By Louis Charbonneau UNITED NATIONS, March 12 (Reuters) - The Afghan insurgency has been much worse than expected and it is time to sharpen the U.N. mandate if international efforts to stabilize Afghanistan are to succeed, a top U.N. official said on Wednesday. "We face an insurgency that has proven to be more resilient than we expected and more ruthless than we ever imagined," U.N. under-secretary-general for peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guehenno told the Security Council at an open debate on extending the U.N. mandate in Afghanistan. He also told the council that governmental institutions in Afghanistan remained fragile, partly due to widespread corruption. Illicit opium trade continued to flourish and has undermined the government by helping fund Taliban insurgents. "The international community, while both committed and generous, has also been, too often, insufficiently united on key issues of policy," Guehenno said. "The United Nations bears its own share of responsibility for deficiencies in international coordination," he said. Despite these problems, Guehenno said there was no need to expand the powers or mandate of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan, known as UNAMA. Rather it needed to be "sharpened", he said. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in his latest report to the Security Council that militant attacks in Afghanistan had increased dramatically last year, with civilians accounting for nearly a fifth of people killed. To address the shortcomings in efforts to stabilize Afghanistan, Ban recommended increased coordination between the international community, Afghan government and NATO-led ISAF forces, and expanding U.N. activities across Afghanistan. NEW RESOLUTION DRAFTED Italy has drafted a Security Council resolution and circulated it to council members. It is expected to be put to a vote on March 20, three days before UNAMA's mandate expires. At the center of the draft resolution is a description of the role of the new top U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, a post Ban asked Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide to fill. One of the problems in Afghanistan, Western diplomats say, is that the most high-profile international figures in the country have until now been been military commanders and not the civilian head of UNAMA, currently Tom Koenigs of Germany. As the top U.N. envoy in Afghanistan, diplomats said Eide would have to take on a more active role than Koenigs did in coordinating international civilian and military activities and in working with the government. He would also want to boost cooperation with Afghanistan's volatile neighbor Pakistan. The draft resolution, obtained by Reuters, hints at a number of inadequacies in Western efforts in Afghanistan. It calls for "more coherent support by the international community to the Afghan government." It also calls for "strengthened and expanded (U.N.) presence throughout the country" and asks UNAMA to "strengthen the cooperation with ISAF at all levels." Diplomats said all of these are areas where improvements are sorely needed. Western diplomats said those elements were key to the "sharpening" of the U.N. mandate and hoped they would help Eide to coordinate the work of the U.N., NATO and aid agencies. Hamid Karzai accepted Eide after rejecting British candidate Paddy Ashdown, who diplomats said had wanted a broader mandate in Afghanistan. But they said Eide's role was essentially the same as what had been agreed for Ashdown. The United States led an invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to oust the Taliban government after the Sept. 11 attacks. (Editing by Philip Barbara)
Canadian soldiers and Afghan policemen keep watch at scene of a suicide bomb attack in Kandahar March 12, 2008. A suicide car bomber hit a NATO-led convoy on Wednesday in Afghanistan's ...
