Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-02-12-Speech-4-013"
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"en.20040212.1.4-013"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, very recently, a thought-provoking analysis of the political situation in Afghanistan appeared in the
with the headline: ‘Afghanistan: The Gulf between Report and Reality’. In it, the author, a widely travelled veteran Afghanistan journalist, turns the common Western image of Kabul and its environs on its head. Ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, you can be assured that the present report has prompted me to reflect on this a good deal. I should like to summarise the article for you, therefore, and add a question about our strategy in Afghanistan. I also hope to give the article to the Commissioner later on, and that he has time to peruse it.
This journalist, John Jennings, disproves the spectre of the Afghan countryside as an Oriental Wild West on the basis of his own observations. With a few localised exceptions, he sees a safe, peaceful society; in short, no local warlords constantly making life unbearable for each other and the population. On the contrary, he sees encouraging signs of reconstruction, and also the return of hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees from neighbouring Pakistan and Iran. In the opinion of Jennings, that huge majority of ordinary Afghans living in areas not actively contested by Taliban remnants have it better today than at any time since 1978.
Interim President Karzai should have every interest in this. To look at the scenario Jennings describes, however, the reverse seems to be true: with the help of ISAF and NATO, the technocrats in Kabul are seeking the military and political removal of the anti-Taliban groups in the provinces. It is precisely that Pashtoon agenda that gives rise to the very real danger of a general revolt against a regime imposed from outside: an Afghan tradition.
In Jennings’s view, it would be much more beneficial to the future of Afghanistan as a nation state to construct carefully and gradually from the bottom up, and to achieve political consensus among the
regional authorities, which do, after all, sanction a weak central authority. Interfering with this fragile process would give the Taliban and their anti-Western Pakistani patrons a second chance. This would mean an out-and-out defeat for the West in the fight against Islamic terrorism.
Paragraphs 12 and 13 of this report reveal that my colleague Mr Brie recognises the acute problem, this area of tension. Unfortunately, he does not enter into a more in-depth exploration of this fundamental problem regarding Afghanistan’s future as a nation: this issue is subordinated. We shall have to make do with that. What are the views of the Council and the Commission in this regard? I should like to bring this article to the attention of Commissioner Patten, particularly given his plans to set off for Kabul in the near future. I shall hand it to you later on. After all, no small matter is involved: a fair, sensible international strategy towards a breeding ground for international terrorist networks."@en1
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