The United Nations announced several times this month that despite recent progress, Afghanistan needs a serious increase in security and aid to prevent it from falling back into chaos.
The U.N. suspended several aid operations in Afghanistan this month due to security concerns caused by fighting between factional armies.
“The challenges of reforming the Afghan security sector are significant,” said Jean Marie Gunno, the U.N. Undersecretary of Peacekeeping Operations, in her address to the U.N. Security Council. “The national army needs to be built, factional armies need to be dissolved, and assistance needs to be provided to help ex-combatants reintegrate into civilian life.”
For generations there has been little “civilian life” in Afghanistan. Opposing world powers created and funded a class of professional soldiers during wars. Many think the problem of easing these soldiers back into civilian life must be dealt with or else civil war will continue.
Treated by world powers as a buffer zone, first between British and Russian colonial empires, then between capitalist and communist world markets, the local population has been dealt with as a spoil of war. But now the U.N. and its U.S.-led military coalition, holding the honor of being the first foreign invaders to successfully conquer all of Afghanistan, may also become the first to offer democracy to the population.
Now officially titled the Transitional Islamic State of Afghanistan, the reborn country is scheduled to hold its first democratic elections in June 2004. Under guidance of the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA), a group of experts from Canada called Elections Canada will supervise the election process.
Economic issues pose a serious barrier to the U.N. plan. Destruction of roads and irrigation canals, first by the Soviets, then by the Taliban, has made producing food crops impossible since the 1970s. The economy devolved into one based on barter and illegal drug trade, and in some parts of the country raw opium gum is the main form of hard currency.
On Feb. 3, a report released to the U.N. titled “The Opium Economy in Afghanistan: An International Problem” claimed that with the infrastructure destroyed, the country’s economy still depends mainly on drug trafficking warlords, making effective democratic rule impossible.
The U.N. has considered sponsoring eradication of drug crops, but, as the report said, “It cannot be done by military or authoritarian means. That has been tried in the past and was unsustainable. It must be done with instruments of democracy, the rule of law, and development.”
U.N. Officials also worry that a war in Iraq may jeopardize international funding for the country’s reconstruction.
“I think that to reduce security risks and maybe terrorism in the future, we’d better go for sustainable returns in Afghanistan and make that a real success,” said Ruud Lubbers, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
“This should be the priority today.