Afghanistan must not be forgotten amid more pressing crises, warns UN envoy

29 June 2015 – The international community must not take its “eye off the ball” when it comes to Afghanistan, the top United Nations envoy there has warned, noting that the country faces numerous challenges that will take quite a bit of time to tackle.

Speaking to the UN News Centre, Mr. Haysom – the Secretary-General’s Special Representative and head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) – said it would be “disastrous” if the country was forgotten amid today’s more pressing crises. Although there has been progress in meeting the country’s challenges in the economic, security and political fields, failure in any one of these areas would have consequences for the overall success of the Afghan transition.

Nicholas Haysom: Afghans are resilient. For 30 years they have been living in an unstable, insecure position. While they are resilient, there needs to be cause for hope. With hope, I think people can withstand quite difficult circumstances. So really, one is in the business of measuring, as it were, a ‘hope barometer,’ which looks at a wide range of factors including the state of the economy, the functioning of government and whether they think things are generally moving in the right direction.

Nicholas Haysom: I think we’re quite evenly balanced. There is cause for concern, which the Afghans express. But on the other hand, things are more or less on track. I think it would be accurate to say that Afghanistan is muddling through. And I would also not undervalue that. It may sound as if I’m dropping the bar but the truth is that Afghanistan first has to address serious economic problems. It has to sustain its overall coherence in its security agencies and security response. It has to make progress politically, which, given tensions within Government and the challenges facing it, are quite significant.

While they are, more or less, meeting the benchmarks and may be modestly succeeding them, I think that everyone is aware that if something were to go badly wrong in any one of those areas – if the government was to fall apart for some reason, the economy was to dip badly or there was to be some serious security reverses – all of those would go into the mix. -  Read More at Afghanistan must not be forgotten

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