Dawn over Turtle Bay
Afghanistan needs a political solution, but won’t get it without ongoing, robust military action, says UN envoy to the ‘Stan, who adds things aren’t as bad as they say they are. CanWest News Service:
UNITED NATIONS - The “gloom and doom” predictions for Afghanistan have been overplayed and become a distraction from efforts to help Afghans get on their feet, the chief United Nations envoy to Afghanistan said Tuesday.
Addressing the UN Security Council, Kai Eide said that a recent focus on rising violence in the country had overshadowed significant advances on Afghanistan’s political and war-on-drugs fronts.
While he emphasized the ultimate resolution to the conflict would be “political,” he said he remained convinced that peace would “depend on the continued and robust presence of military forces.”
Advocates for military withdrawal from Afghanistan, where Canada has 2,500 troops, have cited departing British commander Brig. Mark Carlton-Smith’s assertion that defeat of the Islamist Taliban was “neither feasible nor supportable.”
Eide said much other negativity has come from “people who have scarcely put their feet on the ground” in Afghanistan.
Where’d they get this guy? Talking like that, how long will they keep him? Imagine if the UN had been chastizing people like that over Iraq. It almost sounds like he’s supporting military action as a means of promoting freedom and democracy, and ending terrorist threats. It may not be dawn, but it that a glimmer of early light?
The UN envoy also said Karzai had made prudent changes to his government, and suggested new leadership in the interior and agriculture ministries would lead to heightened government efforts to fight corruption - long a serious problem in the country - and increase food production.
Finally, Eide said Afghanistan had scored little-publicized successes in its efforts to roll back the amount of acreage devoted to drug production.
“Today, poppy cultivation is not an Afghanistan-wide problem,” he told reporters.
Eide told the Security Council there had been too much emphasis on pessimism about Afghanistan.
“I would really caution against gloom and doom statements that we have seen recently,” he said. “Many of them really go too far.”
Eide nevertheless warned the NATO-led military effort faced serious challenges in the months to come, including an upswing of Taliban offensives this winter in contrast to previous years.
Short answer to above question, Eide is Norway’s former NATO rep.
This Oct. 7 Pakistani Dawn article suggests its a change of tune, though it’s hard to say whether he wasn’t just being badgered and quoted by a reporter who wanted an either or on the political-military balance.
“I’ve always said to those that talk about the military surge … what we need most of all is a political surge, more political energy,” Kai Eide, the UN special envoy to Afghanistan, told a news conference in Kabul.
“We all know that we cannot win it militarily. It has to be won through political means. That means political engagement.”
Meanwhile, international Jihadis are hightailing it from Iraq to Afghanistan. Achieving martyrdom is too easy in Iraq due to Crusader advances there. They prefer more of a challenge. Int’l Herald Tribune:
U.S. military successes in Iraq have prompted growing numbers of well-trained “foreign fighters” to join the insurgency in Afghanistan instead, the Afghan defense minister said Tuesday.
The minister, General Abdul Rahim Wardak, said that the increased flow of insurgents from outside Afghanistan had contributed to the rising intensity of the fighting here this year, which he described as the “worst” since the U.S.-led offensive toppled the Taliban government in 2001.
U.S. commanders have said that overall violence here has increased by 30 percent in the past year. Wardak said that “the success of coalition forces in Iraq” had combined with developments in countries neighboring Afghanistan to cause “a major increase in the number of foreign fighters” coming to Afghanistan.
In addition, he said, “there is no doubt that they are better equipped than before. They are well trained, more sophisticated, and their coordination is much better.”
…
U.S. commanders have said that most of the foreign fighters operating in Afghanistan are Pakistanis, Arabs, or people from Muslim countries and communities in Central Asia and the Caucasus, including Chechnya. They note that some Islamic militant Web sites have been encouraging fighters to go to Afghanistan rather than Iraq, where insurgent operations have been sharply reduced in the last 18 months.
In recent weeks, some of these Web site appeals have pointed to the growing concern among NATO nations with troops in Afghanistan about the rising tempo of the insurgency here, and the appeals from U.S. commanders here for more troops.
The AP’s article on same notes that Iraq once drew jihadis who had fled Afghanistan. Memo to the Obama camp. It’s international jihad. It morphs. It moves around. It shape-shifts and uses states and people who use it. You don’t just get to fight it in one place.
All taken togther, sounds like a good reason to crank up the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, and maintain the effort in Iraq. While giving Iran the hairy eyeball.
Topics: Afghanistan, UN
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:02 pm on Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
