1/6/2010

“In January [6] 2010, Kai Eide, the UN special representative for Afghanistan, presented a devastating report to the UN Security Council in which he said that the U.S. emphasis on security over social and developmental issues would doom any efforts to stabilize the country. ‘We will fail,’ he warned the UN. ‘What we need is a strategy that is politically and not militarily driven.’ Civilian deaths had risen by 14 percent in 2009, he said, compared to the previous year. ‘If these negative trends are not reversed and reversed soon, there is the danger that the combination of them will become unmanageable.’ The central government was being weakened, he said, as 80 percent of all aid was financed directly by Western governments rather than by Kabul. Eide made it clear that the entire U.S. surge had been put in place in the absence of an overarching political and economic strategy.”

 – Ahmed Rashid, Pakistan on the Brink, Page 101