UN Envoy: International Community Expects Afghanistan Not to Collapse

A top UN envoy, responding to recent dire predictions for Afghanistan’s future, argued that the war-torn country is expected to improve and will continue to receive lots of support from the international community.

“The international community is ready to do everything possible to support Afghanistan and frankly, to help Afghanistan not lapse into these kind of doom-and-gloom scenarios that are coming from different places,” said John Kubis, a UN envoy to Afghanistan.

Kubis was responding to recent predictions, notably one from the non-partisan International Crisis Group, that said the US-backed Afghan government “could collapse” following NATO’s planned 2014 withdrawal.

The report says that fraudulent presidential elections in Afghanistan in 2014 are expected and the instability that this is sure to cause could prove terminal for the Afghan government, which barely controls much of the country outside Kabul, the capital.

“The Afghan army and police are overwhelmed and underprepared for the transition,” the report says, referring to the complete failure of the Obama administration’s primary counter-insurgency strategy of building up indigenous forces to serve as a bulwark to the Taliban in the absence of US-NATO occupation.

Also, as the Associated Press reported this week, “The outgoing head of the Red Cross delegation in Afghanistan says civilians are in greater danger with less hope for peace than when he arrived on his job seven years ago.”

But Kubis says the Kabul government will continue to be supported internationally, a “commitment [that] is based not on the expectation of seeing Afghanistan collapsing after 2014,” but that “Afghanistan will work, will develop with problems.”

Despite the rare optimism, many experts now believe Afghanistan is headed for civil war and the government in Kabul is too weak to project much power outside the capital. Americans across the political spectrum have nearly given up on the purpose of the war, and with both candidates for president seemingly waiting out until 2014, the failure is widely accepted.