08/21/2002
EDITORIAL NUMBER=0-10080

THE U.S. IN AFGHANISTAN

United States and coalition forces are training Afghan army troops. They are delivering humanitarian assistance, or are helping to improve conditions on the ground so that others can deliver it. And as U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, "It would be accurate to say that the security situation in Afghanistan is the best it’s been probably in close to a quarter of a century."

Today, Afghanistan has a transitional government with a mandate from the loya jirga, Afghanistan’s national representative council. Afghanistan is no longer a safe haven for al-Qaida terrorists. It is a place where women are able to work outside the home again. It is a place where girls as well as boys can go to school again. And executions in soccer stadiums as well as a lot of other terror tactics by the now deposed Taleban have stopped. Over a million Afghan refugees have returned home.

An international security force is providing security in and around Kabul, the Afghan capital.

"The real problem," said Mr. Rumsfeld, "is not security. It is, rather, the challenge of bolstering...the new central government, and the fact that the international community is not yet delivering the level of assistance to President [Hamid] Karzai and his team." Five-billion dollars in aid has been pledged. But, said Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, "the money has not been coming in as fast as it needs to come in.... It all helps, but it does need to be increased."

As Mr. Rumsfeld pointed out, creating a new government from top to bottom is not easy. In Afghanistan, he said, "the ministers don’t have a structure under them so that they can actually govern the country. Nor do they have the budgets necessary to conduct a government. And it simply takes time to get that infrastructure in place so that they can actually function as a working government as opposed to a government essentially in name."

The U.S. is confident that progress is being made, if slowly. The U.S. is also confident, as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said, that Afghanistan will "achieve effective self-government and self-sufficiency and never again become a haven for terrorists."