The United Nations in Afghanistan

By Siddharth Deva

There is a frenzy of activity in the United Nations as it gears up for a central role in the political affairs of Afghanistan. It has an opportunity - once more - to make amends for past policies that have largely failed to deliver on Afghanistan, and this time it must succeed in bringing peace and order to a country and a people ravaged by over 20 years of war and devastation.

If the U.N. is determined to succeed this time, it should draw lessons from its efforts over the past 20 years to find a solution to the conflict in Afghanistan.

The U.N.'s political role in Afghanistan has had a number of guises and a motley crew to run it. Today, its role in Afghanistan falls under the United Nations Special Mission to Afghanistan (UNSMA). In 1988, the United Nations Good Offices Mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan (UNGOMAP) was set up to monitor the implementation of the Geneva Accords which supposedly were the basis for the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. UNGOMAP was scrapped two years later, and in its place came the Office of the Secretary General in Afghanistan and Pakistan (OSGAP) designed to establish an interim Government.

Mr. Javier Perez de Cuellar, who later became the U.N. Secretary General, was the first of a string of U.N. special representatives or envoys to Afghanistan. He lasted barely a year. There have been six others since. Mr. Diego Cordovez, who later became the Foreign Minister of Ecuador, resigned in 1988; Mr. Benan Sevan is remembered mainly for sheltering Najibullah, the Communist President, who was disliked by most Afghans, and whose battered body was later hung in public in Kabul's Ariana Square. Mr. Mahmoud Mestiri was a disaster from the start and he spearheaded a campaign against the Rabbani Government. Mr. Lakdhar Brahimi, who has just been reappointed by Mr. Annan as his special envoy to Afghanistan, tried unsuccessfully in 1999 to engineer a power-sharing agreement between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. Mr. Fransesc Vendrell, the current special representative, realised that a peacemaking process for Afghanistan required incentives, not just sanctions. But despite three different guises, seven special representatives and two decades in Afghanistan, the U.N. has failed so far to find a political solution for this country.

There are four main reasons why the U.N. has been unable to sort out the mess. First, the U.N. never really sought a comprehensive solution to the Afghan problem. This lack of conviction can be traced to the Geneva Accords of the 1980s which essentially provided a diplomatic cover for the Soviets to withdraw, rather than a blueprint for a political settlement in Afghanistan. In more recent years, the United Nations has been obsessed with a broad-based Government in Afghanistan when the concern should really have been on the nature, structure and functions of the Afghan state, and its resurrection. Second, the U.N. misunderstood over and over again the correlation of forces in Afghanistan and simply could not grasp the dynamic nature of the Afghan conflict, and thereby did not engage with key parties in negotiations. It is well known that the U.N. in the early 1990s bypassed prominent commanders who had struggled against the Soviet Union from Afghanistan itself. They became suspicious of the U.N.'s plans to create an interim government and refused to have anything to do with it. Third, the U.N. turned a blind eye to Russia, Iran and Pakistan's continued military support to their Afghan proxies, which destablised its own efforts to bring peace to the country. And finally, it was unable to keep the United States and Russia committed to a political solution to Afghanistan which required long-term thinking and substantial funding to back the political process. So, for the last few years, humanitarianism has been the main response to a failed state, which went largely unquestioned by the bulk of the international community. The U.N. became a cover for inaction on the part of the European Union, the U.S. and Russia.

There never was, nor will there ever be a magical solution to the Afghan problem. What it requires is a serious policy to help Afghanistan, backed by serious money and a long- term commitment to help rebuild the Afghan state. The U.N. has another chance in Afghanistan, and this time its efforts must bear fruit.

(The writer is Policy Adviser for South Asia in Oxfam.)

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