Transcript
PHILIP GORDON: The six of us spent our Christmas holidays in Afghanistan on a trip sponsored by NATO, looking at the ISAF mission, the NATO mission and what international forces in Afghanistan are doing.
We began in Washington with briefings from the State Department and Pentagon. We went to Brussels, NATO headquarters, received more briefings there; saw the Secretary General, various permanent representatives of the alliance; and then moved on via Dubai onto Kabul and Herat to take a look at the ISAF mission.
A couple of words of context before I turn to my colleagues to talk about different bits of the trip in Afghanistan and the war on terrorism. Just two bits of background that I thought I would stress to start off.
One is the issue of rising violence in Afghanistan. Afghanistan, for many of us who follow these issues, has been on the brighter side of the spectrum both in terms of trans-Atlantic cooperation and in terms of success in the war on terror. There was broad international agreement to send forces into Afghanistan. There was political progress on the ground. Indeed, while we were there December 19th, the Afghan parliament, freely elected parliament, was inaugurated. And violence, at least compared to places like Iraq, was relatively low.
That doesn't seem to be the case any more. In just this year, which is only whatever—18 days old or a few weeks old—there have been 10 armed attacks in Afghanistan, 50 people killed. Last year was far worse than the previous years in terms of suicide bombings which were relatively unknown in Afghanistan previously since the beginning of the ISAF mission at the end of 2003. Of the suicide attacks that have taken place, two-thirds of them have taken place just since this past summer.
What seems to be happening—indeed, I'll turn to our expert colleagues to address this issue if they will—is copycatting of the methods used in Iraq in terms of suicide attacks, attacks on civilians, improvised explosive devices in order to deter the deployment of international forces in the peacekeeping mission; which is the second aspect of the context that I thought I would mention to begin with, which is this international mission and specifically the NATO mission.
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