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KABUL Afghanistan's continued descent into crisis is forcing the country to increasingly rely on humanitarian aid that can only provide short-term relief while leaving the underlying problems unsolved, international officials acknowledged on Saturday, even as they launched a request for $550 million in new funding.

Amid rising violence, economic stagnation, and social upheaval, the United Nations estimates at least 9.3 million Afghans, or nearly a third of the population, will need humanitarian assistance in 2017, a 13 percent increase from last year.

While praising the humanitarian workers who provide vital care around the country, Swedish ambassador to Afghanistan Anders Sjoberg said the continued reliance on their services is a sign of broader failures.

"Let us acknowledge that we've been doing this work in Afghanistan for too long," he said at an event with international and Afghan officials in Kabul on Saturday. "This is a failure in itself. Humanitarian aid is not short-term anymore, it has unfortunately become a Band-Aid for the unresolved conflict."

Since even before a U.S.-led military operation toppled the Taliban regime in 2001, international organizations have helped provide both more short-term humanitarian aid designed to address the most pressing and life-threatening problems, as well as long-term development support.

But last year saw record increases in the number of people displaced by fighting, with at least 626,000 additional people fleeing their homes, compared to around 70,000 in 2010, when the international military effort was at its height.

The number of refugees returning - in many cases forcibly - to Afghanistan from neighboring countries like Pakistan and Iran also spiked dramatically, from 181,000 in 2015 to at least 618,000 in 2016, according to the U.N.

That has led the humanitarian community in Afghanistan to request $550 million to help an expected 5.7 million of the most vulnerable people in 2017, the highest amount of funding requested since 2011.

"We need to link humanitarian and long-term development aid much more effectively and we must not allow humanitarian aid to contribute to cementing the conflict," Sjoberg said, noting that the crisis highlights the need to find a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

Mark Bowden, the U.N.'s humanitarian coordinator, told Reuters in a recent interview that the prolonged violence has created a "vicious cycle" in which Afghanistan struggles to address the root causes of problems like economic malaise, limited access to medical care and education, and malnutrition.

(This version of the story corrects the year when displaced persons levels were at 70,000)

(Reporting by Josh Smith; Editing by Shri Navaratnam)

MOSCOW Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to meet U.S. President Donald Trump but preparations for the possible meeting may take months, not weeks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying by TASS news agency.

KOBLENZ, Germany French far-right leader Marine Le Pen urged European voters to follow the example of Americans and the British and "wake up" in 2017 at a meeting of far-right leaders.

TOKYO, A day after Donald Trump became U.S. President and vowed to put "America First", Asian media decried his isolationist policies, fearing they will chill the global economy and sow widespread international discord.

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Humanitarian support 'Band-Aid' for unresolved Afghanistan conflict, officials say - Reuters

Stars and Stripes

From Tokyo to Afghanistan, world reacts to Trump's 'America first' speech Stars and Stripes "Trump did not mention a word about Afghanistan in his speech and the salaries of the Afghan army and police are paid by the U.S.," he said. He added that if the U.S. stops helping Afghanistan, "our country will again become a sanctuary to terrorists ... and more »

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From Tokyo to Afghanistan, world reacts to Trump's 'America first' speech - Stars and Stripes

Between Christmas and New Years, I led a congressional delegation to Kabul, Afghanistan, where I met with some of our soldiers, and with senior U.S. military and diplomatic leaders to discuss what progress we are or are not making in that war.

What I found is alarming: First, we need to abandon the Obama administrations false narrative that it has been able to reduce U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, now down to 8,400, because our strategy is working. Quite the opposite is true; our strategy is not working. The Taliban are gaining ground and Afghan security forces have suffered heavy casualties. So long as the Taliban sees a path to victory and is gaining territory, as it currently is, it will choose to fight rather than negotiate a peace deal.

As for the troop levels, the Obama administration knows that its self-imposed reduction to an 8,400-troop cap is unrealistic. The reality is that it is playing a shell game with the numbers. The trick is that the Obama administration has reduced our military presence by substituting civilian contractors, who are now performing the identical tasks that previously belonged to the soldiers they replaced. In fact, civilian contractors now greatly outnumber U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan at a much higher cost to the taxpayers and with unequal results.

One example concerns U.S. Army helicopter units. Flight crews are arriving in Afghanistan without their maintenance personnel to help keep under the troop cap. Meanwhile, their maintenance personnel, trained, ready and still on the payroll, are sitting in the United States, with no aircraft to maintain, while taxpayers are paying comparatively more for their civilian replacements to do the same work in a combat zone.

Second: We need to change the rules of engagement (ROE). ROE are the guidelines under which U.S. military forces are permitted to engage an enemy. Under the current ROE, the U.S. military in Afghanistan is free to target al-Qaeda and Islamic State fighters, but they do not have the same latitude in attacking the Taliban, who pose an existential threat to the government of Afghanistan. The current ROE only allows the U.S. military to target Taliban fighters if they pose a direct and immediate threat to U.S. military forces. If they are a threat to Afghan security forces alone, wecannot target them, despite the fact that we are in Afghanistan to support the security forces of the Afghan government. The ROE were recently relaxed, but not nearly enough. They now allow U.S. forces to target the Taliban only if a provincial capital is in danger of falling to the enemy.

I believe Congress needs to address the ROE issue by modifying the current Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which is the legal basis for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. The good news is that the Obama administration has long sought revisions to the AUMF, but the bad news is that addressing the Taliban threat is not one of the revisions it has sought.

This spring, the Taliban will, once again, begin to assemble its forces for the start of the fighting season. The U.S. military must have the appropriate ROE to target them as soon as they begin to mass their fighters and long before they can pose a direct threat to our forces or those of our Afghan allies, if we ever hope to bring this long war to an end.

Afghanistan is now the longest war in U.S. military history and given how this war has been conducted, between artificial troop caps and an ROE that makes winning seem impossible, its not hard to see why. The incoming Trump administration must be honest with the American people about how the war is going; stop playing the political numbers game with U.S. troop levels; and provide our military with an ROE that reflects a strategy for victory and not defeat.

U.S. Representative Mike Coffman is a Marine Corps combat veteran and a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

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Trump should update military policy in Afghanistan - The Denver Post

Fifteen years, thousands of lives and tens of billions of dollars later, the United States has failed to meet most of its key objectives in Afghanistan. Mission failed.

Now what? Our current approach, if allowed to continue, guarantees a chaotic future for Afghanistan and an open door for radical Islamists in Central Asia.

Such a state of affairs would herald a major strategic defeat for the United States. Islamists ultimately seek to seize control in both Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and then expand into Central Asia.

A debacle in Afghanistan means we may face another global conflict. Turkey has morphed into an Islamic state, and the Gulf states are financing radical Sunni terror groups meant to encircle and contain the mullahs in Iranincluding extremists in Afghanistan.

Will the Islamists achieve their objectives? No, and we do not want to find out. They need to be defeated now, while the situation is still manageable. An alternative strategy can avert a strategic catastrophe later.

Our incompetent efforts at Afghan nation building rest on three shaky pillars that need to be rethought:

Highly centralized political decisionmaking.

Pashtun control of the overly powerful central government, the national police and the Afghan National Army.

Excessive deference to Pakistans interests and policies in Afghanistan and the region.

This flawed scheme has its roots in the key events of modern Afghan history: the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (in response to the 9/11 attacks) and the subsequent December 2001 Bonn Agreement to reconstitute the Afghan state structure following the war.

With the defeat of the Taliban, the United States and the UN imposed Afghanistans first president Hamid Karzaia Pashtunon the Afghan people against their will. Later, during a December 2002 constitutional convention in Kabul, the United States and the international community forced Afghans to accept centralized governance despite much internal resistance.

After Karzais departure from the political scene in 2014, the United States tried to rectify the most egregious features of his corrupt rule by imposing an unwieldy power-sharing arrangement involving President Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah in the newly created position of national chief executive. This arrangement has also failed.

It is time to let the Afghan people determine their own future. They should have the freedom to:

Choose a federal-style political system.

Elect leaders without an ethnic litmus test.

Officially recognize the border with Pakistan.

Establish regional militias and constabularies.

The United States and other Western powers must begin to take into account the interests of all regional actors in Afghanistan, including India and Central Asian nations.

Afghans should have access to anti-poppy herbicides. The poppy crop, grown mostly in Pashtun areas, is the backbone of the Pakistan-Taliban terror networks and makes systematic corruption a main force in a large sector of the Afghan economy.

The political system we instituted is designed to enable Kabul to control the country, but it is hopelessly counterproductive. It makes Afghanistan uncontrollable and undermines our natural allies inside Afghanistanthose who are fighting radical Islam, namely the Tajik, the Uzbek, and the Hazara communities who represent the majority of Afghanistans multi-ethnic population. But we persist in weakening them and kowtowing to the Pashtunsthe group from which the overwhelming majority of Islamic radicals emerge.

To this day, the president of Afghanistan appoints all governors, mayors, police chiefsand even elementary school teachers! This not only further encourages corruption, but undermines legitimacy. People resent having their mayors, governors and law enforcement officers imposed on them by the central government. Americans would never tolerate such government overreach.

An example of how our failed policy makes matters worse is the recent attempted assassination of Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum. His followers represent a majority of the people in the provinces of northern Afghanistan.

Recall that after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, General Dostum led Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara local fighters into battle against the Taliban army. They were able to defeat the Taliban army with the help of U.S. air support and embedded U.S. Special Forces. The battle only cost one U.S. casualty. Dostum led those fighters on horseback against Taliban tanks and gun emplacements. Now, he and his heroic horse soldiers are depicted in an equestrian statue known as the Americas Response Monument. The statue is at Ground Zero in New York City.

Today, the north of Afghanistanthe gateway to Central Asiahas become a target for Taliban and ISIS forces. The Afghan National Army has not been able to defeat them, which has prompted now-Vice President Dostum to go to the front himself to rally support and repel the Taliban incursion.

In October, while traveling in convoy through Faryab Province, Dostum and his entourage were ambushed. More than fifty of his bodyguards were killed and many more were wounded. Dostum barely escaped with his life. This attack deserved the strongest of condemnations. It has been hard to discern any negative response by the Obama administration.

Read more:
How to Win in Afghanistan - The National Interest Online

A broad sweep of the history of Pak-Afghan relations since 1947 reveals that at its core, Pakistans policy is dictated by its insecurity vis--vis the Durand Line. Right from 1947, Pakistan was faced with a western border that was disputed by its neighbour just as, in its perceptions, India in the east too was seeking to undo Partition.

Afghanistan was the only country that opposed Pakistans membership to the United Nations on September 30, 1947 on the grounds that treaties with Britain lapsed when a new state, Pakistan, was created. As such, for Afghanistan, the Durand Line that demarcated the border between Afghanistan and British India after the Second Afghan War ceased to exist.

In any case, the Afghans considered the 1878 Treaty of Gandamak and the Durand Agreement of 1893 as unjust agreements imposed on them by Britain, which they were forced to accept after a military defeat. Every Afghan government has hoped to re-annex the territories east of the border, extending up to the River Indus.

For its part, Pakistan treats the Durand Line as a settled fact, especially after King Amanullah Khan confirmed it in 1919 following his defeat by the British. However, Pakistan has always been insecure about the lack of its acceptance by Afghanistan.The insecurity is real given the common Pakhtun population straddling both sides of the Durand Line and about 2025 per cent of Pakistans territory being vulnerable to any Afghan revanchist designs.

Pakistans policies towards Afghanistan are, therefore, geared to get an Afghan government accept the sanctity of the Durand Line as the international border so that no ambiguity is left as far as its western borders are concerned.

According to the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan Mullah Abdul Salam Zaif, Pakistan tried three times to formalise the border during the Taliban rule in Afghanistan but it repeatedly received a negative response. The first time was when Mullah Abdul Raziq was appointed as the interior minister; the second time during thevisit of Pakistans interior minister Moinuddin Haider to Kabul and Kandahar; and the third time during the presidency of General Pervez Musharaf.

The policy of securing the border has two objectives. One, a strong government in Afghanistan would be dangerous as it could try and recover Pakhtun territories lost to the Sikhs and inherited by Pakistan via the British. Therefore, Pakistans policy had to ensure a weak government in Kabul that was dependent on Pakistan. This would be the best guarantee against any revanchist posture.

The second objective is based on Pakistans perception about India. Pakistan views its relations with Afghanistan not merely in a bilateral context but in a South Asian context too, coupled with the perceived relationship that the US has with India and Pakistan.

A nightmare scenario for Pakistan would be for India to encourage the revanchist claims of a strong and friendly (towards India) Afghanistan. This Indo-Afghan alliance would catch Pakistanin a vice-like grip with a hostile India on the east and a hostile Afghanistan on the west.

For this reason, Pakistan has determined that India must not be allowed any space in Afghanistan. Only a proxy government in Kabul, or a weak and dependent Afghan government that toes Pakistans line can ensure this.

Pakistans deep involvement in Afghanistan has intermittently given it a seat on the high table for a while, and as a front-line state brought it financial assistance. Has it brought it more security? In reality, the blowback from Afghanistan has had major adverse consequences for Pakistan.

The grievous miscalculation that Pakistan is making is to envision that a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan will toe its line. If there has been one lesson from Afghan history, it is that no outsider has been able to dominate it for long. This is what the British learnt in the 19th century, the Soviets in the 20th and the US in the 21st.

Pakistan is no different but it will not stop trying due to its obsessive desire to control and install a weak and dependent government in Kabul. In the process, given the cost that it has borne for its Afghan policy, Pakistan is fast becoming the next victim of this "graveyard of empires".

Tactically, a weak and dependent Afghanistan may help temporarily to calm the insecurities of Pakistans military. However, over the long-term, it has brought in its wake refugees, drugs, "Kalashnikov culture", and heightened the religious identity of the Pakhtuns even as the concept of "strategic depth" itself has become redundant given the fact that both India and Pakistan are nuclear weapon states.

It is only when the army accepts Afghanistan as a sovereign country entitled to have its own policies that best serves its own interests, and realises that the Afghans are first and foremost Afghans, that a dent will be made in Pak-Afghan relations. Till then, the blowback from Afghanistan will continue to push Pakistan towards the abyss.

(Re-printed with publisher's permission.)

Also read: How Afghanistan and Taliban have turned against Pakistan

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Pakistan pushing itself towards the abyss with its Afghanistan obsession - DailyO