Conference to seek cash for Afghanistan

PARIS (Reuters) - Donor states, military powers andregional players will be seeking a more effective strategy forAfghanistan's development and security as well as pledgingfunds at a conference in Paris on Thursday.

Afghanistan will ask the ministers and other delegates fromaround 65 countries to fund a $50 billion (25.6 billion pounds)five-year development plan, for which donors will demand thatKabul do more to fight corruption in what is one of the world'spoorest states.

Two years after a similar meeting in London outlined aninternational effort to promote security, good governance anddevelopment, envoys will assess "remaining challenges" inAfghanistan, which still suffers daily violence more than sixyears after U.S.-led forces overthrew the Taliban government.

Last year alone, an insurgency by a rejuvenated Talibanaccounted for some 6,000 deaths.

"No one anticipated the levels of violence that we seetoday. That's probably one of the best reasons for reviewingthe London compact -- the basic assumptions in the compact didnot hold true when they were written," said one official whobriefed reporters.

Around 15 international organisations will also take partin the conference, which will be opened by Afghan PresidentHamid Karzai, his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy and U.N.Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

States leading the more than 50,000-strong foreign militarypresence in Afghanistan are expected to attend, as areneighbouring countries including Iran, Pakistan and China.

COORDINATION

Diplomats said envoys would seek to improve coordinationbetween the more than 60 major donor countries andinternational organisations, dozens of aid agencies and foreignforces who are also engaged in reconstruction and developmentwork.

As part of that effort, the conference would strengthen therole of the U.N.'s special envoy for Afghanistan, Kai Eide, incoordinating efforts that include building roads, schools andclinics in the mountainous country, scarred by 30 years of war.

"Coordination is a real problem, all the more so because incomplex situations like Afghanistan, security andreconstruction have to go hand in hand, and so they need to becoordinated," said Etienne de Durand, head of the centre forsecurity studies at the French Institute of InternationalRelations (IFRI).

"That is at the heart of the problem."

Eide has said the international community does not spendits resources efficiently enough, and diplomats said donorswere looking at giving local contractors more autonomy.

Afghanistan depends on aid for 90 percent of its spending.But international donors have fallen behind in paying what theyhave already pledged, and much of the money goes straight backto donor countries in salaries and profits.

The lag in aid is partly due to concerns about corruption.Of the $25 billion pledged for Afghanistan from 2001 until now,only around $15 billion has been spent, aid agencies say.

The Paris conference is unlikely to raise the full $50billion over five years that Afghanistan is looking for.

"It would be surprising if there were not anotherconference on Afghanistan in the next five years, so we areinstead going to focus on what will happen in the first two orthree years," one diplomat involved in preparations said.

The biggest item in the Afghan development plan isinfrastructure, with a price tag of $17 billion, followed bysecurity, with a budget of $14 billion.

Some other parts of the $50 billion package requested bythe Afghans have not been justified in detail, the diplomatsaid.