Europe looks for a peaceful push in Afghanistan

The prospect of a failure in stabilisation and combating anti-terrorism in Afghanistan has prompted key governments to re-examine their approach to the war-shattered country.

A first tangible result of this review is the dispatch of an additional 3,200 US Marines to the country to assist the faltering counter-insurgency effort there, announced on 15 January.

The same week, the German defence ministry confirmed that it was considering sending its own troops to replace a 240-strong Norwegian Quick Reaction Force (QRF) currently stationed in the German sector, in the north-west of the country.

Many of Germany’s NATO allies are exasperated by her insistence that her troops are in Afghanistan only to keep a peace, not to fight a war. But the distinction between peacekeeping and war-fighting can be sustained only with great difficulty in the messy conditions of today’s Afghan-istan. Defeating the Taliban militarily is a precondition for the stabilisation of Afghanistan, but military engagement will need an equally robust civilian complement if it is to achieve its overall goal.

This is where the second element of the new approach comes in, also reported during an important week for Afghanistan: the US and the UK want to name Paddy Ashdown - a former leader of the British Liberal Democrats and a former peace overseer in Bosnia-Herzegovina - as UN envoy to Afghanistan.

The appointment still requires UN Security Council confirmation and could therefore, in the prevailing climate of east-west confrontation, yet be derailed by Russian unhappiness over some unrelated issue. But Russia has the same long-term interest in a stable Afghanistan as does NATO. Key governments now recognise that there is a problem, agree on its nature and appear willing to provide the resources to deal with it. That they want to entrust the UN envoy’s office to a towering (some would say overbearing) figure such as Ashdown underscores just how serious they believe the problem to be.

Whatever specific actions Ashdown might propose, he is not one to shut up if he thinks that his bosses on the Security Council or their executive agents in NATO are not doing enough. By sheer force of personality, he will force these governments to pay attention, something of which there has not been nearly enough in years past.

Readers of Canada’s Globe and Mail of 17 January were given a glimpse of Ashdown’s temperament. He was quoted saying that "there is this bizarre idea that the one thing these people are dying for is gender-sensitivity training". Not a comment that will endear him to his future UN colleagues in Kabul, but he has some more constructive ideas. He added: "We are losing in Afghanistan - and rather than militarily, we are losing the political mission - and in large part we are losing because there has been a complete failure of the international community to co-ordinate its efforts."

The main problem facing Afghanistan today is not simply a lack of co-ordination. Peacekeeping, stabilisation and state-building operations fail for all sorts of reasons. Insufficient means, unclear ends, or a disconnect between means and ends could derail a given mission even if co-ordination were near-perfect. Incompetence, corruption, sloth, lack of financial and human resources are almost ubiquitous in the UN system - yet some missions achieve their goals while others do not.

The real challenge is at the strategic level - the integration of ends and means. It is here where Ashdown can contribute most. In Bosnia, strategic decision-making was in effect outsourced to him as high representative since the countries and groups with an interest in a stable Balkans had only a vague idea about how to achieve it. Afghanistan seems to be a very similar case: the various governments with a presence there seem to have fundamental disagreements over the ends of the Afghanistan mission and the means to attain them (crop eradication is just one example).

But Afghanistan may remain immune to the efforts of even the best-qualified international peace-building czar: it is a very, very difficult situation indeed, quite possibly as tough to resolve as Iraq. In fact, it may be impossible to "resolve" at all, allowing only for gradual improvement. Whether Ashdown will accept this could determine the future course of the entire international Afghanistan strategy.

The prospect of a failure in stabilisation and combating anti-terrorism in Afghanistan has prompted key governments to re-examine their approach to the war-shattered country.