Elections in Afghanistan have been delayed for a second time, according to an announcement this month, with the country now supposedly choosing a president in October and a legislature next spring.
The announcement made few waves, as news media largely treat Afghanistan as yesterday's news. Nearly three years after Operation Enduring Freedom was launched to remove the Taliban regime and bring liberty and prosperity to one of the world's most impoverished countries, little of the operation endures and basic freedoms -- notable freedom from fear and poverty -- remain elusive.
The election's timing, a month before US President George W. Bush goes to the polls himself, has as much to do with American as Afghan politics.
With Iraq in turmoil, a newly elected Afghan president will be offered as proof that at least one of Bush's foreign policy objectives have been met.
Many Afghans, particularly in Kabul, clearly welcomed the removal of the Taliban.
But the one thing that the Taliban did provide was security, so that people could travel in the countryside without fear of ambush and so that the plunder, rape and corruption of the warlord era that preceded them became largely contained.
Last week, Afghan President Hamid Karzai told the New York Times that the threat from the Taliban was "exaggerated" and that the real danger to the future of Afghanistan lay with warlords and their militias.
Part of the reconstruction process after the war was meant to be a disarmament of the militias, but so far only around 10,000 out of 60,000 have responded to the incentive of new jobs and handed in their weapons.
Many Afghans surveying the chaotic aftermath of the US war have ruefully suggested that the Taliban should be invited back in a limited capacity to run security. Every day come reports of fresh attacks on anyone associated with the election process or the West, along with a steady drizzle of ambushes, assassinations, rocket attacks and explosions. Only this week there was a fatal clash between US forces and the Taliban in Zabul.
The election date announcement came as an independent research body published a report on the failure of Afghanistan's security policy that accused the international community of serious neglect. The report by international scholars of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), says that compared with countries where the international community has intervened militarily, Afghanistan has been badly let down.
NATO recently decided to increase its forces there from 6,500 to 8,700, which the report claims will be inadequate. "Shamefully, Afghanistan has the lowest international troop-to-population ratio of any recent intervention," asserts Colonel Philip Wilkinson, who wrote the paper with Michael Bhatia and Kevin Lanigan.
The report says that Afghanistan now has one member of the military to 1,115 members of the population, compared to one per 50 at an equivalent period in Kosovo, one per 111 in East Timor, one per 161 in Iraq and one per 375 in Haiti.
"NATO's continued inability to provide significant forces will only further embolden President Karzai's opponents -- whether warlords, poppy-growers or terrorists," the report concludes. "The Taliban are far from defeated, poppy production has soared and regional warlords are still brazen in their abuse of citizens and in their dealings with the central government."
As the situation stands, it is still not possible to hold fair and safe elections, according to AREU Director Andrew Wilder. The think tank is based in Kabul but supported by the EU, the UN, Sweden and Switzerland. Aid agencies also expressed their concerns.
"Afghanistan continues to be sidelined as international attention and resources remain focused on Iraq," says Barbara Stapleton, spokeswoman for the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief in Kabul. She says that many NGOs have called for an increase in security to help the country stabilize. Many others in the aid community have expressed concern that the election is being hurried through without enough attention paid to the safety of voters and registration teams.
In his novel about the Taliban period, The Swallows of Kabul, Mohammed Moulessehoul, under his nom de plume of Yasmina Khadra, writes: "The Afghan countryside is nothing but battlefields, expanses of sand and cemeteries ... everything appears charred, fossilised, blasted by some unspeakable spell."
For a moment, in the wake of the war, it looked as if the spell might be broken and the country would be associated with something other than battlefields and cemeteries.
Then the caravan moved on to Iraq, and the warlords returned to their pursuits. Afghanistan deserves the world's full attention -- and its help -- once more.
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
RSS