Congressmen criticize lack of burden-sharing by NATO allies

By Stephen Kaufman
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- The reconstruction progress that has occurred in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 "has been nothing short of phenomenal," said James Kunder, the deputy assistant administrator for Asia and the Near East at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

As part of his June 2 testimony to the House Committee on International Relations, Kunder submitted a fact sheet on assistance to Afghanistan, highlighting such USAID programs as the resurfacing of Afghanistan's Ring Road, projects to revitalize the country's agricultural sector, immunization programs, the construction of schools, vocational and literacy training for women, the introduction of the new Afghan currency, and training programs for independent media.

Kunder also said his agency had drawn up a list of "lessons learned" from its response to Afghanistan's need for reconstruction assistance. He said USAID recognized the importance of ensuring that Afghans support and own the reconstruction process through their full participation and input. He also said it was important to remember the gender implications of projects and recognize how they might assist Afghan women in achieving gender equality.

However, in his prepared statement to the committee, Kunder warned that, overall, "stability is the biggest obstacle to development."

The State Department's coordinator for Afghanistan, Ambassador William B. Taylor, Jr., told the committee that the Afghan government and the international community were trying to accomplish three major tasks at once. In his prepared remarks, he said, "President Karzai has set an ambitious goal of demobilizing 40 percent of the militias and cantoning 100 percent of the heavy weaponry this summer."

Likewise, with the help of the international community, the government is executing a three-pronged counter-narcotics strategy involving the eradication of poppy crops, alternative development efforts, and the training and fielding of drug interdiction units.

Thirdly, Taylor said, in September Afghanistan is preparing to hold its first elections in a generation, and the government and international community are working to register voters, secure thousands of polling locations, and disseminate election information to voters.

"Any one of these three tasks would test more mature governments anywhere in the world. Attempting all three at once is a monumental undertaking," he said.

Addressing the challenge of narcotics, USAID's Kunder said that having a viable economy is "the only long term alternative to poppy growing in Afghanistan."

He explained that wheat, Afghanistan's primary agricultural commodity, earns only one-thirtieth of the money a farmer can receive from poppies. "To us, it's astonishing [that] the percentage of Afghan farmers that are actually growing poppy is well under 10 percent in a desperately poor country where the nutritional standards are where they are and where one in four Afghan children even dies before the age of five," said Kunder.

"We need interdiction. We need the law enforcement. But in the long term, what's going to convince those Afghan farmers is other alternatives," he said.

Kunder also praised the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), the joint civil-military units deployed outside the capital Kabul for the purpose of providing security and performing reconstruction projects.

In his prepared statement, he said the patrolling military personnel often help to identify reconstruction projects. PRTs are "a useful way for USAID to gather information from the provinces to make informed program decisions, and they are a mechanism for improving program monitoring," he said.

Ambassador Taylor said that through the military's involvement with the PRTs, the troops get to know their province's village elders and terrain and "who's normally in these villages and who is not," helping to improve security.

"The result has been an increase in information coming in ... and that has resulted in a much larger number of weapons caches being identified and destroyed," said Taylor.

Some of the committee members criticized U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Europe for not adequately sharing the burden of contributing troops or financial resources to help with Afghanistan's stability and reconstruction.

With the United States contributing 14,000 troops, compared to a total of 2,000 from all other countries, and half of the $4 billion that has been used for reconstruction since September 2001, committee Chairman Henry Hyde (Republican from Illinois) said, the challenges threatening Afghanistan's success are not because the United States is not doing enough but, rather, because "not enough is being done."

"Congress is sick and tired at the lack of burden sharing in Afghanistan," said Representative Tom Lantos (Democrat from California). "Now that NATO has accepted full responsibility for security in Afghanistan, both the troop contribution and the financial contribution of both NATO members and other wealthy and developed countries ... is embarrassingly insufficient," he said.

Lantos contrasted the 241 troops contributed by Norway, a country with less than 5 million people, with the 180 troops from Spain and 151 troops from Turkey, with 40 million and 65 million populations, respectively.

"Norway, Spain and Turkey are all members of NATO," said Lantos. "Spain and Turkey have large military forces. Yet their willingness to assume the responsibility that they have accepted by being members of NATO is not reflected in troop strength."

The congressman suggested that the Spanish troops recently removed from Iraq be re-deployed in Afghanistan. He also criticized wealthy European countries, such as Austria, for failing to make a significant financial contribution to Afghanistan's reconstruction.

Lantos also said the responsibility to share the burden in Afghanistan was not related to U.S.-led operations in Iraq.

"Afghanistan and Iraq are different in the sense that NATO has accepted responsibility for Afghanistan," he said. "They are technically responsible for security."

However, USAID's James Kunder praised the contributions of Germany, the United Kingdom and Japan as being exceptions to Lantos' criticism.

(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)