Within five years, "Afghanistan should be able to provide security for its people so we are no longer a burden on the shoulders of the international community," President Hamid Karzai said.
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai said Sunday he is looking at instituting conscription to meet the goals of building an army of sufficient size to provide security without international help.
Mr. Karzai told a conference of the world’s top defence officials in Munich that he wants to build and train an army and police force of 3,00,000 by 2012 that will be able to provide security for Afghanistan by 2015 without external help.
Within five years, “Afghanistan should be able to provide security for its people so we are no longer a burden on the shoulders of the international community,” he said.
Mr. Karzai indicated, however, that international troops would still be needed, saying that the “war on terrorism ... is an issue separate from this security arrangement in Afghanistan.”
He suggested that Afghanistan’s volunteer system may not be able to provide the manpower necessary to meet his goals, and that an army of citizen soldiers could have other advantages.
“For the past many years I’ve been visited by Afghan community leaders who are advising me to go back to some form of conscription for the Afghan army so the young boys of the Afghanistan countryside can ... come to training centres, get acquainted with the rest of the country, get familiarized with other young men around the country and learn something and go back home,” he said.
“This will be philosophically one of our pursuits as we move ahead into the future in consultation with the Afghan people.”
The idea of conscription has been floated before and has met with lukewarm reaction in Afghanistan.
Last week, Afghan Defence Minister Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak said the army had no shortage of recruits and that there was no need to force people to serve. He said the government could not implement conscription “in the current Afghan situation” but left open whether it could be instituted in the future.
