Karzai, Blair upbeat as report warns Afghanistan at 'tipping point'
Afghanistan is at a "tipping point" ahead of an expected Taliban spring offensive, a hard-hitting report warned, despite upbeat comments from Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Blair and Karzai, speaking after talks in London, voiced confidence that the Islamist Taliban militia would be defeated, and the prime minister vowed that Britain and 36 other nations led by the United States will stay the course in the violence-scarred country.
Their comments came after The Senlis Council think tank said the United States and its allies urgently needed to reassess their strategy in Afghanistan.
"We are determined to do everything we can to make sure that mission is successful in the south of Afghanistan as we believe it will be," Blair, whose country is the second-largest provider of troops in Afghanistan, told a news conference at his Downing Street office.
"This is a common battle. This is why it's important that Britain stays the course in Afghanistan."
Karzai added that the "fight against the Taliban can be strengthened, can be contained."
"There are already signs of that. And we hope that with the cooperation that we are getting from our neighbours the fight will be won and won sooner," he said.
While the two leaders expressed their confidence that a resurgent Taliban could be beaten, The Senlis Council's study slammed the international community for "misguided" policies in Afghanistan.
The study said the world was doing nowhere near enough to help the local population through better economic and humanitarian support and was inadvertently helping the Taliban.
"The international community has reached a tipping point in southern Afghanistan," said The Senlis Council, which provides analysis and proposals in security and development policy.
"The anticipated major spring offensive by the Taliban against international forces requires an urgent reassessment of the international community's counter-insurgency strategy," it said.
The report, "Countering the Insurgency in Afghanistan: Losing Friends and Making Enemies," warned that the southern cities of Kandahar and Lashkar Gah were in the Taliban's sights.
The United States, which ousted the Taliban following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, last year handed overall control of military operations in Afghanistan to NATO.
Observers warn that military defeat in the south could threaten the political stability of the whole country.
"We are winning the battles but we are losing the war. We must make immediate changes," said Norine MacDonald, founding president of The Senlis Council, adding that southern Afghanistan had become a Taliban "recruitment camp."
The council said that humanitarian aid, development and institution-building should have been top priorities but were under-funded and neglected.
"This is a blatant disregard of the established counter-insurgency theories, which advocate a complete package of diverse development based interventions such as medical assistance and education, in addition to the necessary military responses," said MacDonald.
The report concluded that Afghans had legitimate grievances with the international community.
The council urged the international community to stop opium poppy crop eradication, branding it as totally ineffective. It proposed instead licensing growing poppies needed for much-needed medicines such as morphine and codeine.
Britain's Lieutenant General David Richards, who handed over control of international forces in Afghanistan on February 4, said on the fringes of The Senlis Council's symposium on Afghanistan that the "war is very winnable".
The Taliban "have failed in everything they tried in 2006. Why believe they are going to be any more successful in 2007? I don't buy it."
AFP
