Kandahar families offered a safe haven from the Taleban

Published on Thursday 1 July 2010 15:23

AFGHAN officials in the besieged city of Kandahar are being moved into heavily fortified compounds - with their families - in a bid to stem a wave of Taleban assassinations threatening to undermine Nato's make-or-break summer campaign.

Major General Nick Carter, the British commander in southern Afghanistan, said Nato's main objective was to "connect the Afghan government to its population" this summer. There is growing disquiet over the slow pace of progress, which Maj Gen Carter blamed on the "relatively weak Afghan human capacity".

"We have a reasonable plan, which I think we are executing as effectively as we can," he said. "The risk to it is human capacity. As a consequence, one of my key priorities is to try and protect what Afghan human capacity we have at the moment, particularly in terms of government officials and people working for it."

The governor's office said 400 civil servants, tribal elders and village representatives have been killed in Kandahar in the past eight years. The number of murders has spiked recently.

In president Hamid Karzai's home district of Dand, as many as nine village elders were murdered since the spring, officials said. The governor of Arghandab District, Haji Abdul Jabbar, was killed by a remote control bomb in Kandahar City, as he drove home earlier this month.

Their deaths are seen as the tip of an iceberg. Countless others have been intimidated into quitting their posts or collaborating with insurgents. The result is a government that's woefully unrepresentative and run by warlords - notably the president's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai.

"As you come out of chaos and war, inevitably it's the strongmen who prevail at the beginning and over time what has to happen is the population has to have a say," Maj Gen Carter said. "The definition of success … is a community council or shura that is representative of the population as a whole. Now you get to that point once you have convinced the people that they are not going to be intimidated."

Asked if the president's brother was "part of the solution," Maj Gen Carter replied: "He is in an elected position and he has a formal constitutional position in relation to governance here."

Afghan officials conceded more security would increase the barriers between the administration and its people, but insisted it was the only way to keep staff safe.

"Of course, it will put a distance between the government and the people, but we have to do it for security," the governor's spokesman Zalmai Ayoubi said.

The plan to protect civil servants stops short of creating a Baghdad-style Green zone, but officials said up to 100 officials and their families would be moved into secure, gated communities in the coming weeks.

Mr Ayoubi said work was already underway to refurbish around ten large compounds, dotted throughout the city.