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London Conference To Define Future Assistance For Afghanistan

27 January 2006

Afghan government to present national development strategy

By David Shelby
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- The London Conference on Afghanistan, scheduled for January 31 and February 1, is designed to chart the future of international engagement with Afghanistan now that the country has completed all of the steps in the political program laid out during the 2001 Bonn Conference.

“The London conference is happening as a result of success,” U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald Neumann told journalists in Washington January 27.  “In Bonn, an international road map was designed for the Afghan political process, and that road map has been accomplished – elections, the constitution, the election of the parliament, the president.”

“[A]s a result of that success, we have run off the map.  And so, since there is still a lot to do in Afghanistan in terms of building a stable government and a country that will not fall back into anarchy, it’s necessary to have a new road map, and what the London conference is going to do is put that in place,” he said.

He noted, however, that the political circumstances are very different today from what they were at the time of the Bonn Conference.  “We have a real Afghan government now, and I think one of the things that is important is that they have played a leading role, albeit with a lot of foreign technical aid, but they’ve taken the lead in making the decisions and judgments that are part of the Afghan national development strategy,” he said.

The Afghan government will present its development strategy to the international community at the London Conference and seek political and financial support for its objectives.  The conference participants will formalize their agreement on Afghanistan’s plans in the form of an Afghanistan Compact, in which the Afghan government commits itself to pursue certain goals in security, governance and development over the coming five years, and the international community pledges its support.

Neumann said the compact “is extremely important in terms of having us all in a common direction, so that rather than spending a lot of time arguing and discussing what we ought to be doing, the discussion is about how we do the next step.”

U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns said the compact also will create a new mechanism for managing international assistance to Afghanistan.

“At the London Conference, we will be creating a coordinating and monitoring board that will now oversee all international assistance to Afghanistan.  That will be led by the Afghan government – by a minister of the Afghan government – and by the United Nations,” he told journalists during a January 27 briefing.

Burns said there also will be announcements at the conference regarding the expansion of the NATO mission in Afghanistan.  In addition to its current assignments in the northern and western parts of the country, NATO will move troops into the southern provinces around Kandahar.  “That will allow the American troops to deploy to the eastern part of the country, which is where the greatest threat from the Taliban and al-Qaida is emanating,” he said.

Burns said he expects the United States and European countries to reaffirm their commitment “to provide security for the Afghan government so they can concentrate on the nation building, on the extension of the authority of the central government from Kabul out to the provinces, and on these exceedingly difficult problems of infrastructure development and of coping with the narcotics problem.”

Neumann welcomed NATO’s increasing presence in Afghanistan, but he said he expects NATO forces to be challenged by the Taliban and urged the participating countries to be certain they are committed to the mission.

“It is, I think, an extraordinarily important mission, and it is one where the peacekeeping and the security parts and the economic parts find their long-term value in building the government for the country and political stability around that government and people’s loyalty to it,” he said.

Transcripts of the Neumann and Burns briefings on the London Conference on Afghanistan are available on the State Department Web site.

See Rebuilding Afghanistan for more information on the country’s economic development and reconstruction efforts.

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