Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2002, page 25

Special Report

 

The Challenge of “Winning the Peace” in Afghanistan

 

By Alan L. Heil Jr.

“The U.S. and its allies cannot afford to win the military battle and lose the humanitarian campaign [in Afghanistan]. We have the ability to triumph on both fronts and we must.”

—Kenneth H. Bacon, president of Refugees International, in a letter to President George W. Bush

“Winning the war in Afghanistan is not enough; unless the peace is also won, the nation will slip back into destabilizing chaos, just as it did after the Soviet defeat a decade ago.”

—Washington Post editorial, Dec. 1, 2001

Drought, the devastation of two decades of civil war, banditry in the countryside—all overlaid by winter. These are the challenges the Afghan people and those in the international community who would help them face in the aftermath of a half-decade of Taliban rule.

The obstacles appear daunting, even to the most dedicated and battle-hardened officials of governmental and non-governmental aid organizations. Since Sept. 11, distribution of food and relief supplied to Afghanistan has been impeded by several factors:

•In September, fear of the impending U.S.-led allied military campaign to rid the beleaguered country of al-Qaeda terrorists and topple the Taliban regime caused a mass exodus of badly-needed international relief workers. That occurred amid an accelerating need to move food from the cities to remote areas of Afghanistan before the onset of winter.

•In October, U.S. bombing of cities and terrorist installations disrupted supply lines within the country despite a concentration on military and strategic targets. In the early weeks of the campaign, this was particularly true in the southern areas of Afghanistan.

•In November, action shifted to the north. The bombardments there hastened Northern Alliance victories in Mazar-e-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, and the capital, Kabul. For relief workers, this was a mixed blessing. A lack of security on the roads leading from the cities to rural areas soon to be snowbound drastically limited the number of willing truckers needed to brave the highways with food destined for remote areas.

Three prominent leaders of humanitarian organizations took stock of the situation at a Nov. 30 United States Institute of Peace (USIP) forum. They were Catherine Bertini, director of the United Nations World Food Program (UNWFP); Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and Kenneth H. Bacon, president of Refugees International and former Clinton administration Pentagon spokesman.

 

A top priority is the restoration of security, not only in the cities but on the roads.

They agreed that a top priority in the effort “to win the peace” in Afganistan would be the restoration of security, not only in the cities but on the roads soon to be rendered impassable by the blizzards of a central Asian winter. Noting that security had deteriorated since the Northern Alliance victories in the north, Bacon put it directly: a peacekeeping force was essential, he said, “to establish beachheads for food distribution.”

Bacon pointed to what he called “a grave situation” in Mazar-e-Sharif, in Jalalabad, and in rural areas. It was relatively stable, however, in Herat and in some areas of Kabul, he said. It would be very difficult, Bacon added, to re-establish a functioning government, to rebuild Afghanistan, or to meet basic humanitarian needs unless a stabilization force were quickly established. He spoke as Britain, France, Turkey, Jordan and Bangladesh all had expressed willingness to perform such a peacekeeping role, despite a U.S. “hold” on any international presence until the completion of the campaign against al-Qaeda and shrinking remnants of the Taliban.

Bertini described remarkable World Food Program efforts since Sept. 11 to channel foreign aid—including the massive U.S. contribution—into Afghanistan. In September and October, she said, 52,000 tons of food had been moved into the country via northern and southern routes, with the amount increasing to 56,000 tons in November. Six million Afghans within the country were at risk, Bertini added, as were about 1.5 millon refugees in surrounding areas such as Iran and Pakistan.

The U. N. official, however, did cite some scattered bright spots in the otherwise bleak picture:

•The exodus of refugees from Afghanistan since September has been much smaller than anticipated.

•Aid workers are beginning to return to the country to help in food distribution.

•Only one of the many warehouses containing relief supplies and food was empty as of the end of November; many others were fully stocked. The problem was getting the UNWFP fleet of 2,000 trucks up and running again, given the fear of drivers to drive these on insecure rural roads where bandits set up checkpoints to rob travelers.

•With the Taliban’s flight from Kabul, women were beginning to work again in bakeries, conduct surveys in neighborhoods to identify those in greatest need of food relief, and resume their earlier prominent roles in schools and clinics.

•A few days after the USPI roundtable, a new, representative Afghan government was agreed upon at U.N.-sponsored talks in Germany. It was scheduled to assume power in Kabul on Dec. 22, replacing the defeated Taliban.

 

Easing of Restrictions Seen

Bertini and Natsios both were confident that restrictions imposed by the governments of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan on the northern frontiers would be eased significantly during the waning weeks of 2001. Natsios said that materials for 70,000 temporary winter shelters were now ready to be deployed, as security conditions permit. The food pipeline, he added, “is now in place.” He credited the UNWFP with having completed comprehensive hunger survey work, county by county, neighborhood by neighborhood, in Afghanistan. The World Food Program, he added, should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for saving lives there in conditions of unbelievable adversity.

The USAID chief also took a longer view of Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis. The top priority, he said, was for the international community to get seed to enable Afghan farmers, late as it is, to begin winter planting of wheat and other crops. He lamented the fact that nearly all seed supplies inside Afghanistan had been depleted because people ate seeds to survive the severe drought of the past several years. Afghanistan is essentially an agrarian society, the experts agreed, and must become self-sufficient if large stores of food in warehouses are not to become tempting targets for brigands and warlords. Agricultural reconstruction, Natsios concluded, “is absolutely essential to the restoration of Afghanistan.”

“Afghanistan,” Suraya Sadeed of Help the Afghan Children wrote recently to President Bush, “is a country in enormous pain and is drowning in her sorrows. I hope,” she added, “that the families of the victims (five million refugees, two million widows, over a million orphans, half a million amputees) will find solace in knowing that we share their pain and stand by them in such times of distress and agony.”

Rapid formation of an effective security force—international or Afghan—would be a promising start, and Bacon urged the U.N. Security Council to create such a force. “There is a way,” as he put it, “to enable a stablization force to come into Afghanistan behind alliance forces, and it should be done without delay.”

Alan L. Heil Jr. is former deputy director of the Voice of America.

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