KABUL, 14 February 2005 — NATO urged Afghanistan yesterday to fix a date for parliamentary elections as soon as possible to give the alliance time to plan reinforcements to send to the country for the vote.
Speaking after a regular command handover for Afghanistan’s NATO-led peacekeeping force, a senior alliance official said that unless the polls were held by the first week of July, troop rotations meant it would be better if they were delayed until September.
The repeatedly delayed polls were supposed to be held this spring, but while President Hamid Karzai says he wants them as soon as possible, the election law means they cannot now be held before mid June and most diplomats see July as more realistic.
“We count on the Afghan government and the international agencies involved to decide as soon as possible on the election time schedule,” said German Gen. Gerhard Back, the commander of NATO’s Allied Joint Forces Command who is in overall charge of Afghanistan’s multinational peacekeeping operation.
“The earlier we can start to prepare fully for these elections, the better,” he told a ceremony for the transfer of command of the NATO-led multinational International Security Assistance Force from French Lt.-Gen. Jean-Louis Py to Turkey’s Lt.-Gen. Ethem Erdagi.
It was the second time a Turkish general has taken command of ISAF since it was established after the overthrow of the fundamentalist Taleban regime in late 2001.
Hikmet Cetin, NATO’s senior civilian representative in Afghanistan, told reporters that if the election was delayed beyond the first week of July, there was a risk of a clash with the next six-monthly rotation of ISAF troops. If the vote was not possible by the first week of July, he said, “better for it to be postponed until September and beyond”.
Back told reporters NATO needed to be able to plan reinforcements to protect the polls alongside Afghan forces and an 18,000-strong US-led force fighting Taleban remnants and allied militants. NATO now has 8,400 troops in Afghanistan.
This month, it agreed to establish two new Provincial Reconstruction Teams and to take command of two more, which will require 500 extra troops.
