Global Policy Forum

By Williams & Wright

Eight months after launching a lightning military campaign in Afghanistan, the United States is in danger of losing the peace unless it takes swift action to defuse ethnic rivalries, limit the powers of warlords, ensure wider security, improve aid distribution and cope with the flood of returning refugees, warn an array of officials and experts.

As a loya jirga, or grand council, convenes here to choose new leaders for the nation, many Afghans are concerned that their country's needs are being shifted to the back burner as the United States moves its diplomatic focus to crises in the Middle East and South Asia.

Doubts about the US commitment to Afghanistan permeate the gratitude felt by the millions being fed, educated, employed and advised by programs funded by the United States. Bitter memories of the brutality that took hold after the Soviet Union withdrew from the country in 1989 - and the United States also began to disengage its aid and political involvement - have left Afghans wary of US promises.

"A lot of Afghan people are still not sure if the United States is sincere this time or will again disappear after a year or two when the first part of its goals are achieved," said Abdul Azimi, a law professor and Afghan liaison for US education aid. Even as it helps, the Bush administration is pushing Afghanistan to assume more responsibility for its own needs.

"We want Afghanistan to be self-reliant, to stand on its own feet, to do the things for itself that it now relies on outside forces for," said Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-born US citizen who serves as President Bush's special envoy to the country. "We don't want Afghanistan to be a security welfare state." But many Afghans and international aid groups say Afghanistan is still many years away from any form of self-sufficiency - and in the meantime needs even more assistance to face new obstacles.

"Until we have our own national army and the country is so thoroughly rebuilt that people cannot conceive of returning to a Kalashnikov culture, the Americans have no right to leave," Afghan Reconstruction Minister Mohammed Amin Farhang said.

Afghan officials and others agree that the most immediate threat to rebuilding the nation is the failure to establish security beyond Kabul. This lack of security hinders food and aid delivery and efforts to reshape the local balance of political power, warns a new report by the International Crisis Group, a independent watchdog group on conflict prevention out of Brussels, Belgium.

"In the absence of that security presence (throughout the country), fear that the US and the international community are disengaging and that extremists offer the only alternative for protection is already resurfacing in popular consciousness," said Martti Ahtisaari, a former president of Finland and now the chairman of the International Crisis Group.

The warlords and militias that divided up Afghanistan in 1992, precipitating the civil strife that allowed the Taliban to take control in 1996, are once again assuming control, warns Human Rights Watch, an international monitoring group based in New York.

Officials with Human Rights Watch charge that some warlords are making a grab for power by "brazenly manipulating" participation in the loya jirga. The warlords are drawing up their own lists of delegates for the gathering - which will decide who rules Afghanistan for the next 18 months - and forcing the local populations to accept them, the rights group asserts.

"If they succeed, Afghans will again be denied the ability to choose their own leaders and build civil society," said Sam Zia-Zarifi, the Human Rights Watch senior researcher in Afghanistan. "This is a make-or-break time for Afghanistan's future."

Afghans, meanwhile, complain that US aid so far has done too little to repair the physical wreckage of 23 years of war and that the international community has hesitated to invest heavily in housing or infrastructure before peace is more secure.

"If (the United States) had provided more assistance in the first days of the interim administration, the political benefits of peace would have been more obvious to the average Afghan citizen," said Farhang, referring to the six-month term of Hamid Karzai. Bush administration officials insist they remain committed to stabilizing and rebuilding Afghanistan and recognize it will be a long process. But some observers are skeptical.

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