http://today.reuters.com/News/CrisesArticle.aspx?storyId=L16899001
NATO chiefs to urge world re-think on Afghanistan Fri 17 Nov 2006 5:00 AM ET By Mark John BRUSSELS, Nov 17 (Reuters) - NATO leaders meeting in Riga this month will call on the international community to revamp a haphazard strategy for rebuilding Afghanistan to plug shortcomings in aid efforts, alliance diplomats said on Friday. Ideas being floated ahead of the Nov. 28-29 summit of the U.S.-led defence pact include stricter monitoring of donor pledges, and greater roles for the local U.N. mission and World Bank in coordinating development and reconstruction. Taliban insurgents have fed off growing frustration among Afghans at the slow pace of reconstruction and anger about civilian casualties as NATO troops seek to root out Islamist fighters often hiding within local communities. Leaders at the summit are expected to call for the United Nations, the European Union and other agencies to work more closely with NATO but will stress the alliance wants to stick to security tasks and seeks no coordinating role for itself. With support at home for the Afghan mission at risk as casualties mount, NATO countries see the international aid effort and the extension of President Hamid Karzai's authority across the country as their eventual way out. "We can be an entry strategy, but we can't do the exit strategy. We are only as good as our partners," NATO's director of policy planning, Jamie Shea, told a Brussels conference. This has been the bloodiest year in Afghanistan since a U.S.-led invasion ousted the Taliban's hardline government in 2001. Some 3,100 people have died in violence as the Taliban, boosted by drugs money and safe havens in Pakistan, fight back. Multiple agencies are working to alleviate dire conditions in one of the world's poorest nations, but inefficiencies mean aid is often not going fast enough where it is most needed. DELIVERING ON PLEDGES "If we are to succeed, our military engagement must be accompanied by a more efficient civilian effort," a NATO diplomat quoted Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere as telling his alliance counterparts in a letter this month. Norway wants the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) to have a greater remit to manage civilian efforts and the World Bank to be "more vigorous" in overseeing development. It called for a greater effort to train the Afghan army, police and judiciary, where corruption is still widespread, and proposed a "special envoy" to better coordinate donor funds. The EU decision this week to send a fact-finding team to explore the scope for a small police training mission is seen in NATO as an encouraging sign that others are willing to do more. Other proposals being floated include new mechanisms to ensure donors deliver some 10 billion dollars of aid pledged at an international conference on Afghanistan in January, and naming a high-powered official to lead international efforts. "It would be a strongly political special representative in the mould of Lakhdar Brahimi," said one diplomat of the veteran U.N. trouble-shooter who helped broker the transition to Iraqi self-rule after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. The Netherlands has proposed that military commanders be given greater access to funds to kick-start development in areas too dangerous for aid agencies to enter. The idea has won guarded backing from some such as Britain, fighting alongside the Dutch in the south, but is opposed by others keen to keep civilian and military efforts separate. "But there is a clear consensus we cannot win this purely militarily," said one envoy. 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