The lessons learnt in Afghanistan…

Afghanistan's parliament is to be inaugurated later this month, following last September's successful elections, but more violence is expected in a country that has so far known only a fragile peace.

Despite political progress, with the election in 2004 of President Hamid Karzai and the installation of parliament and 34 provincial councils, huge security problems remain.

This year has been the most violent since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, with some 89 US military personnel and 26 international peacekeepers killed. Bombings, shootings and suicide attacks claimed around 1,400 lives.

Four years since the fall of the Taliban regime, Afghanistan is not a success story, despite international donors sending huge sums of money to the country.

More and more Afghans are asking themselves where the EUR 10.7 billion the country has received over the past four years went. The former minister for planning, Ramazan Bashardost, points the finger at the international community: "The non-governmental organisations, the UN and the large staff at the embassies have made a mafia system of aid that lacks any transparency," he said, sitting in a tent, while campaigning to win a seat in the parliament in September. Bashardost was sacked for having shut down a majority of NGOs operating in the country.

"This system works against the interest of the people of the donor countries and against the people of Afghanistan," he said.

Last month, Karzai came to Strasbourg to attend the signing of a joint declaration on a new partnership between Afghanistan and the EU that establishes shared priorities for the next phase in Afghanistan's transition.

"We intend to remain a major partner for the new administration to achieve peace, stability and prosperity," said External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner at the meeting.

The EU has been supporting the country militarily, politically and financially, paying around EUR 3.24bn or 30% of the total money pledged at the Tokyo and Berlin conferences for the reconstruction of Afghanistan.

But the Afghans seem to be disenchanted with the result.

"If someone asks me whether I am happy with all the world community's effort to help us, I say 'No', and don't be surprised at that when they are building concrete toilets in my village instead of factories," said Shah Mohammed Rais, the real-life Sultan Khan from Asne Seierstad's bestseller The Bookseller of Kabul. "Millions of dollars are coming into my country and I know that the majority goes back to where they came from. How? Through international contractors."

Afghan writer Ahmed Rashid, author of the bestseller Taliban, estimates that less than half of the $2.5 billion (EUR 2.1bn) that Western countries committed a year ago has been actually disbursed.

Foreign experts warn that the frustration with the reconstruction effort is being expressed violently and could take the form of Islamic extremism. A rise in suicide attacks, for which Afghan officials believe al-Qaeda is partly responsible, is causing particular concern.

One of the biggest threats to Afghanistan's stability is its drug production which makes up around 60% of the economy. Afghanistan is the world's leading producer of opium and is allegedly supplying 90% of Europe's heroin market.

A report from Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations' Office on Drugs and Crime, said that with the second year of bumper opium harvest, "there is a powerful criminal element at work in Afghanistan, drug gangs fighting over turf and trafficking routs".

"It's the warlords and gangs working to destabilise the country, not for jihad but for money. An efficient and independent judicial system is necessary and we don't have it yet. The government-sanctioned impunity only leads to more and more crime," added Costa.

There is a perception among Afghan people that the focus of international community attention has moved elsewhere, and that with the bloody war in Iraq, Afghanistan is becoming forgotten.

This is something the international community can ill afford.

Manca Juvan is a freelance photographer based in Brussels and Ljubjana.

Analysis feature looking at the political situation in Afghanistan and the country's relations with the EU

European External Action Service: Afghanistan http://eeas.europa.eu/afghanistan/index_en.htm

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