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Afghanistan Wins Aid Pledges at Brussels Talks
[AnNahar] World powers pledged billions of dollars for war-ravaged Afghanistan until 2020 at talks in Brussels on Wednesday amid fresh calls for the Taliban to make peace 15 years after they were driven from power.

Afghanistan's President Ashraf Ghani
...former chancellor of Kabul University, now president of Afghanistan. Before returning to Afghanistan in 2002 he was a scholar of political science and anthropology. He worked at the World Bank working on international development assistance. As Finance Minister of Afghanistan between July 2002 and December 2004, he led Afghanistan's attempted economic recovery until the Karzais stole all the money. ..
met officials from more than 70 countries and international groups, including U.S. Secretary of State John F. I was in Vietnam, you know Kerry
Former Senator-for-Life from Massachussetts, self-defined war hero, speaker of French, owner of a lucky hat, conqueror of Cambodia, and current Secretary of State...
and U.N. chief the ephemeral Ban Ki-moon, at the conference.

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini announced that the 28-nation bloc will pledge 1.2 billion euros ($1.5 billion) a year and said "I would expect similar levels of engagement from our partners."

The United States and the EU currently each provide about a third of all international aid to Afghanistan, with Japan the next largest donor.

For security, NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It's headquartered in Belgium. That sez it all....
nations have already committed at a summit in Warsaw in July to maintain troop numbers in Afghanistan and uphold a pledge of $5 billion a year to fund local forces until 2020.

Afghanistan remains dependent on foreign aid and a limited NATO military presence, despite having improved key life indicators including maternal mortality and lifespan.

But the brutal war in Syria and the worst migration crisis since World War II have left Afghanistan facing competition for dwindling international donor funds.

Total pledges in Brussels looked set to fall short of the four billion dollars a year for four years that the international community promised for Afghanistan at the last such conference in Tokyo in 2012.

The United States has spent around $110 billion on Afghanistan's reconstruction since 2001, more than the cost of the Marshall Plan that rebuilt a devastated Europe after World War II, but with limited results.

On the eve of the conference the EU and Kabul
...the capital of Afghanistan. Home to continuous fighting from 1992 to 1996 between the forces of would-be strongman and Pak ISI/Jamaat-e-Islami sock puppet Gulbuddin Hekmayar and the Northern Alliance, a period which won Hek the title Most Evil Man in the World and didn't do much for the reputations of the Northern Alliance guys either....
published a controversial deal to speed up Afghanistan's taking back of migrants colonists from the Europe, which faces its biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

The plan involves possibly building a dedicated terminal for deportees at Kabul airport. EU officials have however denied that aid pledges will depend on Kabul accepting the return of 80,000 asylum-seekers.
Posted by: trailing wife 2016-10-07
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=469569