West lowers sights in Afghanistan: diplomats

THE STANS

Four NATO soldiers killed in Afghan blast: force
Four international soldiers in a NATO-led coalition fighting insurgents in Afghanistan were killed in a bomb strike Sunday, the International Security Assistance Force said. The insurgent Taliban movement claimed responsibility for the attack in the eastern province of Nangarhar. "It was an IED (improvised explosive device). Four soldiers were killed," an ISAF spokesman at the force's Kabul headquarters told AFP. The alliance force does not release the nationalities of its casualties but most troops in eastern Afghanistan are from the US military, which has about 38,000 soldiers in the war-stricken country. An Afghan media officer in the province said the bomb had been remotely detonated to hit an army convoy in Bati Kot district. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said men from his militia had carried out the attack. It comes after three other ISAF soldiers died in Afghanistan on Saturday. A British and a French trooper were killed in insurgent attacks and another soldier, whose nationality was not released, died in a traffic accident in the north of the country, officials said. With Sunday's deaths, 61 international soldiers have lost their lives in Afghanistan this year, most of them in insurgent attacks, according to a toll by the icasualties.org website that tracks the wars here and in Iraq.

NATO wants more Australian troops for Afghan vote: FM
NATO has asked Australia to send more troops to Afghanistan to help provide security during elections in the strife-torn nation later this year, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said Sunday. Smith said Australia had not yet decided if it would grant the request for a short-term deployment around the August 20 election date. "We've received a request from NATO to give consideration to an additional contribution for effective supervision of that election," he told Channel Nine television. "That would be obviously a short-term or temporary measure and we'll give consideration of that. "I'm not tilting the lever one way or the other, whether we will or we won't, we'll give consideration to it." Smith said he would not be surprised if the United States asked Australia to boost its troop numbers on a more permanent basis as it seeks to overcome a Taliban-led insurgency. "We'll consider that on its merits," he said. "We certainly don't want any enhanced Australian contribution to enable other countries not to make a similar contribution or to rest on their oars." Australia has 1,100 troops in Afghanistan, including 330 special forces and a 440-strong reconstruction taskforce in the southern province of Uruzgan, formerly a Taliban stronghold. The subject of additional troops may be raised when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd meets US President Barack Obama in Washington on March 24. Smith also said Australia was contributing three million dollars (1.95 million US) to Afghanistan's Electoral Complaints Commission. "We think that'll play a good part in trying to ensure that there is a good turn-out for the Afghanistan election and it's conducted in a transparent and free and fair way," he said.

by Staff Writers
Paris (AFP) March 15, 2009
Recent weeks have seen a flurry of diplomatic activity on the Afghan front, but this should not disguise what Western envoys admit is a radical lowering of their ambitions for the war-torn land.

Where once Washington and its allies boasted that Afghanistan would serve as a democratic model in a difficult region, officials now accept things are going badly and that NATO can't hope to win a clear military victory.

US Vice President Joe Biden admitted this week that "we are not now winning the war" and suggested including more moderate factions within the Taliban-led insurgency in a broader peace deal.

Canada and Britain also support this position, and this week French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner suggested that the West would have to accept it if what he called "moderate Taliban" made progress in upcoming elections.

Diplomats now hope, at best, that a settlement will be reached that will appease the least dangerous of the rebel elements and allow development work.

Meanwhile, Western leaders have been quietly distancing themselves from President Hamid Karzai's Afghan government, once seen as the best hope for peace, now accused of inefficiency and ties to drug lords.

"We are lowering our ambitions," a senior French official admitted to AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity. "The Americans are now looking for a way out, they no longer regard Afghanistan as strategic.

"It'll take two to five years, but we're in a logic of disengagement."

The campaign, which has seen the deployment of 70,000 NATO and US-led troops to fight a seemingly undaunted Taliban counter-offensive, has also revealed the shortcomings of the Atlantic alliance as a nation-building power.

"It's not an issue that NATO can resolve alone," said Daniel Hamilton of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Washington's Johns Hopkins University.

In an effort to reinforce the West's political muscle in support of NATO's military mission, the major players in the Alliance have appointed special envoys to oversee relations with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The United States' Richard Holbrooke, Britain's Sherard Cowper-Coles, France's Pierre Lellouche and Germany's Bernd Mutzelburg all have the ears of their national leaders and they will work closely together.

But the new team is coming in after more than seven long years of warfare and amid a mood of realism. With the insurgency gaining ground in Pakistan and showing no signs of slowing in Afghanistan, it's time for a new plan.

"We need a clear view of means, a clear view of the end," said Nick Witney, a British expert from the European Council on Foreign Relations.

This new approach, experts argue, must look to developing a process of political reconciliation alongside a more serious programme of economic and social development in the run up to August's Afghan presidential elections.

According to Pierre Levy, director of a planning cell at the French foreign ministry, after September 11 and the fall of the Taliban, there was a will to make Afghanistan into a "great democratic state".

Now, he said, much of the focus has shifted to other missions, such as that of eradicating the heroin poppies whose product generates the cash that funds the insurgency and corrupts Afghan officials.

The lack of a clear master strategy has weakened the mission, Levy said. "The difficulty is in finding a political solution," he told delegates at a recent seminar in Paris, alluding to problems with Karzai's rule.

"We need to train the police, which is the weakest link in the state, and speed the training of the army so that foreign troops can leave," an official in French President Nicolas Sarkozy's office said.

"We need a strategy to neutralise the drug networks that feed the insurgents and a government in Kabul that isn't too corrupt and that can govern outside Kabul," he added, speaking on condition of anonymity.

So should the West look to replace Karzai? "The problem is, there's no one else," the official added.

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THE STANS

Turkey bombs Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq: report

Ankara (AFP) March 13, 2009
Turkish warplanes have carried out new bombing raids against Kurdish rebel positions in northern Iraq, the Anatolia news agency reported Friday, quoting an army spokesman.

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