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Experts Say U.S., International Community Must Help Rebuild Afghanistan
By Ayesha Ahmad, IslamOnline Washington Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 (IslamOnline) - The United States and the international community must play a strong, decisive and sustained role in rebuilding Afghanistan, experts on a panel discussing the future of the war-torn nation here said Thursday.
"There has to be a partnership between this interim government [in Afghanistan] and the… U.S.-led international community," said Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid at the discussion organized by the Center for International Policy (CIP). "Americans will have to be present in a very strong diplomatic way."
Rashid, author of current number one bestseller, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central
Asia, said that the key to American involvement was "how effectively the U.S. is going to be able to lock [Afghanistan's] neighbors in to the reconstruction process."
He said the U.S. could play a role in convincing neighboring countries like Pakistan that enormously lucrative investments could be made in reconstructing Afghanistan's future that would benefit their economies. This would also minimize political interference on their part - one of the major factors in Afghanistan's downfall, he said.
Aside from reconstruction, Rashid said that U.S. humanitarian aid and political presence were also vital to the rebuilding process. "This has got to be very concrete," he said, adding that there would be a "waning of interest in Afghanistan" if America took its war to another country, such as Iraq or Somalia.
"Whether the Americans like it or not, there is a leadership role the Americans have to play," he said, emphasizing the necessity of America's sustained involvement in the process.
Qayyum Karzai, advisor to former king Zahir Shah, also stressed the role of the global community to rebuild not only his country's government institutions, but also civil establishments and educational institutions, to restore "the Afghan way of life."
"International community involvement must go beyond the conventional scope," said Karzai, whose brother Hamid Karzai will become the head of the interim government in Afghanistan on December 22. "[They must] help rebuild Afghanistan not from top down, but from bottom up."
Karzai said his brother, a key Pashtun opposition leader, asked for help from the U.S. because he knew that the rebuilding process was beyond Afghanistan's own resources.
"It is the Afghan people, realistically, [who] see the solution in Afghanistan to be beyond their power," he said. "In this context, they see the international community must participate."
He also addressed the problems of "fundamentalism" and "terrorism," saying that their roots were still there - despite being weakened in Afghanistan - especially in the frontier area around the border with Pakistan.
"The disempowerment of Taliban, terrorism and fundamentalism is part of the equation of reconstruction," he said.
Both Rashid and Karzai saw "considerable" and "enormous" problems that the interim government would face in the next few months; this, Karzai said, was "where the international community will be an essential part."
A third panelist, Selig S. Harrison, author of Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet
Withdrawal, addressed the issue of Pakistan's precarious position in its "marriage of convenience" with the United States and its history of support for the Taliban.
Harrison, who also serves as CIP's National Security Project director, said that an early 1980s interview he held with then-President General Zia ul-Haq prophesied the coming of the Taliban, when Zia said that Pakistan had earned the right to have a pro-Pakistan state in Afghanistan as its neighbor.
"It will be a real Islamic state," he recalled Zia as saying.
He also addressed two historic mistakes he says the U.S. made - one, to let Pakistan decide how to allocate U.S. aid money to the Afghan resistance against the Soviets in the 1980s war, and two, encouraging Islamic activists from all over the world to come and fight the Soviets.
"The more militant the jihadis were, the more fanatically they would fight against the Russians," he said by way of explaining how the Taliban's path to power was paved.
Other panelists at the discussion, held at the Brookings Institute, included Ashraf Ghani, advisor to Lakhdar Brahimi and U.N. special envoy for Afghanistan, as well as Eliza Van Hollen, former head of the Afghanistan desk in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
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