Afghanistan: Urgent Investments in the Long Transition
After a very busy and politically demanding year, the United States, Europe and their key international partners in Afghanistan are at risk of wasting the modest opportunity that they managed to create. Yes, there is now a plausible political strategy in place where there was none before. But the twin hopes for long-term international assistance and a sustainable political settlement with the Taliban remain too doubtful and ambiguous to make a positive difference yet. To make success more likely, the international community needs to deliver a truly impressive follow-up on the decisions made in Bonn.
In the short term, a stronger focus is required on getting ready to subordinate international military operations to the emerging political negotiations, on preparing for the presidential elections in 2014 and on managing local power transitions as a result of ISAF redeployments. At the same time, the decisions being made in the coming weeks and months to predetermine the size and shape of the long-term international engagement with Afghanistan must meet a double challenge: to break or at least slow the cycle of fear that grips the country, and to avoid building the next series of well-intentioned political traps for the international community by a new emphasis on thoughtful analysis and program design.
Into the Unknown: The Long Transition
Since the NATO Lisbon summit in 2010, the international community has begun to shift from an open-ended counterinsurgency campaign without a viable political strategy to a more realistic political approach that combines security transition, institutional development and support for a negotiated political settlement to the conflict. As a result, a profound political transformation has started in Afghanistan and the region. The political and economic order of the past decade is beginning to give way to a new one, the shape of which remains a mystery to all. Uncertainty breeds fear, exacerbating the already daunting political and security risks in one of the world’s most volatile and dangerous regions.
This period of upheaval will last at least three more years, and it will require delicate engagement with the multiple political, economic and partly military transitions at the local and regional levels. At the same time, the news of an impending military drawdown has already relegated the war in Afghanistan to the second tier of international crises. This was inevitable, but if the international community does not follow-up on its Bonn promises with substantial pledges, it risks losing even the modest opportunity it has worked hard to create over the past year.
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