The London Afghanistan conference is meant to appoint a civilian NATO coordinator to help align the counter-insurgency effort. The well-respected British ambassador in Kabul, Mark Sedwell, is a front-runner (as, incidentally, was Geoff Hoon until he plotted against Gordon Brown).
If the press just publish the news, many questions will go unanswered. That’s not right. For the new post means that a two-year effort to make the UN the main aid coordinator has failed, and the appointee is likely to produce little unless individual NATO allies award him some spending power – a very unlikely scenario.
There is nothing easier than to add a job to solve a problem, and sometimes it is the right thing to do. But often war-torn societies play host to a proliferation of envoys, ambassadors, representatives and so on. They spend most of their time coordinating with each other, each one owning only a small slice of the pie.
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