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Analysis: Karzai Asks Pakistan For Help

Council on Foreign Relations

September 21, 2006
Prepared by: Lionel Beehner

“Terrorism sees, in the prosperity of the Afghan people, its ultimate defeat,” Afghan President Hamid Karzai told the UN General Assembly Wednesday (PDF). Violence eerily redolent of Iraq’s grips his country. Suicide bombs against civilians now regularly rip through Afghan communities, a reminder that a resurgent Taliban has reclaimed large swaths of the southern part of the country. Lack of aid from international donors has hobbled reconstruction efforts (AP). Corruption, including rampant bribe-taking and nepotism, plagues the Afghan government’s economic reforms. And a booming opium trade, comprising 90 percent of the world’s supply, has financed Taliban insurgents, as this Backgrounder explains.

What explains Afghanistan’s slide toward chaos? In short, the war in Iraq, writes the Pakistani author and journalist Ahmed Rashid (New York Review of Books). Because of attention focused on Iraq, Rashid writes, “[f]or Afghanistan the results have been too few Western troops, too little money, and a lack of a coherent strategy and sustained policy initiatives on the part of Western and Afghan leaders.” A recent Council Special Report, authored by New York University’s Barnett R. Rubin, calls for more aid from international donors like Japan and Germany, renewed investments in the country’s crumbling infrastructure, and a resolution to the Pakistani-Indian conflict, which threatens Afghanistan’s integration into the region. Karzai, in a recent interview with ABC News, asks Pakistan "to take a much stronger cooperative approach toward terrorism and to remove sanctuaries of terrorism from their country."

Meanwhile, NATO, tasked with patrolling the unruly Afghan-Pakistani border, is struggling to scrounge up 2,500 additional troops (A Backgrounder examines NATO's Afghan security challenges).

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.