Confidence lags in Afghanistan as violence rises
David R. Sands
The Washington Times
07/07/2006
Islamist terrorism in Afghanistan is on the rise,
aided by foreign support and by the struggles of the government
in Kabul to deliver on promises of security and development,
the nation's foreign minister said yesterday.
"The confidence of our people in the government
to protect them, especially in our southern provinces, is not
strong," Rangin Dadfar Spanta said during a luncheon interview
with editors and reporters at The Washington Times.
This year has seen some of the bloodiest fighting in Afghanistan
since a U.S.-led coalition ousted the militant Taliban regime
in 2001, including a string of bombings in Kabul this week that
killed one person and wounded about 60 others.
Mr. Spanta, who met this week with Vice President
Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other senior
administration officials, blamed both "external and internal
forces" for the spike in violence.
He would not specify in the interview which of
Afghanistan's neighbors he blamed for the upsurge, but his government
repeatedly has accused Pakistan of failing to do enough to stop
the flow of extremists across their common border.
Miss Rice traveled to Kabul and Islamabad late
last month to press for better cooperation between the two U.S.
allies.
"We are still waiting to see the results
of that visit in our neighbor," Mr. Spanta said.
The foreign minister also acknowledged Afghan
security forces must be beefed up if they are to help U.S. and
allied forces put down the Taliban, who harbored Osama bin Laden
and his al Qaeda terror network as they plotted the September
11 attacks on the United States. Government police and security
forces are outmanned and outgunned by the terrorists, he said.
"One part of our forces has very modern weapons
and another part is still using Russian arms and equipment left
over from the [Soviet] days," Mr. Spanta said. "That
makes it hard to cooperate among ourselves and hard to complement
the coalition forces we are working with."
For Mr. Spanta, seen as a confidant of Afghan
President Hamid Karzai, this is the first trip to Washington
since he replaced longtime Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah
in April.
Mr. Abdullah was a key power broker in the U.S.-backed
Northern Alliance that ousted the fundamentalist Taliban regime
in 2001, while Mr. Spanta spent virtually all of the past quarter-century
in exile.
Mr. Spanta joined the Afghan resistance to the
1979 Soviet invasion, eventually settling in Germany and working
with left-wing democratic exile groups. He taught for more than
a decade at Aachen University before returning to Afghanistan
in 2004, becoming a top foreign policy adviser to Mr. Karzai.
He said yesterday that the terrorists in Afghanistan
have targeted development projects and schools, especially those
educating Afghan girls. Officials at New York-based Human Rights
Watch are preparing to release a study next week that documents
a sharp rise in the attacks on Afghan schools since the beginning
of the year.
Afghan government forces and the international
security force run by NATO are preparing for a major anti-terrorist
campaign against Taliban and foreign terrorist groups in the
country's south. The Bush administration Monday promised to
double military aid to the Karzai government to $4 billion to
help modernize and equip the country's infant armed forces.
Mr. Spanta said his talks this week left him reassured
that the U.S. government remains committed to Afghanistan's
political and economic success, but said the international community
should not underestimate his country's needs after a quarter-century
of civil war and strife.
"The success at the beginning [of the 2001
war] came very fast, and I think our government and international
community were perhaps a little bit naive about how easy it
would be to bring the Afghanistan project to an end," he
said.
Said Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador to Washington,
complained that only 5 percent of the more than $11 billion
in international assistance to Afghanistan went directly to
government, giving ministers and bureaucracies in Kabul little
opportunity to build up domestic expertise to oversee development.
Mr. Spanta said the government had made some progress
in reducing the acreage devoted to the cultivation of poppies,
the main source of opium. But, he said, a good growing season
this year meant that overall production in Afghanistan, the
world's largest poppy producer, was virtually level with a year
ago.
The foreign minister said it was "unrealistic"
to cut poppy production if Afghan farmers are given no alternative
crops to grow and if international criminal and terrorist drug
rings continue to operate freely.
