October 26, 2003	Sunday	Sha’aban 29, 1424

KUNDUZ (Afghanistan), Oct 25: Twenty-seven German soldiers arrived in rural northern Afghanistan on Saturday to launch an eagerly awaited expansion of a NATO-led peacekeeping force outside the capital Kabul.

The deployment has been welcomed by residents of the town of Kunduz, but aid workers are wondering why peacekeeping troops have arrived first in one of Afghanistan’s safest provinces when they are urgently needed in other parts of the country.

The German army is planning to send 150 soldiers into Kunduz before winter sets in, and up to 450 by the middle of next year. The contingent may include a small number of Dutch commandos.

In their wake are also expected dozens of German aid workers, with the German government likely to fund development projects in Kunduz to make sure their soldiers continue to be welcomed.

“Our hope for the mission is safety for all our men, a safe return home when we have finished our mission and a safe environment for those who follow,” Colonel Kurt Schiebold told reporters as he stepped off the C-160 military cargo plane.

Schiebold added that German troops were aiming to help “establish a secure environment” to enable Afghan authorities, the United Nations and aid agencies to do reconstruction work and provide aid to the region.

“The security situation is fine here, but we want even better security in our city, so it is good they are coming here,” said Najibullah, who works in a local chemists’ shop. “We hope they rebuild our roads, and build clinics and schools.”

The German troops are sure to stand out in the dusty tree-lined streets of Kunduz, where brightly decorated horses and carts usually outnumber cars.

Aid agencies hope the deployment will be the precursor to a much wider deployment of peacekeepers, especially to the south and east of the country where militants from the ousted Taliban regime have been increasingly attacking and killing aid workers.

With elections due to take place next year, the need for thousands more foreign peacekeeping troops outside Kabul is even more pressing, aid workers and diplomats say.

But so far no country apart from Germany has agreed to send significant numbers of troops to expand the 31-nation 5,500-strong International Security Assistance Force outside the Afghan capital.

Kunduz suffers from less of the political and ethnic tension that bedevils other parts of Afghanistan, which is perhaps why the cautious Germans chose it as their new base.

It has also been chosen to launch an ambitious U.N.-backed plan to disarm 100,000 militiamen over the next two years, with 1,000 men handing in their weapons this week and being demobilised by President Hamid Karzai to get the scheme under way.

Officials in Kunduz hope the two initiatives will complement each other, with German aid money providing jobs for some ex-combatants and even encouraging other provinces to take part in the Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) plan.

“If people see changes here after the beginning of DDR, everyone will benefit,” said Sergiy Illarionov, the senior U.N. official in Kunduz. “If they see good results in Kunduz, they may think ‘we have to join them’.

Schiebold said the Germans would help to monitor the DDR process and would also help to train local police and security forces.

But one thorny question does await the German peacekeeping force whose mandate will ultimately cover all four provinces of northeastern Afghanistan.

Remote and mountainous Badakshan is one of the country’s major poppy-growing areas, and much of the opium which ends up as heroin on the streets of Europe transits through Kunduz on its way to Tajikistan.

Combating the drugs trade is not part of their mandate, and Schiebold said it was “not our business”. But the German public might not be happy if their soldiers do nothing to prevent Afghan heroin ending up on the streets of Berlin.—Reuters