Afghan aid

Daniel Feldman is the US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

DW: The upcoming Afghanistan donor's conference is the 12th international conference since the first meeting was held 2001 in Bonn, Germany and the signs coming out of Afghanistan ahead of it are not promising. The new president, Ashraf Ghani, not only missed his self-declared goal to form a government within 45 days, but the security situation - even in the capital Kabul - is tenuous as evidenced by the deadly attack on NATO troops recently. Why do you think this latest conference will have a more positive and sustainable impact on the country than the previous attempts?

Daniel Feldman: Let me say that the upcoming conference is not actually a donor's conference. And that is important exactly for the reason that you note. It comes at a very important moment in that the government of national unity has already taken critical steps to promote the rule of law and improve Afghanistan's relations with its neighboring countries. I would strongly disagree that there hasn't been a promising start. I think what you have seen over the last two months of this government of national unity has been quite positive from the fact that it took as one of its very first acts the signing of the NATO SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement - the ed.) and the BSA (Bilateral Security Agreement - the ed.), to actively lobbying both houses of parliament to ratify both of those agreements and then signing them just over this past weekend, to steps it has taken on anti-corruption initiatives including the reopening of Kabul Bank and looking at more meritocratic appointments of civil servants and others, to its engagement with the region as a whole via trips to China, and East and Central Asia to the Gulf and most importantly to Pakistan to look at the broad range of linkages on economic security and other areas where there could be room for progress.

In terms of the formation of the actual government what has been most important is that there has been a broad convergence from both President Ghani and Dr. Abdullah on all these key functional initiatives whether it's on the budget shortfall, on anti-corruption initiatives, on security related issues or the commitment to a reconciliation process. I saw both President Ghani and Dr. Abdullah together recently and they spoke in absolute accord on the fact that they were committed to this government of national unity functioning and delivering benefits for the Afghan people and that they were very close on the appointment of key ministers.

I think the fact that there has been such sustained international commitment to Afghanistan has been enormously important for the remarkable achievements that have actually been accomplished in Afghanistan over the past decade from the growth in social factor indicators, the remarkable growth in education, the fact that a third of school-age children are now girls, the health indicators where the life expectancy for a woman has increased 20 years, the very robust media and the role of women more broadly in society as well as governance issues. There have been remarkably positive indicators which have been accomplished in large part because of the continued international assistance. This London conference is the latest opportunity for the international community to show that we remain committed partners to Afghanistan and this very important moment in Afghanistan's history. It gives President Ghani and Dr. Abdullah the opportunity to outline their vision for Afghanistan's social, political and economic future.

While the London conference may not be officially billed as a donor's conference, Afghanistan of course expects and needs additional billions of dollars to essentially fund its government. Probably the three most crucial issues for the new government to tackle are the still rampant corruption, human rights problems, especially women's rights and of course the dire security situation. Do you from the US perspective expect concrete and verifiable steps to address these issues?

In terms of the pledging conference what we and our partners did in Tokyo was to outline what our long-term commitments would be from 2012 to 2015. And London gives us the opportunity to reaffirm those commitments. So their won't be specific commitments made in terms of numbers provided, but obviously the US has provided billions of dollars of assistance over the last few years and we will reaffirm those commitments over the next few days.

In terms of what we expect from the Afghans is that the Afghan government looks at London as an opportunity to lay out its agenda and start a very real conversation with donors as to how our assistance funds can best support their own reform agenda. This is the way we build increased confidence in increased Afghan sustainability and in turn for sustained assistance from donors.

In terms of anti-corruption in particular, there is no question that corruption remains a fundamental challenge in Afghanistan and that is something that both President Ghani and Dr. Abdullah had been very forthright on and in fact they both made it centerpieces of their campaigns and signed anti-corruption pledges. The Afghan government has already made commitments to tackle corruption and enhance transparency and to be more accountable. But our commitments in Tokyo were based on what we call the mutual accountability framework which we as the international community and the Afghan government agreed to. Per that framework we put in place a larger percentage of our assistance budget in incentive mechanisms that link disbursement to progress on specific reforms including action on corruption. So as this government of national unity takes these steps to shore up governance and fight corruption we want to support this reform agenda. But we will continue to be very vigilant in ensuring that anti-corruption remains a key piece of their reform agenda.

With regard to security we continue to have a very robust discussion with our partners and allies and with Afghanistan's own leaders on how to improve security throughout the country. I would say that Afghan security forces are already providing security for their own people, fighting their own battles against the insurgency, holding gains made by ISAF. They did a very good job in securing the presidential and provincial elections and have taken very heavy casualties in the fighting season this year, but also inflicted very heavy casualties on the Taliban. We want to continue to support their efforts, although we remain very clear-eyed on all the challenges that the Afghans will confront on this one.

On the security issue while the US has extended its combat mission in Afghanistan now, NATO's mission is scheduled to end at the end of the year. Has the US talked to Britain, Germany or other NATO allies about whether they would also reconsider ending their combat role in Afghanistan?

There has been some confusion about that point. The US has not changed its commitment to transition at the end of the year from a combat mission to a non-combat mission. Everything that President Obama laid out in May continues to be the case. He said that we would end our combat mission at the end of 2014 and that is still absolutely the case. He said that we would then embark in 2015 on two limited missions and that it would be a train, advise and assistance mission for the Afghan forces in a non-combat role with NATO and that we would have a limited counter-terrorism force which will continue operations against remnants of al Qaeda beyond 2014. None of that has changed.

The only change or evolution is that over the course of the last few months we have tried to continue to clarify exactly how our forces will operate. And what we said is that in very limited circumstances that the US will be able to provide some enabler support to Afghans to ensure that key strategic interests are met and that we will also continue to do everything possible obviously to preserve the lives of our forces and others and therefore take all self-defense measures necessary. So there is not any shift in terms of policy, it's just a clarification under which circumstances we act with these two more limited missions.