Afghanistan and Iraq: Washington's Two Achilles Tendons

First Afghanistan and now Iraq - cornerstones of Washington's disastrous foreign policy
A report issued by the UNO on Thursday claims that it will be impossible to complete the registration process to hold a general election in Afghanistan, two years after the Loya Jirga, as stipulated by the Conference of Berlin, due to the lack of security in the country.

"It is close to impossible to meet the June date with the current security conditions that do not permit registration teams to go throughout the country", claimed Manoel de Almeida e Silva, of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

This opinion has been backed by Kofi Annan, who describes the 270,000 registrations out of a total of 10 million as being "too low" to meet the targets required by now. The UN Secretary general added that "Direct access to each of up to 10 million eligible voters must be available and lack of access due to insecurity will result in the disenfranchisement of voters".

This being the case, it is clear that NATO's jurisdiction, like that of the Soviet authorities in the 1980s, is limited to the cities and does not extend deep into the countryside, where scores of armed Taleban and drug traffickers roam at will.

Under the Bonn Agreement, in 2001, it was declared that there would be an election within two years of the first Loya Jirga of June 2002. The fact that not even 5% of the voters have been registered, five months from the deadline, indicates that Washington's invasion and NATO's peacekeeping has been far from successful.

Having opened a second front in Iraq, which is running disastrously badly, Washington faces the prospect of a long-term armed conflict with forces it neither understands nor seems willing to dialogue with. From a sociological point of view, the implanting of regimes friendly to Washington but alien to the geographical area in which they have been set up, it would make as much sense to open a kindergarten on Mars.