebuild the main route between Kabul and Kandahar.

However, some of these initiatives have antagonised the international aid
community in Afghanistan, and there are also frictions with US Aid.

Some aid organisations are afraid they will be identified with the US
military - and not viewed as independent actors - if soldiers become
involved in providing medical care and other rehabilitation project.

Others in the aid community argue that direct US involvement in
reconstruction will weaken Mr Karzai by making it more apparent that he is
unable to deliver stability.