While the United States has poured men, machinery and money into Iraq and is now focusing on the Palestine-Israeli problem, the question of Afghanistan arises. Has Afghanistan, exactly as President Karzai feared, been forgotten?

Two years ago, the US went into Afghanistan in pursuit of terrorists and the Taleban government that protected them.

American soldiers took the city of Kabul and searched numerous caves in search of the enemy. Hamid Karzai agreed to become the interim president until 2004 and he selected Gen. Fahim as his defense minister. It was not long before they discovered that the powerful warlords together with the remnants of the Taleban presented them with their greatest challenge.

After 23 years of constant conflict, Afghanistan had become a country of armed militias whose only loyalty was to the rogue warlords who have divided the country into separate kingdoms. An estimated 300,000 fighting men, armed with about $5 billion worth of weapons, including laser-guided stinger and anti-aircraft missiles face the new Afghan Army which is smaller than 2,000 in numbers. The efforts at recruitment into the army have failed and there is little hope of reaching the desired number of 9,000 in time for next year’s elections.

The United States currently has 11,500 troops in Afghanistan but their major objective is to hunt down terrorists, not to disarm the warlords or the population.

There is an international peacekeeping force, numbering 5000, in Kabul as a means of trying to control the armed looting that has plagued the city continuously. In the absence of armed support, money is being raised, with the US, Britain, Canada and Japan pledging millions of dollars which should ultimately reach $140 million and it is expected that sum will be needed just for the disarmament program. However, it is very obvious that money is simply not enough to assist this government in gaining control in their own country, let alone to begin the massive reconstruction process.

There are 26 million people in Afghanistan split into 19 different ethnic groups. Over 40 percent of the population is Pashtun and having ruled the country for the past three centuries, they are not about to relinquish control.

To complicate matters, they have strong support from the Pashto-speaking tribes in Pakistan. There is a small and ineffectual police force in Kabul that lacks trained personnel and proper supervision. The water, sanitation, hospitals, schools and secondary roads are all in dire need of rebuilding.

The United Nations estimates that there could be as many as 5 million land mines and 750,000 unexploded ordnances that have either killed or wounded some 400,000 Afghans, amounting to 10 to 12 people every day.

Crimes go uninvestigated and often unpunished.

There was an attempt on President Karzai’s life last year and his Vice President Haji Abdul Qadir was killed in an ambush.

Over the past few months, there has been an increase in guerrilla attacks against the government by former Taleban members.

There is no doubt that the United States has given President Karzai an impossible task to accomplish. A member of the White House staff made a comment just prior to the beginning of the war in Iraq that referred to the postwar Iraq as not becoming a victim of the same mistakes already made in Afghanistan. It is evident that he was referring to the fact that not securing a country with an interim military force leads to chaos. Several weeks ago, NATO agreed to take over the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell hailed that announcement as the first significant military operation by NATO outside of Europe. A few days later, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld announced that the US would expand the number of civil-military teams from both the US and other coalition nations to assist with reconstruction in Afghanistan. He said that these provincial reconstruction teams were a means of demonstrating to the Afghan people the benefits of supporting President Karzai and his government. He said “It is the path of the future.”

What he did not say was just how many men, how much machinery and money the US was now willing to commit to Afghanistan. Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan is a poor country and the only return that the United States can expect on their expenditure is long- term “good will.”

Yet it is how America completes its mission in Afghanistan, more than in Iraq, that will demonstrate Washington’s real commitment to the region.

(Adrienne McPhail is an American journalist based in Riyadh.)

Arab News Opinion 4 May 2003