AFGHANISTAN: Aid Worker’s Killing Underlines Decline in Security

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Nov 17 2003 (IPS) - Aid workers are increasingly targets in the ongoing “war on terrorism” between U.S.-led forces and Islamic radicals, as the killing of a United Nations refugee worker Sunday in Afghanistan demonstrates.

Bettina Goislard, a French citizen, was gunned down while riding in a car of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the provincial city of Ghazni, when two men on a motorcycle opened fire on the vehicle, killer her and injuring her driver.

The attackers were arrested, and Afghan authorities identified them as supporters of the Taliban, which is believed to have re-established a presence in much of the southeastern part of the country, close to the border with Pakistan.

In a statement, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemned the attack as a “cold-blooded killing … outrageous and contemptible.” All U.N. operations in central Afghanistan were suspended in the wake of the killing.

Ghazi is located about 70 miles south of Kabul along the highway to Kandahar.

Sunday’s attack came less than a week after a bombing in front of U.N. offices in Kandahar and three months after a truck bomb attack on U.N. headquarters in Baghdad that killed 22 people, including the world body’s chief envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

Two people were injured in the Kandahar blast, which took place as a delegation from the U.N. Security Council visited Afghanistan to assess conditions there.

Goislard was the first U.N. staff member to be killed since the August bombing.

Annan’s statement Sunday stressed that the latest incident “underscores the urgent need for the international community to provide stronger security in areas outside the capital, Kabul”.

Security remains a major and growing challenge to stabilising and reconstructing the war-torn country.

In addition to the threat by the resurgent Taliban in mainly Pashtun areas in the south and along the border with Pakistan, much of the countryside is ruled by tribal leaders and warlords whose loyalty to the central government headed by President Hamid Karzai is variable at best.

The Security Council recently approved a new resolution authorising deployment of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) beyond Kabul, to which it had been confined since just after the Taliban’s ouster by U.S.-backed forces two years ago, but NATO, which is leading ISAF, has failed to persuade member countries to add to the 5,500-strong force.

Norway and Germany have volunteered to begin sending troops to specific trouble spots outside of Kabul, but the Karzai government will continue to rely mainly on the 11,000 U.S.-led combat troops currently deployed in Afghanistan as the main offensive force against Taliban concentrations.

Still, as even U.S. military commanders have begun to acknowledge, the Taliban and its allies have made gains in recent months.

Last week, the head of the U.S. Central Command, General John Abizaid, described daily combat operations in Afghanistan as “every bit as difficult as those that go on in Iraq”.

Eleven U.S. servicemen have been killed by hostile fire in the country since August, almost one-third of the 35 killed since the United States first began military operations in Afghanistan in October 2001.

On Friday, a U.S. special forces soldier was killed when his vehicle was hit by a bomb, while a Romanian soldier who was part of the U.S.-led force died of wounds received the week before.

“The situation is much more serious than a year ago,” Vikram Parekh, a Kabul-based expert with the International Crisis Group (ICG), told the ‘Washington Post’ this weekend.

“The cross-border infiltration is better financed, armed and equipped. The Taliban’s military leadership has been reconstituted, and in several provinces there is a more or less permanent presence of anti-government forces.”

A major target of the Taliban strategy, at least since last summer, has been international aid workers, both expatriates and native Afghans, who are apparently seen by the insurgent movement as key allies of the United States and other western nations trying to rebuild the country.

In recent months, a number of humanitarian relief groups have withdrawn their workers from provinces where the Taliban have carried out attacks against them or where security has broken down due to fighting between different factions.

A recent survey of 10 major aid groups estimated that security concerns have resulted in the cancellation or delay of aid projects that are supposed to benefit more than 600,000 Afghans.

It also found that more and more Afghan communities are afraid to accept help, and some are even returning reconstruction assistance for fear that any relationship to the government or aid agencies might result in reprisals against them by the Taliban, warlords or drug traffickers, who are believed to have become increasingly powerful due to the record opium crops harvested over the past year.

When the Security Council delegation visited Kabul 10 days ago, a group of 28 international aid agencies, including ActionAid, Oxfam, Save the Children and CARE, handed it a letter calling on the international community to “redouble” its efforts to extend security around the country.

In need of particular protection, it said, are those sectors most vulnerable to abuse – women, children, returning refugees and displaced people.

The letter was delivered just one day after a bomb attack just outside the Kabul office of Save the Children, the first direct attack on the international aid community in the capital, according to the Afghan NGO Security Office (ANSO).

Since last March, more than a dozen aid workers, mostly Afghan employees, have been killed. In most cases, resurgent Taliban forces or their allies have been blamed.

As a result, the relief groups have lobbied hard for months for ISAF to move into the countryside and secure key areas.

“What Afghanistan needs is something which might be more appropriately named ISAF Security Support Teams (ISSTs),” according to Paul Barker, CARE’s country director for Afghanistan.

Assuming that ISAF will not be enlarged, “these teams would be deployed to the more insecure areas of the country, (and) their core responsibility would be to promote Afghan capacity to establish and ensure improved security”, he added in a recent statement.

This would be done by training and conducting joint operations with the Afghan National Police Force and the Afghan National Army, which are being trained and equipped by U.S. and other western forces.