US fails to reach goals in Afghanistan

With its troops struggling against the growing Taliban insurgency to stabilize Afghanistan, the United States has not reached its civilian goals in the war-ravaged country, a leading American newspaper reported on Monday.
Citing administration officials, The New York Times reported on Sunday that Washington was falling far short of its goals in fighting Afghanistan’s endemic corruption, creating a functioning government and legal system and training a police force.

The officials told the newspaper nearly seven months after President Barack Obama announced a stepped up civilian effort to bolster his deployment of 17,000 additional US troops to Afghanistan, many civil institutions are deteriorating as much as the country’s security.

According to the officials, Afghanistan is now so dangerous that many aid workers cannot travel outside the capital city of Kabul to advise farmers on crops.

Agricultural assistance was a key part of Obama’s announcement in March that he was deploying hundreds of additional civilians to work in the country.

The judiciary is so weak that Afghans are increasingly turning to a shadow Taliban court system because, a senior military official said, “a lot of the rural people see the Taliban justice as at least something,” The Times said.

Administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity also described Obama as impatient with civilian progress so far.  “The president is not satisfied on any of this,” the paper quoted a senior administration official as saying.

Since the beginning of the war in 2001, Washington has allocated nearly $13 billion for civilian aid to Afghanistan, officials at the State Department said.

However, the Defence Department report in January noted that although the Afghan Ministry of Finance is responsible for tracking international aid, there is “no reliable data on the total amount of international assistance that has been pledged or dispersed to the country.”

President Obama is considering troop reinforcements after US and NATO commander General Stanley McChrystal warned that the war could be lost unless more troops are sent to Afghanistan.

Despite the presence of over 100,000 US and NATO ‘boots on the ground’, the escalated militancy has made the current year the deadliest yet for foreign forces, as well as Afghan civilians.

More than 1,500 civilians, the main victims of the controversial war, have been killed and many others wounded in the first six months of 2009, which shows a 24 percent increase compared to the same period last year, according to the latest UN report.