Kunduz to The Hague - confusion reigns

Will the Netherlands send police trainers to Afghanistan or won’t it? This week, the Dutch parliament is debating a possible new mission to the province of Kunduz. The outcome is anybody’s guess. On Monday, all kinds of experts travelled to The Hague to inform MPs about the situation in the ravaged country, among them RNW's correspondent in Kabul, Bette Dam, who writes here about the situation and her role.

I had not been back more than two days from the Afghan province of Kunduz when the phone rang at my home in Kabul. An official from the Dutch foreign ministry politely informed me that the ministry would like to invite me to attend a parliamentary hearing in The Hague on the government’s plan to send a new mission to Afghanistan.

Three days later I was at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, answering questions on my mobile phone about the situation in Kunduz. Apparently, just about everybody was desperate to find out all they could about Afghanistan: how do the Afghans view their own country? What do they expect of the Dutch? And first and foremost: how did I feel about the proposed mission?

Clueless
I felt right at home in this excited atmosphere. The atmosphere in Afghanistan is not all that different. Over there, the question of what is best for the country also causes much confusion. There are moments when absolutely nobody seems to have an answer, including the international community, which appears to be increasingly clueless.

It is no wonder that the various political parties in the Dutch parliament should be at loggerheads over Afghanistan after almost ten years of Western intervention. The country is no safer than before and many ambitions such as democracy and women’s rights have not been realised.

I can still remember the 2006 hearing on the Dutch military mission to Uruzgan. Parliament then had only limited knowledge of the subject. No journalist in the region had come round to writing an extensive, well-researched report.

However, when I joined the latest hearing on Monday morning, the tone of the discourse was quite different from 2006. The politicians wanted information on subjects which were essential, but very sensitive to Afghans. No doubt much to the dismay of the Afghan interior minister, who was closely questioned.

One line of questioning went as follows: “Why did you appoint the current Kunduz police commander? He reportedly runs his own militias and is concerned only with furthering his own interests. And why did the commander fail to show up after being invited to The Hague?”

I believe the minister has never experienced anything like this in other NATO member states, where patriotism rules supreme and politicians take it for granted that the troops must support the Karzai government. And last but not least: politicians in other countries are generally much less direct than their Dutch counterparts.

Not just soldiers
The critical questions did not come from the Green Left and the democrat D66 parties alone (both in opposition) but also from MPs of the governing Christian Democrat CDA and coalition-supporter Geert Wilders' Freedom Party, a declared opponent of a new mission to Afghanistan. The prevailing sentiment is that the problems facing Afghanistan cannot be solved simply by sending large numbers of soldiers.

On the contrary, said the director of Cordaid, one of the main beneficiaries of Dutch government subsidies to NGOs: If you are going to send soldiers anyway and concern yourself exclusively with training police officers, we will not come.

The earlier mission in Uruzgan was wholeheartedly supported by Cordaid, but this will not be the case in Kunduz. “Make sure that there is a functioning government and send diplomats instead of soldiers,” said director René Grotenhuis.

Meanwhile, I was growing increasingly nervous. Would I be able to provide a clear picture of the prevailing chaos in Afghanistan? The questions turned out to be more political in nature than I had expected. How did the Netherlands do in Afghanistan? How reliable or unreliable are the Afghans anyway? I forget what questions the Green Left MPs asked me, I must have been too nervous to remember.

Now, a day later, I believe that the hearing has resulted in a more critical and, by extension, more realistic image of what can be achieved in Kunduz than proponents of the mission had hoped for. All we can do is wait for the results of the parliamentary debate on Thursday.

(gsh/tf)