Mfr Nara- Na- Dos- Kabul Briefing- 10-21-03- 01199

..cOl'iF-IBH-HIAL

MEMORANDUM Interviewee: Date: Location: Participants:

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FOR THE RECORD

Country Team Briefing, Embassy Kabul October 21, 2003 U.S. Embassy, Kabul Commission Del, Charge David Sedney, CFC Commander, General Barno and team Zelikow

Drafted by:

Sedney led off by emphasizing the whole mission felt their goal was to prevent another 9/11. That started with a stable and secure government in Afghanistan. Because so many of our other meetings would involve security issues, we focused in this meeting on political and economic topics. Discussion led off with a description of the process underway to write a constitution for Afghanistan and elect a constitutional government next year. The next key event in that process would be the constitutionalloya jirga (CLl) in December. They would review the work of the Constitutional Commission, made of VP Sharoni and 34 others representing a cross-section of groups, but including many people with a legal background. UNAMA provided the . secretariat. International advisers were Barnett Rubin (US), Carcassonne (sp.? FR), and Yashkai (sp.? Asian, multinatl bkgrd). For the CLl local shuras would select district delegates. They would select reps to regional shuras. There would be about 13,000 such regional delegates for the whole country. Those selections/elections had begun, with about 500 selected so far. The regional shuras would select the delegates to the CLl Key concerns in the constitution drafting process were the nature of the government (role of president, vice presidents, and prime minister) and religion. In nature of the government the key issue (we learned later) seems to be the high level division of power, with factions emerging especially between the Taj ik/Panj shiri war veterans led by VP Fahim Khan and the Pashtun expatriate technocrats led by people like the Finance Minister. On the religion issue, the US was pushing for a position similar to the 1964 constitution that might recognize Islam as the religion of Afghanistan but with a clause fully tolerating the practice of other beliefs. Turning to the development program, there were many issues. We tried to clarify a few key numbers: •

About $360 million was spent on US development assistance in FY 03.

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The supplemental for FY 04 would increase outlays up to $878m-l.3b in 04. Plus another $350m was being reprogrammed from other accounts.

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Total international commitments (not pledges) were thus headed toward about $2.3b, with the US putting in slightly more than half that number.

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Other key contributors were the EU, World Bank, ADB, Japan, the Dutch, and Norway.

In other words, after a slow start, the US was now weighing in with a massive program of planned aid. We asked about the priorities for assistance. We received a long list from the AID rep.

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Comment: The Embassy is obviously understaffed to an almost absurd degre~1 The civilian part of this multibillion dollar nation bUildi:ri""g-e"lll!lU"'o-rt"'l-s -n-ow .......se-m-g-r-a-n .... by about 15 people. 9f course they are relying on contractors to actually mioage all the projects ....

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9/11 Classified

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