The Challenges of Reconstruction in Afghanistan - Judah Grunstein, World Politics Review.
With all eyes on London and the high-profile Afghanistan Conference, a quieter gathering that took place this week in Prague might have shed more light on the opportunities, challenges and uncertainty that lie ahead for the war-torn country.
The conference, co-sponsored by the Prague Security Studies Institute and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, brought together military and civilian practitioners of reconstruction and development work in Afghanistan, ostensibly to discuss the future of Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan. But the wide-ranging panel discussions also addressed the broader challenges of reconstruction, as well as the urgent need for overcoming them, if the effort to stabilize Afghanistan is to be successful.
PRTs emerged in Afghanistan in 2003 as an ad hoc response to the inherent security challenges presented by reconstruction work in an ongoing conflict zone. Made up of personnel from both civilian development agencies and the military, they represented the first efforts at interagency, whole-of-government stability operations upon which a counterinsurgency approach depends. Their ability to respond quickly to local needs by bypassing bureaucratic and chain-of-command bottlenecks soon led to wider applications. Now, as Mark Ward, special adviser on development to the chief of the U.N.'s Afghanistan mission, observed, with $1 billion in funding and roughly 30 teams operating in the country, the PRTs are collectively one of the biggest international aid donors to Afghanistan...
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U.S. Marines Make Fragile Progress in Helmand - Balint Szlanko, World Politics Review.
Marine Capt. Scott Cuomo of Fox company, 2nd battalion, 2nd Marine regiment, must have felt very confident. How else to explain his climbing into an armorless Afghan army truck -- a coffin on four wheels -- next to Haji Abdullah Jan, the Afghan district governor, with only a few Afghan army soldiers for protection, to speed down empty dirt roads almost certainly mined by the Taliban?
But Cuomo's confidence is not misplaced. The men make it safely to their destination: a destroyed compound beside which the barren, twisted remains of three dead trees point grotesquely to the sky. The district governor, clearly moved, walks to the building. It is his house, which he is visiting for the first time in four years because of the war. Cuomo grins excitedly. The governor is home.
"This is a big success," Cuomo says. "It may be harder to quantify than counting the number of bad guys we have killed, but it is success."
Garmsir district lies in the southern-central part of Helmand, Afghanistan's most war-torn province and home to a massive, opium-fed insurgency. Since 2006, most of the district had been Taliban country. Forays by the British army, until recently the NATO nation in charge of Helmand, had never quite managed to dislodge the insurgents, in part because the British never had enough troops to hold and build the areas that they had cleared of insurgents...
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