Afghans Will Pay a Price for War's Loss

Debate about the risks faced by the international community in supporting President Hamid Karzai’s “corrupt” Afghan government regularly omits the people that matter most: Afghans.

Military losses being suffered by Britain, the United States and other coalition forces are tragic - each death and injury a terrible blow within a real community, of families, friends and comrades. The cumulative impact on a nation is clearly significant, and the collective mood in Britain, for example, is more sombre by the week.

Yet what of the Afghan people? Those we rarely see, excepting the occasional refugee, diplomatic or academic in a television studio discussion in the West? At Amnesty we hear time and time again from Afghans - professionals, traders, housewives, the nameless many - saying what they need most is peace, justice and security. This sentiment hasn’t changed since early 2002, when I first travelled through Afghanistan.

Amnesty’s proposal for a successful Afghanistan strategy is simple: focus on the well-being of Afghan people and not on political expediency. What are Afghans really going through? Consider this: if after eight long years the strain is evident in the home countries of the 42-nation NATO coalition, imagine how much worse it is for millions of Afghans. This “American period” is for them only a fraction of the 30 years of conflict and turmoil they’ve already endured.