Donors pledge €6.6bn for Afghanistan
Donor nations have pledged €6.6bn to help war-ravaged Afghanistan rebuild and confront threats from private militias and widespread drug cultivation over the next three years.
Now that the money is committed, officials from more than 50 nations meeting in Berlin were to turn their attentions today to how the aid would be used to ensure security in the country, where regional warlords are yet to be disarmed and a Taliban-led insurgency persists in the south and east.
“What we are all seeking is to demonstrate that our joint commitment to peace, human rights and security in Afghanistan is stronger than the forces of darkness which sought to tear Afghanistan apart, and which are still working against us,” Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told the conference yesterday.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai is seeking €22.5bn over seven years, saying that with “sustained assistance” from the world the country can “stand on its own strong feet”.
The US offered €1.8bn of the €3.5bn pledged for next year alone, with Secretary of State Colin Powell telling Mr Karzai, “the United States will not abandon you”.
Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani said he was “delighted” with the pledges, adding that priorities will include rebuilding roads and irrigation systems.
Mr Ghani said donors met Afghanistan’s target for this year and covered more than two-thirds of its expectations over the next three years. Earlier, Mr Karzai held out hope that Afghanistan can become self-sufficient in a decade.
Aid pledges also rolled in at the start of the two-day meeting from Germany, Japan, Italy and the European Union. Italy offered up to 300 soldiers to expand international military teams to protect aid workers outside the capital, Kabul.
Meeting amid heavy security at a Berlin hotel, donors applauded the progress Afghanistan has made since the Taliban regime fell in late 2001 in a US-led bombing campaign triggered by the September 11 attacks.
But UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned delegates that the country’s first post-Taliban elections, planned for September, remain in peril because Mr Karzai’s government and foreign peacekeepers backing it still cannot provide countrywide security.
“The magnitude of the election task is enormous,” Mr Annan said in a statement. “Objectives that have eluded the country for two years must now be achieved in a very short time – in particular, greater security to allow registration and polling to take place everywhere in a balanced manner.”
Recent fighting in the Heart region has highlighted the slow process of building a new national army and police force, and put pressure on Mr Karzai’s government to speed up a much-delayed plan to disarm thousands of militiamen before elections.
Mr Karzai said the militias are the country’s first challenge – “not only a challenge to security and stability in Afghanistan, but they also are a cause of drug cultivation”.
Afghanistan and its six neighbours – China, Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan – agreed at the conference to cooperate in the fight against drugs, though no details of their plan were announced.
