by Sir Timothy Garden
To a packed meeting room this Monday morning, Jack Straw laid down the master plan for the future of Afghanistan. He explained that the problems for this century stem more often from States with too little power, rather than too much power as in the past. We can no longer ignore distant places, and our previous inaction has made places like Sudan and Afghanistan safe havens for terrorism, drug dealing and organised crime.
He believed that we could look to the recent past for examples of how the international community had rebuilt failed and failing states. The experience in Bosnia, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Cambodia and Mozambique has shown that it is possible to bring countries back from lawlessness into the rule of law and improve the lot of the people. He reminded the audience that Afghanistan had been a successful state for 40 years up until 1973, and had been making good moves towards democracy. he accepted that the rest of the world should have done more to help the Afghan people over the past decade
The current military campaign would have to continue until the al-Qaeda network was destroyed, but plans were in hand for the post conflict rebuilding of the country. A senior foreign office official, Robert Cooper, has been given the task of drawing together international thinking on the best approaches.
The Foreign Secretary spelt out his four guiding principles for the future of Afghanistan. Firstly the future must be in the hands of the Afghan people. Second, there must continue to be a global coalition addressing the problem. It would be no good if Afghanistan's neighbours were backing particular factions within the country. Thirdly, he felt strongly that the United Nations would have to take a lead. He welcomed the appointment of Ambassador Brahimi as the UN's representative for this task. Brahimi had written a very hard -hitting report last year on the future of UN peacekeeping. His fourth principle was the need for adequate resources and political will to see through what was going to be a 5 to 10 year exercise in nation building. He reminded the audience that it had cost $Bn5 in order to carry out the post conflict reconstruction of Bosnia, which is a much smaller country.
The rebuilding of Afghanistan would have to go far beyond humanitarian aid. Housing, water, electricity and basic infrastructure would be needed. For this to be done under safe conditions, and to promote the rule of law, some form of military presence will be needed for a considerable time. He was unwilling to speculate on the composition of this force, except to say that it might contain non-Taliban Afghan elements. It was clear however that it would require a UN tasked serious military force. It seems most likely that a number of NATO nations will have to operate with a number of other nations drawn from surrounding countries.
It is good to know that the FCO is taking a lead in the thinking about what to do in Afghanistan in the longer term. It is of course questionable whether the political will, which Jack Straw so rightly underlined, will be sustained in the longer term. In particular the US has shown itself unenthusiastic for the soft security tasks which follow conflict. Neverthele ss, the UN security council is for once speaking with a single voice, and it may be that its time has come. The most difficult question for the moment is whether the current military campaign can be finished quickly and in a way that will prepare the ground for the nation building.