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http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/812/in2.htmBrigadier Ed Butler was blunt. "The violence in Afghanistan is now worse than in Iraq," he told a meeting of NATO's defence chiefs last week. He was referring to the ferocious battles that have assailed NATO troops since they took over most combat operations in Afghanistan from US-led forces in August.
Butler is head of NATO's 4,500 strong British contingent. He says "hundreds" of Taliban guerrillas have been killed in the fighting. But so have dozens of NATO soldiers and scores of civilians, including 14 in a suicide attack in Kabul on 8 September. Canadian Defence Minister, Gordon O Connor, was more sober in his assessments gleaned from a tour of NATO Canadian troops in Afghanistan's restive southern provinces. "We cannot eliminate the Taliban," he said simply.
This will come as news to his people, as well as to those of the 25 other NATO nations. For regime change in Afghanistan has been sold as one of the few unalloyed successes of the new world born of the 9/11 attacks on America. ....... How then -- five years on -- is Afghanistan so near collapse?
The answer can be given in one word, says veteran Afghan watcher, Ahmed Rashid: "Iraq: Washington's refusal to take state-building in Afghanistan seriously and instead wage a fruitless war in Iraq. For Afghanistan the results have been too few Western troops, too little money and a lack of coherent strategy and sustained policy initiatives by Western and Afghan leaders."
For the Taliban the lacunae enabled it to regroup, rearm and resurge, whether in the southern provinces or from its Pakistan hinterland. When the "fighting season" resumed this spring, NATO commanders acknowledged they faced a guerrilla force more sophisticated, better organised and more numerous than ever before, with a new and deadly penchant for remote-controlled bombs and, unusually in Afghanistan, suicide attacks ............Taliban commanders now boast of a fighting force of 12,000 men and control over "20 districts" in southern Afghanistan. NATO officials say the figure is exaggerated but, with NATO's 6,000 troops over-stretched to command 23,000 square miles, they admit that the Taliban can "loosely control much of four southern provinces much of the time".
The military flaws have been compounded by a "corrupt and inefficient Afghan administration without resources", says another Afghan analyst, Barnett Rubin. Since 2001, billions have been raised for Afghanistan, he says. However for every dollar spent on development ten have gone on security and/or purchasing fealty to the government of President Hamid Karzai. "Not a single new dam, power station or major water system has been built, and only one intercity highway has been completed," says Rashid. The result is only six per cent of Afghans have access to electricity, over half remain impoverished and 63 per cent are illiterate. This is no better than when the Taliban ruled under sanctions.
Into the economic void has risen an economy driven by opium and run by farmers, drugs barons, warlords and truculent tribesmen. In return for protecting their poppies, Taliban fighters raise taxes and levy mercenaries. Dope has become Afghanistan's most lucrative trade, worth $2.6 billion or 52 per cent of the country's GDP, says Rashid. "When we compare Afghanistan's situation today with 2001, we see the country needs to develop an entire alternative economyto replace the drug economy." ......The news is ALL BAD. We'll lose the place if we don't get out of Iraq and put the resources there. Even at that, we've wasted so much time, it may be too late without a huge investment of still more blood.
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