Calls for Afghan cooperation with its neighbours

Source: The European Weekly - http://www.neurope.eu/view_news.php?id=70207
10/02/2007

Calls for Afghan cooperation with its neighbors

BELGIUM

10 February 2007 - Issue : 716

	Belgian Foreign Minister Karel De Gucht has expressed optimism that the fight against drugs in Afghanistan can be won. “It cannot be that we are stabilising Afghanistan for drug production to flourish. The fight against drugs in Pakistan and Turkey has shown that this is a war that can be won,” Gucht told a conference on Afghanistan in Brussels on February.
Belgium’s Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht arrives at the general affairs council, at the EU headquarters in Brussels, January 22, 2007*

Noting that relations between Kabuland Islamabad are strained, De Gucht called for better cooperation between the two Muslim countries. Afghanistan also needs to improve cooperation with its neighbors Iran, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, said the Belgian foreign minister, noting that a major part of narcotic traffic makes its way through these three countries.

He said that NATO's ISAF mission in Afghanistan cannot and should not stay for decades. "Together we will have to work for an exit strategy for ISAF," he said.

The two-day conference was entitled "Security and Development: the Case of Afghanistan," and included ministers, officials and security experts from Europe and Afghanistan.

Hedayat Amin Arsala, senior minister in the Afghan government, said Aghanistan during the last five years had made substantial progress and improvements. However, he said that Afghanistan still faces numerous problems such as terrorism, drugs and extreme poverty.

"These three things are interlinked and, therefore, our approach has to be an interlinked approach. We have to tackle all the three things at the same time," he said. "Drug trafficking is one of the biggest enemies of Afghanistan because those who are involved in drug trafficking do not want stability in Afghanistan."

Meanwhile, Belgian Minister of Development Cooperation Armand De Decker warned that if international actions fail to improve the living conditions of the Afghan people "there will be a high risk that the people will reject the presence of international forces and will turn in despair towards the Taliban, whose downfall has been hailed as a liberation."

The conference was organised in cooperation with the Egmont Institute, which is Belgium's Royal Institute of International Relations.