Political Counselor Haidari Speaks to U.S. Forces Deploying to Afghanistan
Political Counselor M. Ashraf Haidari visited Fort Riley in Kansas and Fort Campbell in Kentucky in early and mid February to express the gratitude of the Afghan government and people to the deploying troops and their families. “Please allow me to welcome you to Afghanistan where our people have strongly supported international security forces, and look forward to working with you to secure our country,” Haidari told the forces.
In a discussion of the current challenges facing American, NATO and Afghan security forces, Haidari said that the Taliban lacks a unifying vision for Afghanistan, but they “fully exploit weak state institutions on the district and village level that lack the necessary resources and capacity to deliver basic services to people in southern Afghanistan.” He noted that terrorism and drug-trafficking are inter-linked transnational security problems, which have to be fought on global scale, not in Afghanistan alone. He reiterated the support of the Afghan people for the continued U.S. engagement in the region.
He briefed the contingents on the judicial and police reforms in Afghanistan, which he said had received the least amount of resources and attention from the international community over the past seven years. “In any asymmetrical warfare, police and the judiciary constitute the eye and arm of the government, and if these two key institutions are absent or too weak to do their jobs well, the government loses its legitimacy in the public eyes,” said Haidari. He traced the problem to the defective lead-nation security sector reform framework, citing a lack of coordination among lead-nations and a lack of resources for effective implementation of each reform, particularly in the police and justice sectors. “We do not need so much firepower against the Taliban but a capacity surge to enable the government institutions to protect the population and to maintain their active support for the peace-building process in Afghanistan,” said Haidari.
Haidari called for unity of effort among all military and civilian entities helping secure and rebuild Afghanistan. “Every actor’s exit strategy in Afghanistan must be to enable us, the Afghan people and government, to stand on our own feet in order to drive our country’s rebuilding process,” he said.
