Asia

Home page

Asia

Aid groups in Afghanistan should deal with Taliban: NGO

15 October 2010 20:54 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Aid workers in Afghanistan should work with the Taliban as the insurgents will play a permanent role in the country’s future, a safety monitoring group said Friday, APA reports quoting AFP.
The insurgents, who have been fighting a brutal war for nine years, were becoming increasingly confident of returning to power, the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO) said in a quarterly report.
With the Taliban "certain to play a permanent and increasingly political role" in Afghanistan’s future -- and foreign forces increasingly sidelined -- ANSO advised non-government organisations (NGOs) to work with the insurgents.
"We recommend that NGOs start developing strategies for engaging with them rather than avoiding them," ANSO’s director Nic Lee said.
"We understand that the (insurgents) are increasingly desirous of this engagement and if handled correctly will respond to it coherently and non-violently," he wrote in an introduction to the report.
ANSO is a non-profit group providing information to NGOs on the safety of areas where they operate throughout Afghanistan.
The report covering the third quarter of 2010 comes as the number of NATO and United States troops has reached its maximum of 150,000 with the completion of a surge of 30,000 extra US soldiers.
The international community has also given its tacit approval for peace talks between the Kabul government’s recently established High Council for Peace and the Taliban leadership.
The conflict is in its 10th year since the United States began military action in October 2001 to topple the Taliban regime for supporting Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda after the September 11 attacks.
The insurgents are increasingly seen to have seized the momentum as the foreign military death toll nears 600 in 2010, compared to 521 for 2009.
Some parts of the country, especially in the previously peaceful north, were "in danger of slipping beyond any control," Lee said. The report describes the Taliban as "increasingly mature, complex and effective".
As it grew in confidence, the Taliban’s leadership had begun mirroring the international counter-insurgency strategy of "hold and build" after taking territory, Lee said.
The insurgents were setting up "shadow governance" structures, and leaders "are outlining tentative foreign policy, reassuring neighbours of cooperation on narcotics, the environment and commerce, while alluding to ’the upcoming system of the country’," Lee said.
"The sum of their activity presents the image of a movement anticipating authority and one which has already obtained a complex momentum that NATO will be incapable of reversing," he said.
There have been a spate of attacks this year against aid organisations, most recently US development group DAI whose British employee Linda Norgrove was kidnapped and then killed during a failed US rescue operation last week.
But Lee said insurgent attacks against NGOs had fallen as organisations stepped up security.
NGO fatalities, however, rose 47 percent to 25 in the third quarter of 2010, compared with 17 in the same period last year, accounted for by the "unusual mass murder" of 10 aid workers in Badakshan province in August.
Abductions of aid workers rose 60 percent in the last quarter over the same period in 2009, and had been "overwhelmingly" concentrated in the north, it said.
The impact of the abductions had been reduced by the rapid release of the victims, an indication that the Taliban saw the benefit of humanitarian work in one of the world’s poorest countries, Lee said.
"It is not coincidental that a number of the released abductees have been asked to register their NGO’s activities to avoid future incidents," he said.
"We recommend that, for our own safety, we all follow their advice and urge the (insurgents) to make the process for doing so clear and safe."