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US envoy to Afghanistan urges Obama not to send more troops | US Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl W Eikenberry has told President Barack Obama through a leaked cabled message that it would be a mistake to send additional military reinforcements to war-torn Afghanistan, and has reportedly
advised the White House to hold off on such move till the Hamid Karzai government
demonstrates that it will act against corruption and mismanagement. Eikenberry,
who has long experience of Afghanistan and is a recently retired three-star general,said
that there is a dangerous misunderstanding outside Afghanistan about what "corruption
and mismanagement" mean in an Afghan context and a potentially lethal underestimation
of how these impact on American and British forces. Agreeing with Eikenberry's
conclusions, Britain's shadow Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, argued in an article
for The Independent on Sunday that, "we need to recognise that Afghan governance
is likely to look very different from governance as we know it in the West". Eikenberry
has expressed frustration over the lack of US money being allocated for spending
on development and reconstruction after Afghanistan's infrastructure was wrecked
by 30 years of war. The ambassador has not even been able to obtain 2.5 billion
dollars for non-military spending. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries
in the world. Some 12 million out of 27 million Afghans live below the poverty
line on 45 cents a day, according to the UN. Yet the lower estimate for each extra
1,000 US troops is a billion dollars a year. Eikenberry is rightly sceptical about
the dispatch of reinforcements to prop up a regime which is more of a racket than
an administration. |
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