The Cabinet Choice

The biggest decision of Hamid Karzai’s presidency looms ahead: who to pick for his cabinet. The embassy of Afghanistan in Canada has compiled recent coverage related to the big questions yet to be answered: Will Karzai offer Cabinet positions to warlords? Will the President appoint his rival Mohammad Yunos Qanuni to the post of Defense Minister, as Radio Afghanistan has suggested? Will Afghans with dual citizenship, such as current Finance Minsiter Ashraf Ghani and Interior Minister Ali Ahmed Jalali, be permitted to serve in the new cabinet? To find out the latest as to who has the inside track, click here.

December 20, 2004

Afghanistan 'Footprint' Helps Shape U.N. Reform
Jeffrey Laurenti

The much-anticipated release of the High Level Panel report on Threats, Challenges, and Change provides one of the best opportunities in decades to strengthen and reform the United Nations. Century Foundation Scholar Jeffrey Laurenti takes a look at how Afghanistan helped shape our understanding of what can work-and what won't:

Jeffrey Laurenti

It was the shock of the American invasion of Iraq that pushed United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan into creating a high-level panel to address the deepening crisis of collective security, but the specter of Afghanistan looms large over the panel's report.

It was in Afghanistan in the 1980s that the U.N. began a quiet transformation from Cold War Greek chorus, left to rally world opinion from the sidelines, to an intermediary that actively negotiates, even between superpowers. It was on Afghanistan that the United States decided that benign neglect of a continuing civil war would lead to a politically more satisfying final solution than a U.N.-brokered all-party peace settlement.

It was from Afghanistan that a terrorist enterprise hid behind the drape of a parasitized state's "sovereignty" to launch escalating attacks on "infidel" powers that culminated in the World Trade Center's destruction, and the events it set in motion. And it is in Afghanistan that outside powers experimented with divvying up post-conflict reconstruction efforts (and security) among individual countries, while entrusting to the United Nations the tasks of political reconstruction and the repatriation of 4.5 million Afghan refugees.

The UN Report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility

The high-level panel, chaired by former Thai prime minister Anand Panyarachun, was composed of former or current heads of government, regional organizations, or U.N. agencies; top-ranking ex-diplomats from major states; and former commanders of multilateral military forces, including U.S. retired general and presidential advisor Brent Scowcroft. The panel hewed closely to Annan's mandate to eschew case studies or country-specific recommendations, and its report mentions Afghanistan only thrice in 130 pages. But clearly a number of its 101 recommendations are informed by the Afghan experience.

In an implied mea culpa for the policy choice of the U.S. administration that Scowcroft once served, the panel observed, "If the Security Council had been seriously committed to consolidating peace in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, more lives could have been saved, the Taliban might never have come to power and Al Qaida could have been deprived of its most important sanctuary." Thanks to international mediation and peacekeeping, the panel reports, more civil wars have ended in negotiated settlements in the past 15 years than in the previous two centuries; and international peacekeeping reduces the likelihood of conflict relapses by 70 percent. Afghanistan in 1989 was, tragically, the "control group" that was given a placebo while other countries in conflict got settlements and peacekeepers.

Among the recommendations that bear the footprint of the Afghan experience are those calling for:

• Creation of an ongoing U.N. fund to finance the recurrent expenditures of a nascent post-conflict government. This fund would help avoid the gaps common with ad-hoc funding, which has been likened to passing around a tin cup among donors.
• Assessed U.N. financing for the disarmament and demobilization of armed factions as a core component of peace operations.
• Binding treaty obligations on member states for the marking and tracing, as well as the brokering and transfer, of small arms and light weapons.
  
• U.N. frameworks for minority rights and the protection of democratically elected Governments from unconstitutional overthrow.
  
• Establishment of a commission on peace-building under the Security Council, including donors and states neighboring a country emerging from conflict. The peace-building commission would mobilize international pressures and resources to prod states toward peaceful resolution of mounting internal stresses before violence erupts, and would be better able to keep an eye on continued implementation of post-conflict settlements for years after international peacekeepers go home.

Afghanistan's representatives to the U.N. will likely not play much in the coming debate over strengthening the world's collective security machinery. But Afghans have nevertheless played a significant role in shaping the understanding in major states and regional groupings of what can work—and what won't.

Century Foundation Scholar Jeffrey Laurenti, a senior advisor to the United Nations Foundation, was executive director of policy studies at the United Nations Association of the United States until 2003, and currently serves on the Association's Board of Directors. He is the author of numerous monographs on subjects ranging from international peace and security, terrorism, U.N. reform, to international narcotics policy, and has authored articles for numerous major newspapers and international policy journals.