WASHINGTON, Feb 22: Security concerns and the need for immediate international aid will be high on his agenda when Afghan President Hamid Karzai arrives in Washington next week for talks with President George W. Bush and other senior US officials.
His visit comes amid reports that European troops keeping the peace in Kabul have a contingency plan to pull out if a possible war against Iraq inflames anti-Western feeling in the Afghan capital and amid complaints that international aid pledged in the flush of enthusiasm after the fall of the Taliban has not materialized.
A State Department official told Dawn on Saturday that Karzai would spend two days, Wednesday and Thursday, in Washington after attending an international conference on Afghan security in Tokyo.
His talks with Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will focus on security concerns in Afghanistan where the Karzai government is still struggling to extend its control beyond Kabul.
Conflict has broken out intermittently in some areas between the militias of various warlords, thought to total about 700,000 soldiers altogether.
Plans to form an Afghan national army, trained by the US military, appear to have stalled, although Mr Rumsfeld pledged last week that “we will not abandon Afghanistan”.
Mr Karzai is expected to come to Washington with an agenda called DDR for disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of Afghan fighters) for restoring peace to Afghanistan.
He says he hopes to achieve this within three years but admits that it will be “a complicated process”.
In January last year, Tokyo hosted a ministerial conference on Afghan reconstruction, at which attending nations pledged 4.5 billion dollars in aid. But Afghanistan complains that most of those pledges were not met, forcing the Afghan government to depend on international handouts even for paying its employees.
And now the Afghan government fears that a shift in attention to Iraq could further reduce the involvement of the international community in the rebuilding of Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s fears have been further compounded by an indication from Germany that it could withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in the event of a war in Iraq.
German Defence Minister Peter Struck told a news conference in Berlin on Friday that a contingency plan had been worked out with the United States to evacuate civilians from Afghanistan if tensions in the region escalated. After the civilians, the troops could also be pulled out, he warned.
Germany and the Netherlands took joint control of the ISAF peacekeeping force in Kabul on Feb 10.
Alarmed by these developments, Mr Karzai warned: “Reducing attention to Afghanistan at this critical time will have an obvious negative impact that nobody wants.”
On Friday, Britain’s Financial Times newspaper quoted a confidential German foreign ministry report indicating mounting hostility towards the peacekeepers, even among the Afghan government’s security forces.
The 22-nation, 4,800-strong force has maintained security in the Afghan capital since its deployment in Dec 2001 after US forces forced Taliban fighters to retreat.