Bonn conference on Afghanistan opens today
Foreign ministers were gathering Sunday in the former German capital, Bonn, for a key conference today on Afghanistan’s future and international aid to the embattled nation.
Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi was on his way and would meet the host, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle diplomats said. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon was also set to arrive in advance of the Monday event. Scheduled events later Sunday included Westerwelle meeting Ban and a parallel conference of 60 university students from 25 nations, Afghanistan included, debating alternative answers to the unresolved conflict between Kabul and rebels.
Questions had hung last week over Iran’s participation after a flare-up of tension with the European Union over Iran’s nuclear programme and a mob invasion of the British embassy in Tehran.
Salehi had accepted an invitation to the Bonn conference months earlier and took part in a preparatory meeting in early November in Istanbul, Turkey where he also had talks with Westerwelle.
Pakistan and Iran are the two neighbours with most influence in Afghanistan and neither favours NATO’s peacekeeping operation.
The Bonn conference on Afghanistan is scheduled to discuss the post withdrawal Afghanistan and possibility of talks with Taliban. However, Pakistan, a critical player in Afghanistan’s future, has decided to boycott the conference in protest to a recent NATO air strike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.
Protesters have taken to the street in Bonn, calling for an immediate conclusion of whatsoever military operation in Afghanistan, ahead of a conference on Afghanistan set to open next Monday in the west German city.
The demonstration turned against German army’s long term stationing on the foreign soil and demanded for the war-ravaged Afghanistan to resume peace as soon as possible.
Delegates from some 85 countries and 16 international organizations, including UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, are expected to attend the meeting.
Sponsored by Germany and chaired by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the conference is intended to work out a roadmap for Afghans’ self-sustenance for economic development and peace after the NATO mandatory mission expired by the end of 2014.
The conference is overshadowed by the Pakistani boycott which has cast doubts over whether it could come up with workable suggestions. Karzai, who arrived in Germany on Friday and held talks with German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said there was no solution through military conflicts for Afghanistan, but only reconciliation could bring peace and stability. Other important issues to be discussed at the Bonn conference will feature future assistance to Afghanistan.
Afghan Foreign Minister Zalmai Rassoul has called on the international community to further support his country after NATO mission ends by the end of 2014.
An angry goodbye to Bonn
The Parliamentary Committee on National Security has also — regrettably — recommended that Pakistan not attend the Bonn Conference on the future of Afghanistan (it opens on December 5). It has thus endorsed the earlier decisions by the cabinet, its defence committee and the Senate, to boycott the conference by removing Pakistan from the gathering of 1,000 delegates reviewing progress on what was decided 10 years ago in 2001. While the nations represented at Bonn still swear by Pakistan’s importance and hope to lure Pakistan in, it has chosen isolation to express its outrage at the attack by US-Nato forces on a Pakistani checkpost on November 26, killing 24 Pakistani soldiers.
It is presumed that Pakistan holds some important trump cards and will be able to achieve the results it wants by this diplomatic device: it sits atop Nato’s supply route and it has liaison with the Afghan Taliban who are required to contribute to the most crucial issue at Bonn, namely, achieving peace and negotiating a political transition in Afghanistan after 2014. It is yet to be seen whether Pakistan has enough leverage on the so-called Quetta Shura of Mullah Omar to deliver what Bonn wants. So far, the Taliban, whom Pakistan presumably supports as its candidate for the post-withdrawal government in Kabul, have rejected American offers for peace talks, saying Nato forces must withdraw first. While Mullah Omar is diplomatic, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, together with Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), have denounced Pakistan for being “a slave of the United States”. The Pakistani Taliban owe allegiance to Mullah Omar and al Qaeda. A sign of what may be the al Qaeda strategy appeared when the Afghan ‘peace negotiator’ Burhanuddin Rabbani was killed in Kabul. The Taliban were not invited in 2001; they, together with Pakistan, are not going in 2011.
Either way, there is clearly a considered view which thinks that it will be pointless for Pakistan to attend Bonn, given its stance. The conference itself, this view holds further, is unlikely to achieve much. It was convened a decade ago to restore to Afghanistan its representative institutions, by holding elections, giving it a new constitution and installing an elected government. Afghan President Karzai who hardly satisfies the moral and ethical yardsticks of many delegates at the Bonn Conference, is still in power after a decade, and the Loya Jirga he convened in November in anticipation of the conference did not please all the parties in Afghanistan who thought that the jirga was ‘selective’ and did not represent the entire population of Afghanistan.
The national consensus in Pakistan is emotional rather than rational because the military, which is endorsed in its stance by this consensus, has not encouraged the political players to plan an appropriate strategy after the Mohmand attack. As its details came to light, Pakistan was expected to gain the moral high ground at Bonn and stood a better chance of pushing through its own proposals on post-withdrawal Afghanistan, and that is why attending it would have been a better option. The Americans might have been pressured after that to render to Pakistan the apology it needs to assuage its rage.
The West, which was supposed to contribute financially to post-withdrawal Afghanistan’s security and economic development, is today mired in its own economic crisis of historic proportions. The conference will probably end up exhorting the ‘concerned nations’ and Afghanistan’s neighbours to do their best to bring durable peace to Afghanistan on the basis of a peace process involving all Afghan factions. As for Pakistan, it is absenting itself because it is not sanguine about the conference’s outcome. However, the outcome it wants — which is mostly India-centric — has not found favour with the international community. Pakistan will have to face the outcome: it will have to continue to harbour important Afghan players, and the regional states led by India will go on looking at Pakistan as a troublemaker and will see to it that the Taliban don’t ‘conquer’ Afghanistan the way they did in 1996. Isolationism as an expression of anger at this point does not suit Pakistan.
Nato air raid: No Bonn-homie, just sympathy from Obama
A day before an international conference on the Afghan endgame kicked off in the German city of Bonn, US President Barack Obama called up his Pakistani counterpart to offer condolences over the death of two dozen troops in Nato airstrikes that prompted Islamabad’s boycott of the crucial meeting.
A White House statement said Obama placed a call early Sunday to Asif Ali Zardari expressing his regrets over the “tragic loss” and promising a “full investigation” into the November 26 air raid on Pakistani border posts in Mohmand Agency.
Obama “made clear that this regrettable incident was not a deliberate attack on Pakistan and reiterated the United States’ strong commitment to a full investigation,” the statement said.
Islamabad has so far refused to take part in a US investigation into the November 26 air strikes on the Afghan border.
But the White House said Obama and Zardari nonetheless “reaffirmed their commitment to the US-Pakistan bilateral relationship, which is critical to the security of both nations, and they agreed to stay in close touch.”
In the wake of the strikes, Pakistan decided not to take part in the Bonn conference on the future of Afghanistan that opens today (Monday), a decision which, together with the Taliban’s boycott, has cast the event’s usefulness into doubt.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who will attend the conference, expressed his disappointment that Pakistan was not attending.
Taliban no-show
The Taliban’s non-attendance risks making Bonn part of what Britain’s former ambassador to Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Coles, called the “charade” of international conferences on Afghanistan, dogged by “diplomacy for diplomacy’s sake”.
Their participation seemed a possibility earlier in the year but all hopes were dashed after the assassination of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s peace envoy, Burhanuddin Rabbani, was blamed on the Taliban.
“I’m not expecting a huge amount on reconciliation,” Britain’s Ambassador in Kabul William Patey said.
“I’m not expecting much other than an affirmation that the Afghan government, supported by the international community, stands ready to talk peace and reconciliation with the Taliban when and if they’re ready.”
The ‘original sin’
Some argue that decisions taken at the 2001 Bonn conference caused some of the problems facing the country today.
Britain’s former ambassador to Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Coles wrote this year in his memoirs that the conference had been “a victor’s peace from which the vanquished had been excluded.”
The ‘original sin’ was not to have the Taliban at Bonn, Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid quotes the former UN special representative to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, as saying, in the book “Descent Into Chaos”.
Open meetings “are the least likely arenas to address some of the thorniest issues at the core of the conflict, including the role played by neighbours such as Pakistan and Iran and the diplomatic strategy for dealing with (the Taliban).”
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