just discovered YORK, March 8 Kyodo...

just discovered YORK, March 8 Kyodo

choiceed editorial excerpts from the U press:

AFGHANISTAN'S LETHAL blow (Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles)

International peacekeepers in Afghanistan have been discussing operating in other cities besides Kabul, the capital, since promptly after the Taliban was ousted from power more than pair years ago. But they haven't gotten same far.

So when five aid workers were kill ed in eastern Afghanistan couple weeks ago and a Turkish engineer working forward a U.S.-funded road plot was killed Friday, colleagues were not surprised. They have watched security fare steadily downhill in much of the geographical division that the United States and other nations one time considered a priority.

A companion to and in a ways a cause of worsening security is Afghanistan's increasing opium production. The Taliban herd women from the workplace and girls from instructs enforced its perverted brand of Islam and made public executions a visit often spectacle.

One of the to a high degree few good things it did was attack opium production, which was nearly stamped abroad before the U.S.-led war that followed the tribe 11, 2001, attacks. But now the poppies flowering across the country and opium production is back to pre-Taliban plains accounting for nearly all the heroin sold across Europe

The warlords haven't helped stop Taliban attacks forward aid workers. Last year 13 aid workers were killed in the land Nine were killed in les than sum of two units weeks last month.

Security is thus poor that only 1 million of the more than 105 million Afghans have been registered to promised There's no sense holding national legislative elections until millions more voter can safely register, without fear of reprisal.

Iraq continues to distract attention from Afghanistan, and the risks of that distraction are growing. NATO should expand its peacekeeping forces beyond Kabul and the U military should provide protection if those forces are attacked.

Security would lease international aid workers move more freely to help rebuild a fatherland shattered by decades of war, repression and the menace of Al Qaeda. All of those threats will get back unless outside forces subdue the current rule by violence.

(March 8)

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