Leaders Renew Vows of Support for Afghanistan

[unhappycamper]

Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, joined President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for a group photo after a meeting in Kabul.


Leaders Renew Vows of Support for Afghanistan
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and MARK LANDLER
Published: July 20, 2010

KABUL, Afghanistan — American, European and other foreign leaders met here Tuesday to pledge anew their support for Afghanistan, agree to entrust it with more spending decisions, and embrace its president’s commitment for Afghan forces to take charge of security by 2014. They acknowledged that neither the public in their own countries nor the Afghan people had much patience left.

The transition timetable, which President Hamid Karzai outlined last year, is nonbinding and essentially unenforceable, and much depends on how and when responsibilities will be transferred. The conference’s final statement stopped short of any firm commitment to the timetable, instead expressing “support for the president of Afghanistan’s objective.”

The most concrete commitment was a promise to increase to 50 percent the proportion of international development funds to be disbursed through Afghanistan’s own budgeting process, a change to be made over the next two years and a huge shift from the current situation. Now, many donor countries send money directly to individual ministries or to nongovernmental organizations, undercutting the government’s ability to plan how to use the funds. Critics of the move pointed out that most Afghan ministries had proved unable to spend the money they already got.

Mr. Karzai promised to make concrete efforts to reduce corruption and find a way to end the fighting in his country, echoing pledges in the past. He painted a picture of a country that could flourish, lifting its “people from poverty to prosperity and from insecurity to stability.”

“Our vision is to be the peaceful meeting place of civilizations,” he said in an address. “Our location in the center of the new Silk Road makes us a convergence point of regional and global economic interests.”



unhappycamper comment: Our puppet, Mr. Karzai, is sounding like he's been partaking in some of that Afghan brown stuff.

[asjr]

1. Whether we leave one month, one year,

20 years from now the result will be the same. More deaths, more money spent, more heartache. But that country will do whatever it wants to do the way they want to do it. Our money will have rebuilt their country, but what happens to our country? It still bleeds. The idiots who put us there in the first place have washed their hands of it. They will not pay any price at all for ruining us. I often wonder how much brush has been cleared away from the "ranch." We now know for sure Cheney has no heart. All of us are paying the price for the overinflated egos of an administration that should never have happened.