Nice DayOne Day,One Nice!!!!

Searching for survivors after the Office of Humanitarian Coordinator Building in Baghdad, Iraq was bombed in August, 2003. (Source: USAF via WikiMedia Commons)

On Monday, the UN moved non-Afghan staff from its office in Kandahar and ordered Afghan staff there to stay home:

“We at the United Nations keep security measures under constant review. The safety of all our staff is of paramount importance,” McNorten said, adding the agency had 200 local staff in Kandahar.

“Due to the current security situation in Kandahar we have temporarily relocated some of our non-Afghan staff to Kabul. Our Afghan colleagues have been instructed to remain at home for the time being,” he told AFP.

On Tuesday, Reuters characterized the move as a closure of the Kandahar office:

The United Nations said on Tuesday it had temporarily withdrawn foreign staff and shut its mission in Kandahar, the Afghan city where security has deteriorated ahead of a major military offensive.

U.N. spokeswoman Susan Manuel said some foreign staff in the Kandahar office had been moved to the capital Kabul for their safety, and Afghan staff there had been told to stay home.

/snip/

“The security situation has gotten to the point where we needed to withdraw them yesterday,” she said. “We hope people can go back and keep doing what they have been doing. We see it as a very temporary measure.”

It’s hard to see this move as “very temporary”, since the Kandahar offensive is still in its very earliest stages and this same Reuters article suggests that the main part won’t be underway until June.

Despite the UN’s primary role as a peaceful contributor to aid and reconstruction, it often has been a target of insurgents in areas where the presence of US forces is the primary source of instability. The worst example of this occurred in Baghdad in August, 2003:

The U.N. special representative in Iraq and at least 16 others died Tuesday in a bomb explosion that ripped through the organization’s headquarters in Baghdad.

Sergio Vieira de Mello, a veteran U.N. official appointed to the post in May, was killed when a bomb-laden cement truck exploded beneath the window of his office in the Canal Hotel at about 4:30 p.m. [12:30 p.m. GMT; 8:30 a.m. EDT].

He was trapped in the rubble for several hours before he died. At least 100 people were wounded.

How very sad that the planned US offensive in Kandahar now has the UN making a decision that equates the security situation there as potentially as dangerous as that in Baghdad in the summer of 2003. And that decision comes on the heels of the announcement in February that the UN would not participate in the reconstruction in Marjeh because of the manner in which the US has militarized relief operations.

How can we say that the US is improving the situation in Afghanistan if one of the primary results of our actions is to decrease the role of the UN?