LONDON: A `make or break` situation is facing NATO forces in southern Afghanistan in the coming months, with the threat of a major Taliban spring office, an international think-tank warned the other day.
After Musa Qala fell two weeks ago, the Taliban now have the big towns in their sights and anyone who can leave has already left, the Senlis Council said in its latest field report on the Counter Insurgency in Afghanistan.
The council, which has offices in London, Brussels, Paris and Kabul, concluded that the international community`s own policies are responsible for the dramatic loss of support for the Afghan government and for the rise in the insurgency.
"With our own policies, we have created our own enemies," said the founding president of Senlis, Norine MacDonald, who has lived and worked in Afghanistan for the past two years.
"The policies implemented by the international community have created these resentful and poor young men who cannot feed their families, and they are now being easily recruited by the Taliban," MacDonald warned.
He said that it was `through these misguided policies, the international community has turned southern Afghanistan into a recruitment camp for the Taliban`.
Senlis said that there were many legitimate grievances of the local Afghan population which needed and could be simply and inexpensively be addressed.
Legitimate grievances include the large numbers of civilian deaths, injuries and displacements caused by fighting; forced poppy crop eradication while many farmers were still fully dependent; the lack of food aid and humanitarian assistance; the overall lack of development; the perception that the Karzai government is a puppet regime; the lack of public facilities such as hospitals and schools and the perception that culture and traditions are not respected.
The under-funding of humanitarian and development aid was a `blatant disregard of the established counter insurgency theories, which advocate a complete package of diverse development based interventions`, the report said.
"The people of Afghanistan have become the unwilling victims of a war which is not their own," said MacDonald. "Proper provision has not been made according to the Geneva Conventions for civilian casualties in a war zone," he said.
"Hospitals have no equipment, no medicines, no blood, no heating.
For the most part, civilians injured in the bombing campaigns are abandoned by the international community," he added.
The report also pointed out that in 2006, some 2000 NATO bombing campaigns were executed over southern Afghanistan, causing an estimated 4,000 civilian deaths and an untold number of casualties, for which there is practically no possibility of treatment. "The insurgency in southern Afghanistan has been fuelled by the neglect of the international community to address vital issues such as emergency treatment for victims of the international forces bombing campaigns, or the widespread starvation," MacDonald said.
The report made several recommendations including the immediate cessation of forced poppy crop eradication and bombing raids, immediate widespread food aid and compensation to civilian victims of bombings.
It also called for military paramedics and field hospitals to aid civilian war casualties, the rebuilding of existent hospitals and the construction of new ones and a complete overhaul of failed counter-narcotics strategies.
Senlis work encompasses foreign policy, security, development and counter-narcotics policies and aims to provide innovative analysis and proposals within these areas.
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