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Taliban Pay-for-Peace Plan Will Be Put in Motion in London

28 January 2010 03:32 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. A $500 million plan to entice Taliban fighters to quit the growing insurgency in Afghanistan will be put in motion today by governments at a conference in London, APA reports quoting businessweek.com.
More than 60 foreign ministers will meet top Afghan officials to approve a political strategy backing the U.S.-led troop surge. The ministers will seek to show support for Afghan President Hamid Karzai and resolve to stabilize his country, while countering falling public support for the war in Europe and the U.S. by pledging troops can start coming home by 2011.
â€œThe trick in London will be to balance these two conflicting messages,â€ said Shada Islam, an analyst at the European Policy Centre, a research institute in Brussels.
Governments attending the one-day meeting will pledge about $500 million to fund Taliban fighters who return to civilian life, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Jan 26. The money will go for housing, jobs and agriculture. A senior member of Merkelâ€™s Christian Social Union sister party, CSU General Secretary Alexander Dobrindt, dubbed it a â€œTaliban cash-for- clunkersâ€ program.
Conference attendees also will renew pressure on Karzai to reduce official corruption that has weakened his government.
â€œWe have made it clear that we want a transparent Afghan government and that fighting corruption must be a high priority,â€ Merkel told reporters yesterday after meeting Karzai in Berlin.
Sanctions Lifted
The reconciliation bid comes as the United Nations Security Council this week lifted sanctions against five former Taliban officials, in what the Afghan UN ambassador, Zahir Tanin, called â€œa message for anyone in the Taliban that wants to join the peace process.â€
The Taliban dismissed the London talks as â€œa waste of timeâ€ and repeated demands for a pullout of international forces, Pakistanâ€™s GEO television reported, citing an e-mailed statement.
In trying to stabilize the Afghan government before 2011, when the U.S. plans to begin reducing its military force, governments may be hampered by Karzaiâ€™s political weakness. The Afghan leader has failed to get parliament to approve his full Cabinet 12 weeks after being declared the winner of a fraud- tainted election.
The London meeting will skip some issues, in part because Afghan government departments â€œstill donâ€™t have permanent ministers in all of the jobs,â€ said Mark Sedwill, the British ambassador to Afghanistan, who was appointed this week as the top civilian North Atlantic Treaty Organization official in the country.
â€˜Loss of Momentumâ€™
The conference, hosted by the British government, will try to reverse what â€œwas essentially a loss of momentum in the whole Afghan projectâ€ last year because of distractions around the disputed elections, plus Taliban military gains, Sedwill told reporters last week.
In 2009, 520 NATO troops were killed in the Afghan war, a 76 percent jump over 2008, according to the casualty-monitoring Web site iCasualties.org.
Since 2003, several Afghan reconciliation plans have collapsed because the government failed to deliver on promises of land, money or jobs for Taliban who quit the war.
â€œThis time they have to be sure the money gets through,â€ said the European Policy Centreâ€™s Islam.
The new effort has a better chance because it has greater international support, Afghan Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal said in an interview with Bloomberg Television yesterday.
U.S. Backing
The U.S. backs the plan, its special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, told MSNBC this week in an interview. Germany will contribute $70 million, Merkel has said.
A reconciliation program should work at local and provincial levels to woo lower-level Taliban, and should exclude the Taliban leadership including its commander, Mullah Omar, former Afghan Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah told Bloomberg Television in an interview yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
With governments in Britain, Germany and the U.S. losing support for any long-term commitment of their troops in Afghanistan, todayâ€™s conference will try to set â€œan indicative timelineâ€ for NATO to hand over security control of districts and provinces to Afghan troops and police, Sedwill said.
Merkel said yesterday she wants all security operations to be carried out by Afghan forces from 2014. Yet she said that setting any deadline for withdrawing foreign troops would be a â€œmistakeâ€ that would â€œonly encourage the Taliban to carry out more attacks.â€
Corruption Concern
Afghanistan is seen as the worldâ€™s second-most corrupt country, according to the annual survey by Transparency International, a Berlin-based corruption-monitoring group. Graft has outstripped the countryâ€™s violence as the biggest worry for Afghans, 59 percent of whom called it their top concern in a survey released this month by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
Corruption has made it harder for Western governments to sell troop increases in Afghanistan to voters at home. NATO is getting 38,500 reinforcements in Afghanistan that will bring its troop strength to almost 150,000 in the ninth year of the war.
While conceding that corruption is a problem rooted in â€œweak institutionsâ€ in Afghanistan, Zakhilwal disputed as â€œflawedâ€ a conclusion by the UN report that Afghans pay annually the equivalent of 23 percent of the countryâ€™s gross domestic product in bribes.
The Afghan government will detail its new anti-corruption plans at todayâ€™s conference, said Zakhilwal. â€œWhat we are aiming is not a 100 percent removal of corruption, but significant reduction, which will be possible.â€