Afghanistan: Slow Progress on Security and Rights
In February 2006, 60 nations convened to compose the Afghanistan Compact, a blueprint for Afghanistan’s transitional government, which outlined the Action Plan for Peace, Reconciliation, and Justice. Yet the Action Plan, first initiated on December 12, 2006, has yet to be fully implemented. A report released by Human Rights Watch at the end of January counted more than 4,400 Afghans who have died in conflict-related violence in 2006, twice as many as in 2005 and more than in any other year since the Taliban was ousted in 2001. The United Nations estimated that the armed conflict has displaced approximately 80,000 people in southern Afghanistan.
The Human Rights Watch report illustrates the ways in which due process is indispensable to a stable Afghanistan and sharply calls for President Karzai’s government to uphold the rule of law and to hold militias and warlords accountable for abuses. Human Rights Watch censured President Hamid Karzai’s government and its international supporters for failing to meet the Afghanistan Compact’s benchmarks on improving human rights and basic security. The organization accused the Afghani government and its international backers of having made insufficient progress in providing basic needs like security, food, electricity, water, and health care to the citizens of Afghanistan.
Human Rights Watch further faulted actors well beyond Afghanistan’s borders. NATO was a pointed target of criticism. Human Rights Watch accused the international signatories of the Afghanistan Compact of failing to disband illegal militias and regional warlords who continue to inflict terror on the Afghani population. In 2006, Human Rights Watch reported, NATO and coalition operations caused the deaths of at least one hundred civilians and damaged the homes and livelihoods of hundreds of families. It called upon NATO member states to provide financial compensation for civilian death, injury, and property damage resulting from its military operations, thus extending ethical and financial accountability to the international community.
Complicating this discussion is a proposal made on January 24, 2007 by several members of Afghanistan’s lower house of parliament (the Wolesi Jirga), all of whom have been implicated in committing human rights abuses, to grant blanket immunity to Afghans accused of perpetrating war crimes. Those who support this proposal cite fears that Afghanistan’s fragile government cannot withstand the divisive repercussions of conceding to war tribunals in a country where few hands remain clean after 25 years of continuous bloodshed.
To quell criticism in Afghanistan and abroad, the Afghan Parliament most recently proposed to add an article to the immunity bill that will safeguard victims’ rights to find justice for committed atrocities. Last month, tens of thousands of supporters of former mujahedeen leaders rallied in Kabul
to support the bill. Caught between mounting internal and external pressures, President Hamid Karzai remains poised to sign the immunity bill into law.
