As an international conference on the country opens today in London, international and Afghan observers are demanding a new commitment to Afghanistan, writes David Tresilian An international conference on the future of Afghanistan opens in London today, bringing together foreign ministers from countries contributing to the Afghan International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), representatives from countries neighbouring Afghanistan and representatives from NATO, the United Nations, the EU and other international organisations. According to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, co-host of the conference with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, the aim of the conference is to "match the increase in military forces with an increased political momentum, focus the international community on a clear set of priorities across the 43-nation coalition and marshal the maximum international effort to help the Afghan government deliver." The conference comes against the background of the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, with attacks on Afghan and foreign forces now being an almost daily occurrence. In December 2009, US President Barack Obama announced that the US would be deploying an additional 30,000 soldiers in the country before initiating planned troop withdrawals in 18 months time. Afghanistan's presidential elections, held in August 2009, were characterised by a lack of security, low voter turn-out and allegations of widespread fraud. A planned second round, apparently forced on the country by US pressure, was cancelled when Abdullah Abdullah, main candidate for the presidency along with incumbent Hamid Karzai, withdrew from the running. Karzai was declared the winner and president of Afghanistan for a second five-year term. However, far from reassuring international observers, Karzai's re-election, combined with the deteriorating security situation in the country, has only reinforced concerns at the culture of corruption that has apparently taken hold in Afghanistan and the apparent inability of the Afghan government to tackle it. Whatever else delegates at today's London conference find to talk about, the perceived failures of the Afghan government, the deteriorating security situation in the country, and, nearly a decade after the ousting of the Taliban in 2001, the country's still shockingly low state of development, are likely to be high on the agenda. However, perhaps almost as important as anything decided at today's London conference for those concerned about the future of Afghanistan -- likely to include citizens of the European and other nations currently providing development assistance to Afghanistan or with soldiers stationed in the country -- are answers to the questions of what has gone wrong since 2001 and why. According to participants at a roundtable discussion on Afghanistan held earlier this month in Paris, the fall of the Taliban in 2001 was as welcome to Afghans as it was to international observers. According to Michael Barry, a professor at Princeton University in the US and one of the world's leading experts on Afghanistan, in 2001 there was a real opportunity for a "Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan, with foreign forces being welcomed as liberators that could provide the security and assistance necessary for the country's reconstruction. In addition to his scholarly expertise in Persian culture and the Persian cultural area, Barry is unusual among academics in that he has also served as an international humanitarian worker in Afghanistan, working in the country between 1979 and 2001. During the Soviet occupation, Barry was Afghan affairs officer for the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights, also working in the country between 1985 and 1995 for Médicins du monde and the UN. Barry was in Kabul during the post-Soviet civil war and Taliban siege of 1992-1995, and his history of Afghanistan, Le Royaume de l'insolence, l'Afghanistan 1504-2001 (reviewed in the Al-Ahram Weekly in July 2002), has been through three editions. It was the hope for a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan in 2001, Barry explained in conversation with the Weekly, which enabled Afghan reconciliation to begin after decades of foreign intervention and civil war. Following a nationwide loya jirga, or council of elders, in 2002, Hamid Karzai was chosen as interim president, and a new constitution was ratified. Karzai was elected president in 2004, and the 2005 legislative elections returned Afghanistan's first elected national assembly since 1973, with guarantees for women's representation and the rights of minorities. Today, however, the hopes of these early years have all but evaporated. While there was a "window of opportunity" for the reconstruction of Afghanistan in the years immediately following the fall of the Taliban, that window could remain open only as long as there was a relationship of trust between Afghans and the foreign forces stationed in their country. "Afghans were staggered by the US invasion of Iraq in 2003," Barry told the Weekly, since this seemed to show that the "US was not serious in its partnership with Afghanistan. No attention was paid to living up to the promises made at the Bonn Conference for Afghanistan in 2002, with the result that reconstructing the country is now going to be far more expensive that it would have been in 2003." "Today, the reconstruction of Afghanistan will involve overcoming the insurrection, as well as the cynicism and despair," that have replaced the optimism of 2001-2003. "A way will have to be found of overcoming the Afghan view that the only thing that makes us important to the international community is fear" at the consequences of chaos in the country. While the window of opportunity has not closed, Barry said, the "shutters are closing." Earlier during the roundtable discussion, Barry said that what he called the "Afghan tragedy" was one that had international implications, such that the international community now had little choice but to reinforce and continue its military presence in the country. The mistake in 2001, he said, had been the same as the Soviet mistake in 1979, the US supposing that it could stage a military intervention in Afghanistan before losing interest and turning its attention elsewhere. However, Barry said, far from being in control of the situation in its pursuit of Al-Qaeda in 2001, the US had been drawn into a trap, from which the only way out would be by investing massively in Afghanistan's development and future security. "You cannot imagine the scandal of Kabul today, a city of eight million inhabitants where most people have no access to clean water and where the air is the most polluted in the world," he said. "It is impossible to talk about 'good governance' in Afghanistan in the face of this scandal. The country has to be taken seriously, not seen as being of only secondary importance." "If you want to get out of Afghanistan now," he later told the Weekly, "you've got to buy your way out." At the roundtable, Afghan Ambassador to France Omar Samad took up the subject of Western relations with Afghanistan. Following the withdrawal of Soviet forces from the country in 1989, ending the 10-year occupation, no attempt had been made to find a political solution for the country. Having armed and financed the mujahideen in their battle with Soviet occupying forces in the 1980s, the United States "ignored and forgot" Afghanistan over the following decade, allowing it to sink into civil war, becoming a haven for international terrorism. Today, Samad said, only 10 per cent of Afghans support the Taliban. What was needed in Afghanistan was a serious programme of reconstruction, education, the development of civil society and the private sector, and these things would be on the agenda of the London conference. The mistakes made after 1989 when world attention turned away from the country should not be repeated, Samad said, and neither should the mistakes of the period after 2001 when opportunities left open by the fall of the Taliban were not fully seized upon. Both Samad and Barry pleaded for a renewed commitment on the part of the international community to Afghanistan, and it is to be hoped that a formula for such a commitment can be found at today's London conference. Both men also went some way towards indicating what a reconstructed Afghanistan might look like. According to Barry, the search for stability and a political solution to the country's ills should take off from the three pillars of Afghan nation-building put in place in 1919, when Afghanistan had been among the first Muslim countries, and the first country in Central and South-West Asia, to gain independence from European or Russian colonial rule. In a country made up of Uzbek, Tajik, Pashtoun, Hazara and other elements, each of which at times of stress tends to look for support across the country's borders, the 1919 settlement proclaimed that all communities living in Afghanistan would be first and foremost Afghan, demonstrating a real effort to forge a sense of national belonging. Ethnicity was not mentioned on Afghan identity documents, Barry said, and efforts were made to extend state administration, and particularly education, to every part of the country. A third pillar of Afghan nationhood stressed in 1919 had been the revaluation of Afghan national heritage, emphasising the country's long and diverse history and the fact that this was the inheritance of all Afghans. It was this history and this diversity that the Taliban had sought to destroy during their control of Afghanistan, proclaiming that a real Afghan was a Pashtoun and marginalising or destroying Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara identities. Work or education for women had been forbidden, leading to a collapse of many state functions, and the country's history had been consciously reshaped according to a Pashtoun and foreign religious agenda, with, most famously, the giant statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan that had stood guard in this predominantly Hazara part of the country for some 1,500 years, being destroyed by the Taliban as if to proclaim that the country's history and identity were now to be reshaped in a direction alien to the pillars of the 1919 settlement. According to Omar Samad, it was important to remember that the Taliban's ideology, fed from sources abroad, was not historically Afghan. Afghan society was very strong, he said, and though foreign elements may wish to promote the country's fragmentation, there was no desire for this among Afghans themselves. The task of the London conference, both men indicated, would be to underline the three historical pillars of Afghan identity, while at the same time making a serious commitment to economic and social development and a lasting political settlement in the country.
