Luxembourg - The European Union is to pour more money into Afghanistan and follow a new, coordinated strategy in an effort to build a stable state there, EU foreign ministers said Tuesday. The European Commission, the EU's executive, "will increase substantially our assistance to Afghanistan and also Pakistan," EU Foreign Affairs Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said as she arrived for the meeting in Luxembourg.
It is too early to say how substantial the increase will be, she said. The EU is already spending around 1 billion euros (1.5 billion dollars) per year in Afghanistan.
But the bloc is unhappy with progress in the country eight years since the Taliban regime fell, criticizing both its own efforts and those of the Afghan authorities.
"There clearly needs to be a new start in Afghanistan, no question about that," Sweden's Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, who chaired the meeting, said.
In particular, the EU is concerned by the massive rate of fraud in August's Afghan presidential election.
The election "led to a decline in confidence both internally and externally in the efforts in Afghanistan. That must be repaired, and that can only be repaired by a very credible reform programme immediately after the second round of the elections," scheduled for November 7, Bildt said.
To that end, the EU is to send a "big" team to observe the run-off poll between President Hamid Karzai and his main challenger, Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, Ferrero-Waldner said. Dutch Member of the European Parliament Thijs Berman will lead it, she said.
However, the EU is also dissatisfied with its own performance, both in terms of coordination and in the question of training the Afghan police force. The EU approved a 200-strong training mission in 2007 and agree to double its size in 2008, but its member states have so far only managed to deploy around 250 officers.
The mission "had its problems from the beginning," because policemen are harder to find than soldiers, Bildt acknowledged.
"Soldiers are paid to stay in the barracks until something happens, policemen are out on the beat," he said.
To improve the bloc's performance, foreign ministers were set to approve a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan on Tuesday, coordinating and streamlining member states' efforts.
