Global Policy Forum

Without an effective peacekeeping operation in Afghanistan, much of the aid will be wasted.

A lot has been achieved in Afghanistan. Taliban rule is a distant memory, the al-Qaeda terrorists whom they sheltered are reduced to fighting a losing battle from remote hideouts, and the long work of rebuilding a nation shattered by more than two decades of war has begun. More than $4 billion has already been pledged by donors for the purpose. Beards are disappearing, if not yet many burqas, and a date has been set in mid-June for the calling of the loya jirga--a mainly elected constitutional assembly of 1,450 delegates which will choose a representative government.

All these achievements, though, are contingent on Afghanistan's staying peaceful. And that is very far from certain. In the absence of a properly functioning national army or police force, security outside Kabul rests in the unreliable hands of local warlords. Skirmishes between rivals have been common, and the threat of them is hindering reconstruction, making travel difficult and the writ of the central government uncertain. Iran meddles in the west, Russia in the north. The former king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, has repeatedly had to postpone his return on security grounds.

In time, a national army should emerge: Britain and Germany are training a presidential guard, and America is soon supposed to start training a full brigade. But it will be a good while yet before such an army is up to the task of managing national security, not least because there are no funds available as yet to run one. The obvious interim solution is to extend the scope of the existing International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which does a fine job of keeping Kabul safe, but has not been given the authority or the men to operate outside it.

Remember Bosnia

This idea has been urgently studied for months, without result-- mainly, it is clear, because of American reservations. All the international commanders serving in Afghanistan support the idea of extending the ISAF's mandate, as does the UN secretary-general, and his respected representative to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi. The Afghans favour the idea too: their interim prime minister, Hamid Karzai, has flown around the world begging for a beefed-up ISAF. The regional governors too are uniformly favourable.

The suggestion, frequently made by opponents of "nation- building", that the ISAF would be a force sent into a hostile quagmire does not square with reality. A more accurate analogy would come from Bosnia, where in 1996 America boldly contributed a third of a peacekeeping force that went in heavily with 60,000 men, and has proved so successful that it has been progressively reduced to just 15,000--with not an American life lost. Even now, admittedly, Bosnia is hardly a perfectly built nation. But it is at peace, and gradually improving. Those improvements could not have happened without the peacekeepers: security is the essential prerequisite for everything else. Without it, money spent on aid and development is money down the drain. That is as true in Afghanistan as it has proved in Bosnia.

One reason for the Americans to pay more attention to this is that it will influence how other people think about Iraq. If the United States does indeed decide on "regime change" there, it certainly has the military wherewithal to remove Saddam Hussein. But even those who most ardently desire the dictator's removal are anxious about what will follow him. A free-for-all in Iraq would be a greater danger to international security than chaos in Afghanistan could ever pose. Iraq's Shia minority on its southern border with Saudi Arabia, its Kurds in the north bordering Turkey, its enmity with Israel, its vast oil supplies and its long rivalry with Iran all point to the dangers. Some form of robust international security arrangement will surely be needed in Iraq after the fall of Saddam, until the authority of an acceptable new government can be established. In Afghanistan, the Bush administration has yet to prove that it is willing to tidy up after its military victories.

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