Karzai wins world support

KABUL: A landmark conference in Kabul on Tuesday ended with an endorsement of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s plans to make peace with insurgents in an effort to end a nearly nine-year war.

“Participants welcomed and endorsed in principle the Afghan government’s peace and reintegration programme,” said the final communiqué, issued as a result of talks between over 70 organisations and countries.

Last month, Karzai won approval from Afghan leaders to start peace talks with insurgent leaders and called on the international community to back his efforts - despite at least initial scepticism from the US.

Karzai’s programme is open to insurgents, “who renounce violence, have no links to international terrorist organisations, respect the constitution and are willing to join in building a peaceful Afghanistan,” the statement noted.

The international community also endorsed plans for the Afghan govt to take responsibility for security by 2014 and take greater control of aid projects.

President Hamid Karzai is under massive international pressure to crack down on corruption, make better use of billions of dollars of aid money and get a grip on a Taliban insurgency now killing a record number of foreign soldiers.

Karzai delivered a keynote address seeking to convince the international community he was capable of assuming responsibility for security and cleaning up government, but the lasting impact of the conference remains unclear.

The final communique backed Karzai’s call for Afghan security forces to “lead and conduct military operations in all provinces by the end of 2014”, allowing US-led troops to start going home. Commenting on the issue, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said that any peace process in Afghanistan needed to be led by the Afghans themselves. “The framework of the transfer of security responsibilities from Nato to Afghans requires capacity building of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan police,” Qureshi said. But, according to him, the handover of responsibilities should be gradual and based on ground realities rather than deadlines.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the plan laid out by the Afghan government was “comprehensive” and that the conference marked a “turning point”, but the scale of the challenge was clear as the planes of the UN secretary general and the foreign ministers of Sweden and Denmark were forced to divert as militants fired rockets at the airport on Tuesday.

Despite the setbacks however, the conference continued and Karzai said the international community had committed enough money to see Afghanistan through the next three years.

The conference urged Kabul to make reforms to strengthen public financial management and reduce corruption, saying at least 50 per cent of development aid would be channelled into the government’s budget within two years. Previously, only 20 per cent of $40 billion of pledged international aid had been routed through the budget, leading to corruption among the rest.

During proceedings, Clinton emphasised that much more work faced the Afghan government - a refrain that was echoed by other foreign ministers in their speeches.

British Foreign Minister William Hague, whose country is the second biggest supplier of foreign troops to Afghanistan, said: “We will always need to see that the government is making the best possible use of our and its own money.”

On their part, analysts were optimistic about commitments agreed to by the conference, as Former Afghan Finance Minister Dr Ashraf Ghani said the meeting was a ‘resounding success’.

“We have managed to agree on strategic commitments and goals, and have articulated the concept of strategic patience. The international community is committing itself to realign behind Afghan priorities,” he said.

Dr Ghani stressed the importance of countries neighbouring Afghanistan, saying: “We have a firm message of hope for regional partners. Pakistan is our most important transit partner and the figures show current exports of Pakistan to Afghanistan have exceeded $4 billion.” He said that peace would yield high dividends to regional partners, who should avoid using violence as an instrument of policy.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 21st, 2010.