The provisional Afghan government revealed yesterday that widespread lawlessness might force postponement of the general election due next June.
The foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, voiced his doubts about the election timetable in talks with the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, who arrived in Kabul from Tehran yesterday.
It is yet another problem to add to those besetting the government installed after the US-led forces overthrew the Taliban in November 2001. It is an appointed government, and desperately needs the legitimacy of an election.
But its control does not extend much beyond Kabul, the rest of the country being under various warlords.
Straw pressed Abdullah to go ahead with the election: there could be some slippage, until September or October next year, he said, but not beyond that.
In reply, Abdullah stressed the law and order problem and the huge logistical difficulties in holding an election posed by Afghanistan’s mountainous terrain.
A significant delay would be a blow to the US and Britain, which promised that, after the overthrow of the Taliban, there would be a speedy move to democracy.
Although Straw told a press conference that there were visible improvements round the capital since his visit in February last year, the grip of the warlords has tightened outside Kabul, al-Qaeda is making a comeback along the Pakistani border, and production of opium is estimated to have increased tenfold since the overthrow of the Taliban.
Yesterday rockets were fired into the city of Jalalabad, east of Kabul, causing some damage but no casualties. In the southern city of Kandahar, a bomb injured 16 worshippers in a mosque, four seriously. No one claimed responsibility for the bomb, but Mullah Abdullah Fayaz blamed the Taliban or their al-Qaeda allies, saying he had issued a fatwa against the former’s view of Islam two months ago.
The Afghan government’s fear is that the US and Britain, having promised to help rebuild Afghanistan, are being distracted by Iraq.
Straw met Presdient Hamid Karzai, who has criticised the international community for failing to provide enough money for reconstruction: it promised $5-billion last year but only $1,8-billion has been paid so far.
Straw said that Britain had fulfilled its promises. He criticised — but did not identify — the countries that had yet to pay, saying: ”The international donors are better at promises, sometimes, than delivering”.
Britain and the US are finding that, as in Iraq, the aftermath of invasion throw up unwelcome and unexpected problems, not least the unwillingness of other countries to help with peacekeeping.
Karzai is pressing for the international force of 11 000 soldiers, half of them from the US and the rest from Britain and elsewhere, to expand its operations beyond Kabul.
As an interim measure, Britain is to send what is known as a provincial reconstruction team of about 50 troops and civilian staff to the volatile northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, and US troops are being sent to three other cities.
Straw, who visited a centre where the British army is helping to train Afghans, rejected the call for a significant increase in troops, saying it was more important for Afghanistan to build its own army.
He discussed with the Afghan leaders the problem of opium, which is heading for a bumper crop this year. About 90% of the heroin in Britain is thought to be from Afghanistan.
Under the Taliban production dropped dramatically, though Straw insisted that this was not out of religious conviction but to manipulate the market price.
”I do not think the issue of drugs is intractable, but I think it is a very difficult problem. It requires action on all fronts. You have to have effective security and law enforcement, interdiction, disruption at every point in the chain.
”We have to keep taking out the drug dealers, and barons behind them, the laboratories, the money laundering. You have to keep going at that, and we are raising our game against them,” he added.
”At some time we have to recognise that if you are a very poor farmer, and I am not just talking about Afghanistan, the temptation to grow heroin or cocaine is very great.” – Guardian Unlimited Â