Afghanistan risks falling into civil and regional war if all US and international troops leave as planned by the end of 2014, the conflict-wracked state’s former interior minister warned on Thursday. Mohammad Haneef Atmar, speaking in Washington, also said Kabul’s efforts to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, which the United States sees as crucial to a peace settlement, had failed to attract hard-core insurgents. Atmar said it was wrong to assume that violence would taper off after a scheduled 2014 pullout of NATO forces, and that 20,000-30,000 foreign soldiers should remain. “With 450,000, we have a problem at the moment,” he told an audience at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies think-tank, referring to the combined numbers of Afghan security forces and international troops. The United States has increasingly been looking for a negotiated end to the Afghan conflict given that the insurgency remains virulent more than 10 years after the September 11 attacks prompted American forces to invade the country. Atmar said Afghanistan would only succeed if security gains in hotspots such as Kandahar are built upon and forecast that the Kabul government could fall.
“Why would it fall? If there is a premature drawdown of troops, if there is a significant reduction of economic assistance… and if the vacuum created is to be filled by regional actors,” he said, alluding to Afghanistan’s neighbors Pakistan, Iran, Russia and India. “If these things happen we will fall. There will be a perfect scenario for a regional wargame and it will be a proxy-led civil war in Afghanistan which would lead to the disintegration of Afghanistan,” he said, noting that such conditions would provide more safe havens for anti-American insurgents.
Afghanistan faces ‘regional war’ if NATO troops go
