United Nations New Envoy
and Afghanistan’s Old Challenges

By: Sharif Ghalib
Toronto, March 12, 2008

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has nominated Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide to be the next UN envoy in Afghanistan.

The nomination, already welcomed by the government of Afghanistan and appearing imminent to win the unanimous approval of the Security Council this week, will practically bring to close the seemingly dragging quest for the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative to the country to succeed the ex-UN envoy, Tom Koenigs of Germany.

Correspondingly, the nomination in progress shall make the bitter row between the Afghan government and its major allies over the ill-fated appointment of Paddy Ashdown, a Briton, and former UN's High Representative and EU envoy to Bosnia, which brought the sides on the verge of a war of words causing world-wide media flurry, a theme of the past.

Without a doubt the appointment of Kai Eide comes at a delicate time. He is to embark on a task he sure would find unlikely to be easy, with the deteriorating security situation and violence high on UNAMA’s accumulative listing of the back logs.

More than six years after U.S.-led and Afghan resistance forces deposed the Taliban, NATO and Afghan forces are still battling an unrelenting Taliban insurgency.

According to news media accounts quoting a United Nations report released Monday in New York, a tenth of Afghanistan is off limits to aid workers because attacks by Taliban insurgents make it too dangerous, hindering the delivery of humanitarian assistance to vulnerable Afghans. Violence last year was at the highest level since a U.S.-led offensive toppled the hard-line Taliban regime in late 2001. There were 160 suicide attacks and 68 thwarted attempts in 2007, compared to 123 suicide attacks and 17 failed attempts in 2006. Afghanistan had more than 8,000 conflict-related deaths last year, including 1,500 civilian deaths, the U.N. report was quoted as saying.

Frustration over the lack of security is mounting so much so that a growing number among ordinary Afghans question whether the multinational coalition forces are in their country to bring peace or whether these forces are capable enough to do the job in the first place.

As a result, the declining pattern of security has taken a heavy toll on the confidence of the people over the ability of the Afghan government and the international community to carry out the reconstruction objectives at the desired pace, aimed at tangibly improving their lives.

To-date, however, to the dismay of the Afghan Government and of the nation at large, arguments stressing the need for the international community to set the pace and ratchet up the building, training and equipping of the indigenous security institutions of the nascent Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP), have gone unheeded and to no avail.

Much as security, the slow pace of development and sluggish reconstruction efforts continue to leave ordinary Afghans increasingly infuriated. Lacking adequate access to health and education facilities, social services and employment opportunities, a great many wonder how negligibly their lives have been changed with the billions of dollars that have been funnelled to the country.

In this context, media and government reports on the on-going wide-spread calamitous fatalities and the loss of lives across Afghanistan this winter due to preventable conditions provide a clear testimonial to the extent of vulnerability among the larger populations of the country.

Characterized as correlated and intertwined, security and development remain of paramount importance to the overall situation, whereupon a great many often tend to contemplate each as balancing the other, thus requiring a close and effective coordination between the two by the newly headed UNAMA.

The alarming proportion of poppy cultivation and heroin production is yet another indicator of the international community’s profoundly flawed counter-narcotics strategy in Afghanistan. Failure to adopt a comprehensive and integrated approach to combating narcotics has led to record increase in illicit drug production, which demands earnest attention by the new envoy.

According to the International Narcotics Control Board agency, last year Afghanistan produced an "exceptional quantity" of opium, at 8,200 metric tons, 34% more than in 2006. The country now accounts for 93% of all opiates on the global market, the UN agency said in its annual report made public last Wednesday in Vienna.

Addressing the precarious situation, inter alia, require fresh resolve and renewed leadership by UNMA. The vary fact that Mr. Eide is slated to be assuming a “strong mandate” to “accelerate and strengthen the coordination of the support of over 40 countries contributing military forces or military support to Afghanistan, and over 60 countries, nation states and institutions contributing development assistance and reconstruction assistance to Afghanistan”, shall inevitably prove to be of fundamental importance to his success in confronting the formidable challenges and the implementation of the stated objectives.

However, it is equally important that Mr. Eide should be able to ensure bringing a distinct perspective to the conduct of the work of the UN office vis-à-vis the government of Afghanistan and the greater ethno-political dynamics of the country.

Oddly, UNAMA, on more than one occasion, has been on the record taking position and/or putting out intrusive statements over pure internal government issues such as appointments of certain state officials, and at times even judging the country’s parliamentary decisions, irrelevant to its jurisdiction and the framework of its responsibilities, and detrimental to the efficacy of its role, image and integrity in a post-conflict nation still susceptible to upheavals.

By the same token, revelations about UN ranking delegates’ clandestine activities in southern Afghanistan last December, found unsanctioned and inconsistent with the nature of their jobs by the Afghan government, and the ensuing controversy surrounding their expulsion, are instances which run utterly counter to impartiality as an underlying principal enshrined in the charter of the United Nations as an international organization.

The United Nations must strictly adhere to its commitments and obligations to the inviolability of the sovereignty of the elected government of Afghanistan and the sanctity of its constitutional duties before the Afghan nation in dealing with the state affairs.

Looking forward to the next historical watershed events of presidential and parliamentary elections in their country, the people of Afghanistan cannot be enough indebted to the United Nations for the pivotal role it has played all along. And much the same, they continue to trust and pin hope in UNAMA’s invaluable mission dedicated to their collective well-being and strengthening the nation’s grasp on its newfound democracy.

End.

Sharif Ghalib served at the UN for ten years, and was the first Afghan diplomat to negotiate the establishment of full bilateral diplomatic and consular relations between Afghanistan and Canada at resident-embassy level. He opened the Embassy of Afghanistan in Ottawa in late 2002 and served as the country’s Charge d’Affaires, a.i., and Minister Counselor until 2005.

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