Afganistán (Continuación)

This week's alarming UN reports on the Afghan opium crop, showing that it now accounts for over 93% of global illicit production, prompted much debate. A Guardian leader (The drugs don't work, August 27) acknowledged the futility of eradication efforts, but gave qualified support to the Senlis Council plan to pilot the licensing of Afghan opium production for medical use.Superficially, the idea has great appeal, potentially helping Afghanistan toward political stability and filling the apparent shortfall in medical opiates. Yet the Senlis vision is both ill-conceived and impractical.

As other experts identified in another article (Eradication or legalisation?, August 29) the plan faces a raft of political and practical problems relating to Afghanistan's chaotic status as a failed state and war zone.…  Seguir leyendo »

Simon Jenkins raises many important issues about the challenges of building a modern state in Afghanistan (It takes inane optimism to see victory in Afghanistan, August 8). But his central premise that this is a British "post-imperial spasm, a knee-jerk jingoism" is plain wrong.I have visited Afghanistan a number of times and there is no doubting the international community's common view of the task ahead, nor the fact that the overwhelming majority of Afghan people reject the Taliban and their brutal tactics. Afghanistan has suffered 30 years of despair and conflict. It remains one of the poorest and least developed countries on earth.…  Seguir leyendo »

Enthusiasts for the catastrophe that is the Iraq war may be hard to come by these days, but Afghanistan is another matter. The invasion and occupation that opened George Bush's war on terror are still championed by powerful voices in the occupying states as - in the words of the New York Times this week - "the good war" that can still be won. While speculation intensifies about British withdrawal from Basra, there's no such talk about a retreat from Kabul or Kandahar. On the contrary, the plan is to increase British troop numbers from the current 7,000, and ministers, commanders and officials have been hammering home the message all summer that Britain is in Afghanistan, as the foreign secretary, David Miliband, insisted, for the long haul.…  Seguir leyendo »

The British government is lining up Paddy Ashdown to rule Afghanistan. This is not a silly season story or a Gilbert and Sullivan spoof, merely a measure of the lunacy now polluting British foreign policy. Ashdown has time on his hands and Gordon Brown wants to show himself as firm a liberal interventionist as Tony Blair. He, too, wants to make Afghanistan a peaceful and prosperous democracy and may as well start now. So Paddy's the man.

To the British left, Afghanistan was always the "good" war and Iraq the "bad" one. It is permitted for ministers to assert that they were "privately opposed" to Iraq so long as Afghanistan is seen as a worthy cause.…  Seguir leyendo »

In the run-up to war, senior British security and intelligence officials as well as diplomats made it clear that they were strongly opposed to the invasion of Iraq - though not clear enough. Why now, why Iraq, they asked; it would merely increase the terrorist threat, as the joint intelligence committee warned ministers less than a month before British troops and bombers joined the US attack on the country. Concern in Whitehall was shared by some perspicacious Americans, including General Tony Zinni, the former head of US central command, which is responsible for operations throughout the Middle East. He called it the wrong war, fought in the wrong place, at the wrong time.…  Seguir leyendo »

A few weeks ago, The Post published a heartbreaking story of Afghanistan's health-care system breaking down as the insurgency seems to advance. Medical workers have disappeared (one was beheaded), doctors are seeking safer places to work and clinics are running out of medicine because deliveries have become too dangerous. The added cruelty of this news is that Afghanistan's health system had just begun to turn a corner.

Today, 40,000 more Afghan babies a year are living beyond their first birthday than survived to that age in 2002. Recent household surveys and health facility assessments carried out by experts from Johns Hopkins University indicate how rapid progress in the health sector has been.…  Seguir leyendo »

In Asia's poorest capital city, which has no sewage system, no piped water, only a handful of hospitals, and a population of 60,000 street children, it might seem frivolous to spend more than a million pounds on creating a garden. Do a series of terraces and several rows of trees fulfil an urgent need? Isn't this another example of foreign aid being wasted? Not a bit of it, insists Jolyon Leslie, a Dari-speaking architect who has dedicated two decades of his life to this hauntingly magnetic country, first with the UN and now with the Aga Khan Development Network, which is funding the garden's restoration and playing host to my visit to the Afghan capital.…  Seguir leyendo »

America and its allies are in danger of repeating the mistakes of Iraq in Afghanistan. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and even some Republicans are insisting on withdrawing from Iraq and sending more troops and resources to southern Afghanistan. The Bush administration’s gloomy National Intelligence Estimate last week on the fight against Al Qaeda will only lead others to make such calls.

But they should think again. The intervention in Afghanistan has gone far better than that in Iraq largely because the American-led coalition has limited its ambitions and kept a light footprint, leaving the Afghans to run their own affairs.

Much has been made lately of setbacks and the resilience of the Taliban.…  Seguir leyendo »

When things go wrong — touchdown passes are missed, products come out defective, wars are lost — it is typical to blame the equipment, or the help. In the case of the unraveling situation in Afghanistan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has become the favorite whipping boy of American officials and military personnel. NATO countries aren’t sending enough troops, we hear. Those who do arrive are constrained by absurd caveats that prevent them from engaging in combat. NATO lost Helmand Province to the Taliban.

In fact, after watching rotation after military rotation cycle through here since late 2001, I see NATO as an improvement over its American predecessors.…  Seguir leyendo »

Senior military officers, defence officials and even ministers are making no secret of their view that British forces in Iraq are on a hiding to nothing, that their very presence is counterproductive. The army would like to sneak out without anyone noticing, leaving the south in the hands of Iranian-backed Shia militia.Afghanistan, they say, is different. There, British troops are fighting for what ministers call a "noble cause". But the problem, they now privately admit, is that the spiral of violence in Iraq is plainly being repeated in Afghanistan, albeit without the sectarian violence.

In one of the bloodiest days since the Taliban was overthrown in 2001, at least 24 people were killed on Sunday by a suspected suicide bomber in the centre of Kabul and at least seven children were killed by US air strikes on a school near the Pakistan border.…  Seguir leyendo »

Last year in Afghanistan, while serving with the British army, I sat on the rooftop of our patrol base in the middle of Sangin, a small town in Helmand province. Surveying the skyline of flat-roofed mud homes and barren hills, I took stock of the situation. We had seized and occupied Sangin a few days previously, wresting control of the town from the Taliban. During our advance an 11-year-old boy was killed in the crossfire, shot in the head accidentally by our allies, the Afghan national army. Despite this we established our base in a local government building, the district centre, and patrolled the bazaar every day.…  Seguir leyendo »

The photographs gathered by The Post each month in a gallery called Faces of the Fallen are haunting. The soldiers are so young, enlisted men and women mostly, usually dressed in the uniforms they wore in Iraq and Afghanistan. What's striking is that most of them were killed by roadside bombs known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.

The United States is losing the war in Iraq because it cannot combat these makeshift weapons. An army with unimaginable firepower is being driven out by guerrillas armed with a crude arsenal of explosives and blasting caps, triggered by cellphones and garage-door openers.…  Seguir leyendo »

The team that wrote President Bush's Prague speech on democracy this week have clearly never visited Afghanistan. Otherwise they would not have had the president quoting a Soviet dissident who compared "a tyrannical state to a soldier who constantly points a gun at his enemy". The guns that most Afghans see pointed at them are held by Americans, and they are all too often fired. At least 135 unarmed civilians have been reported killed over the past two months by western troops, mainly US special forces.

The deaths by ground fire and US air strikes have become so frequent that last month the upper house of Afghanistan's parliament did something it has never done before.…  Seguir leyendo »

The international community is in danger of repeating in Afghanistan the mistakes made in Iraq. Millions of Afghans have seen little material improvement in their lives since 2001, and most still live in desperate poverty. From the start, the damage inflicted by a quarter-century of war was underestimated; this is not about repairing the state but building it from scratch.Rural communities have seen some improvements, but essential services are scarce or inadequate. In provinces where Oxfam works such as Daikundi, there is no mains water or electricity, and virtually no paved roads. Average life expectancy in Daikundi is 42 and one in five children dies before the age of five.…  Seguir leyendo »

Como si de un compromiso acordado de antemano se tratara, la ofensiva talibán en Afganistán se ha puesto en marcha en cuanto la primavera ha liberado los pasos montañosos cubiertos por la nieve. Tanto el Gobierno afgano, incapaz de imponerse a sus enemigos internos, como las tropas lideradas por la OTAN y por Estados Unidos, en dos operaciones que están muy lejos de lograr estabilizar el país y de eliminar la violencia, parecen haber aceptado sin remisión este hecho. La Operación Aquiles, en marcha desde principios de marzo, sería apenas un intento por debilitar la capacidad operativa que se les adivina a los reforzados enemigos del Gobierno de Hamid Karzai.…  Seguir leyendo »

As the spring fighting season opens, Afghanistan faces many challenges: terrorism, the Taliban, Islamic extremism, drugs and criminals, warlords and factional friction, weak government and an inadequate national and international security presence.

This is a good time to make an objective assessment of the Afghan and regional environment and to put together a strategy to overcome those challenges. This strategy should be comprehensive, combining military containment with political reconciliation, administrative control and rapid socio-economic development. It must build peace through a bottom-up approach — village by village, district by district — by offering incentives and disincentives to secure the support and cooperation of local populations.…  Seguir leyendo »

If consecutive suicide bombings aimed at the vice president of the United States and the American ambassador to Afghanistan weren’t dramatic enough illustration of the Taliban’s resurgence, President Hamid Karzai’s decision two weeks ago to swap five Taliban captives for a kidnapped Italian reporter, Daniele Mastrogiacomo, should make perfectly clear the disaster unfolding in Afghanistan.

The precedent that this trade establishes is as obvious as it is staggering in its implications. Taliban insurgents, international terrorists, opium traffickers and garden-variety criminals learned years ago that attacking foreign aid workers and journalists was the easiest and least costly way to keep rural Afghanistan, in particular the southern and southeastern areas along the border with Pakistan, both ungoverned and ungovernable.…  Seguir leyendo »

"Ya que no somos profundos, seamos al menos oscuros", decía Alfonso de Cossío, citando a su maestro Felipe Clemente de Diego, cuando empezaba a explicarnos derecho hipotecario. Peor que la oscuridad que oculta la falta de profundidad, es la inconsistencia. Aunque no siempre las palabras inconsistentes pongan de manifiesto una inteligencia de la misma naturaleza, se convierten en síntoma si se pronuncian con solemnidad y pretendida ironía para desarmar a los críticos.

Ésa es la impresión que tuve cuando oí al señor Aznar reconocer que no sabía que no existían armas de destrucción masiva en Irak, añadiendo que nadie lo sabía entonces.…  Seguir leyendo »

Blazing their way through yet another firefight with the Taleban at Shurakay, on the west bank of the Helmand river last Friday, British Royal Marines were carrying more than just the weight of bandoliers, radio sets and grenades on their shoulders.

The legacy of past wars burdened them too: Doctor Brydon, wounded and alone on his limping pony, sole survivor of the British Army’s withdrawal from Kabul in 1842, stalked their gun-chattering advance along the Shurakay heights; the ghosts of Russian soldiers, slain during the Soviet Union’s failed ten-year occupation of Afghanistan, stared on from the surrounding ridgelines. Each spectral voice gave a warning that, despite the best efforts of the Marines, they were just the latest foreign soldiers with a walk-on part in another unwinnable war, destined for ultimate defeat.…  Seguir leyendo »

Late last month some 25,000 people held a rally in the Afghan capital, Kabul. Were they calling for more aid? Were they rallying to demand military action against the Taliban? No, they were urging President Hamid Karzai to sign a law providing legal amnesty for actions committed during the civil war that raged in Afghanistan during and after the Soviet occupation.

While the law has passed both houses of Afghanistan’s Parliament, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and several humanitarian groups have argued against it on the grounds that it eliminates any possibility for justice for the people killed, tortured and raped during that awful period.…  Seguir leyendo »