Development & Aid, Headlines, Middle East & North Africa

AFGHANISTAN: NGOs Urge Donors to Focus on Rights, Security, Drugs

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Mar 29 2004 (IPS) - Days before an international donors’ meeting, aid agencies are insisting the world community answer a call for billions of dollars to help rebuild war-ravaged Afghanistan, whose planned June elections were postponed Sunday because of security concerns.

In a letter sent to the major donors, Amnesty International said it was most concerned about continuing insecurity for the vast majority of Afghans who live outside the capital Kabul, particularly ongoing abuses committed against women and girls in much of the country.

Similarly, the international relief group CARE urged in a new policy brief, also published Friday, that donors take four specific steps to ensure Afghanistan’s stability. It stressed that the burgeoning drug trade, which it said is fuelling violence and insecurity, needs to be addressed more aggressively.

It also called for donors to commit the full 27.5 billion dollars in reconstruction assistance over the next seven years that the government of President Hamid Karzai has requested, noting that 70 percent of the country’s 25 million people live in poverty after a quarter century of warfare that ended only two years ago with the U.S.-led ouster of the Taliban government.

The recommendations were made just days before a donors’ meeting scheduled for Berlin, Mar. 31-Apr. 1.

On Sunday, Karzai announced that presidential elections scheduled for June will instead be delayed until September and held with parliamentary elections. The delay, he said, was necessitated by the ongoing insecurity in various parts of the country where potential voters could not be registered in time.

Only about 1.5 million of an estimated 10.5 million eligible voters have so far been registered, and United Nations workers who are helping organise the polls have warned for months that the June date would be very difficult to meet under current conditions.

"The international community is fully aware of the need in Afghanistan to make it more secure for the Afghan people to have free and fair elections," Karzai told reporters.

Of greatest concern are the Pashtun areas in the south and east, particularly along the Pakistani border where the Taliban has reasserted its presence in part by carrying out attacks against aid workers, government officials and Afghan police and army units.

The Pentagon announced last week that it was sending 2,000 Marines to join about 11,000 U.S. troops who are deployed mainly to those areas as part of a major operation to both prevent the infiltration of Taliban forces and to coordinate with Pakistani forces across the border that are trying to flush out remnants of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist group, who are believed to be hiding there.

NGOs have been calling for months for both Washington and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which has so far been confined almost exclusively to Kabul, to expand operations to other parts of the country, including the predominantly Pashtun areas, but also to other regions where warlords continue to rule.

That message was underlined last week in fighting that broke out between rival forces in the western city of Herat, located in what was one of the more secure and prosperous parts of the country.

Earlier this month Karzai called on NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation), which oversees the ISAF, to provide more troops for pre-election security.

In its letter, Amnesty warned that failing to provide security and to ensure the human rights of all Afghans posed a major danger to the country’s future.

"We have seen some positive steps emerging, such as the building of a professional police force, training of the judiciary, police and lawyers, legal reform and physical rehabilitation of prisons and courts in Kabul," the London-based group noted.

"However, it is extremely worrying that progress is being limited to the capital while human rights remain far from realised for Afghans living in other provinces."

Among the most important issues to be tackled, it said, are violence against women and prison conditions, areas in which the group recorded some of the gravest human rights violations during its most recent visit to Afghanistan in February.

"Violations of the rights of women and girls, including physical abuse, underage marriage (and) exchange of girls to settle feuds, were widely reported to Amnesty International during the visit," it said. "It is particularly worrying that the Afghan government has not addressed these issues in any substantial way so far".

The group also called for donors to press the government to end impunity for both past and current serious human rights abuses. "Human rights violations are likely to continue as long as people reasonably suspected of being responsible for gross human rights violations are allowed to escape criminal responsibility and to hold positions of authority," Amnesty said.

In its report, ‘The Cost of Doing Too Little’, CARE echoed some of Amnesty’s concerns, noting in particular that ISAF and U.S.-led military forces should focus their efforts on enhancing security while training and building up Afghanistan’s police and army forces.

Observers have noted that thousands of army and police recruits have already deserted for a variety of reasons, including low pay.

"Lack of security will slow reconstruction, undermine confidence in the government, facilitate expansion of poppy production and the criminal economy more generally, and create more favourable operating conditions for terrorist elements in Afghanistan and along its borders," it said.

Insecurity, it went on, derives from the continuing activity of Taliban, al-Qaeda and related groups, abuses committed by warlords who are not under Kabul’s control, conflicts between rival warlords as in Herat and armed criminal gangs.

Local rivalries are increasingly being fuelled by the fast-growing drug economy, adds the report, which noted that Afghanistan’s opium crop currently accounts for a whopping 75 percent of global production, up from just 12 percent in 2000, when the Taliban regime banned poppy growing.

CARE said the drug trade was making it far more difficult for the Afghan government to promote legitimate economic reconstruction and development. Poppy farmers currently earn about 2,520 dollars a year, while farmers who cultivate legal crops average only about 670 dollars annually.

The result is that more farmers are planting more of their land with poppy, and more labourers are diverted into drug production.

"Once entrenched, this industry will become increasingly difficult to uproot and will pose a growing threat to the Afghan state over time," according to the report.

That threat underlines the need for greater investment by the international community in projects and development that offer attractive alternatives to the country’s rural population, it adds. It also means strengthening the government’s ability to offer development alternatives, as well as greater security.

Like Amnesty, CARE also noted that attacks against aid and humanitarian workers – 11 of whom were killed in February and early March – appear to be rising and require a strong response.

"The long-term costs of failure in Afghanistan are likely to greatly outweigh the short-to-medium-term costs of increased investments in reconstruction and peacekeeping," it said.