London Conference to Focus on Afghan Security

AOL News KABUL (Jan. 26) – There is plenty of substance on the agenda of Thursday's one-day conference on Afghanistan in London. The assembled U.N. and NATO officials, as well as foreign ministers including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, are expected to endorse a recent agreement on a substantive increase of Afghan National Security Forces and set timelines for beginning to hand over security responsibility to them. They may well hash out a concrete proposal for political reconciliation with the Taliban. But looming over the proceedings will be memories of previous international conferences on Afghanistan – including one in London in 2006 and another in Paris in 2008 – that have seen little or no follow-through.

Thursday's London conference is meant to dispel differences within the international community on the approach toward Afghanistan, which came to a head during the election period. The United Nations, with the support of the European Union, had already proposed a conference in Kabul following the new government's election. But France, Germany and the United Kingdom, under domestic pressure not to spend more money and human resources on a nonperforming government under President Hamid Karzai, wanted a forum to put concrete demands on the Afghan government, leading to London in January with a Kabul conference mooted in spring.

The London agenda that has emerged will center on security concerns and specific military strategy. Participants want to spell out a security strategy that will enable the major troop-contributing countries to give their voters a clearer sense of when their forces can start withdrawing. But before that can happen, according to plans endorsed by President Barack Obama last month, 30,000 more U.S. troops and 7,000 from allied countries will deploy in Afghanistan. On Tuesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged to increase her country's military presence there from 4,500 to 5,000 troops.

An agreement endorsed in Kabul last week after tough negotiations between the Afghan government and donors calls for more than doubling the Afghan National Security Forces, from 191,000 now to 400,000 in five years. That effort will require more money and more trainers from Afghanistan's partners, and the British government hopes to secure commitments for both at the conference.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has suggested that Afghan forces must be ready to take the lead in "at least five provinces ... by the end of 2010," but it is far from clear whether an actual number of provinces will be spelled out at the conference, let alone specific provinces named – even though those decisions have a direct bearing on any contemplated troop withdrawals.

The Karzai government is expected to table a policy that would allow reconciliation with the "Afghan" Taliban, an effort recently endorsed by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander of U.S. and NATO troops in the country. Karzai will also call for renewed military operations across the border in Pakistan and ask Western donors to pay into a fund to enable cash payments to reintegrated fighters.

"Those Taliban who are not part of terrorist networks, who are the sons of the Afghan soil, and who are in thousands and thousands, they have to be reintegrated, and they are welcomed to be integrated," Karzai said at a regional conference in Istanbul on Tuesday.

Development and governance have also been cited as themes for the conference, but concrete, measurable steps on those issues will be tougher to secure, much to the regret of many experts. "The focus on governance is long overdue," said Rachel Reid, Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch. "As long as there are known rights abusers and people associated with criminal activity in public office, the government will fail to win the trust of the people. Similarly, there can be no half measures from the international community, who are bringing pressure upon the government to reform, but are still failing to audit who it is they are enriching and empowering in Afghanistan."

Many Afghan civil society groups, including defenders of women's rights, are concerned about the process of reintegrating Taliban forces into society, Reid said. "Those who do not wield guns should not be excluded from these important decisions," she said.

Civil society groups and nongovernmental organizations are not invited to the conference itself, but have met in their own forum in London earlier this week. Many of them believe earlier conferences have seen little follow-through. In 2008, for instance, leaders endorsed the Afghan National Development Strategy, which Ashley Jackson of Oxfam International said "does prioritize the needs of Afghanistan but does not seem to be on the agenda right now."

"An international preoccupation with military strategy has deflected attention from building up civilian institutions and developing the economy," the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit, a respected research organization, has concluded. The organization expressed the hope that the London and Kabul conferences would lead the international community to commit itself to building public institutions that are legitimate in Afghan eyes, something that had been "too long neglected in preference of quick-fix and military solutions."