By Ayesha Ahmad, IOL Washington correspondent 

WASHINGTON, June 4 (IslamOnline) - The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan has been generally successful in its military aspects, but much more needs to be done towards the future of the war-ravaged nation, a panel of experts in Washington said Monday, June 3. 

Despite the fact that the original motivation for the war - to find and punish those deemed responsible for the September 11 terror attacks on the U.S. - has not been fulfilled, panelists speaking at a leading think tank, the Brookings Institute, said that the U.S. military campaign had succeeded in creating an environment hostile to “terrorists” within Afghanistan. 

“We’ve made personal security their first priority,” Michael O’Hanlon, a Brookings senior fellow in foreign policy studies, told IslamOnline after the forum discussion. “I think we’ve been fairly successful… these achievements are significant” within a realistic framework of what can be accomplished in such a war, he said. 

He added that reducing the focus of the war to one person - Osama bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda leader suspected by the U.S. of masterminding the September 11 attacks - was not a measure of success. It would be “hard to say we’ve won it completely," unless several years pass without any major terrorist attacks, he said. 

Speaking on the panel, O’Hanlon said that the mission in Afghanistan was “going about as well as we can hope,” saying that keeping Al-Qaeda “off-balance” was at least some success. 

Another panelist, Mark Schneider, senior vice president of the International Crisis Group (ICG), agreed that the war had “been successful militarily in destroying much of the resource base of Al-Qaeda.” 

But he added that “it’s not just you win this battle and the war is over… It’s a question of militarily confronting Al-Qaeda, but beyond that, creating conditions in countries where there is no haven for [terrorist groups],” - this last point being his definition for success in the war on terror.

The forum discussion, called “The War in Afghanistan: Is it Over? Did the United States Win? What's Next?”, is the latest in a series of forums at Brookings about various aspects of the war. It comes less than two weeks before the convening on June 10 of the first major emergency loya jirga, a “grand national council” of Afghan leaders - a long-awaited benchmark in the progress of post-Taliban Afghanistan. 

During the discussion, panelists largely focused on the “What’s Next?” aspect of the forum's title rather than the military aspects, questioning U.S. and international community roles in rebuilding Afghanistan after years of war and a final substantial bombing campaign by the “anti-terror” coalition. 

As Schneider told the audience, “Is the war over? No. Did the U.S. win? Not yet.” What’s next, he said, is the broader goal of phasing in a democratic system in Afghanistan; he noted that a House International Relations Committee bill asking the administration to expand its security and support efforts would soon be debated before the Senate. 

While U.S. troops remain engaged with Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters, Afghan officials have implored their new allies to increase the presence of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which currently provides security assistance in Kabul.  

Evidence of factional fighting, as well as assaults on both humanitarian workers and ethnic minorities, has emerged in regions under the protection of Afghan warlords, far from ISAF eyes. 

Although the panelists had differing suggestions regarding the priorities of the U.S. role in helping Afghanistan, all agreed that something more needed to be done. 

The forum’s keynote speaker, Martti Ahtisaari, former president of the Republic of Finland and chairman of the ICG, spoke from his experience in the recuperation of Bosnia and Kosovo after the wars during the 1990s that left so much destruction. 

“The immensity of the task of rebuilding Afghanistan… cannot be overstated,” he said, comparing it to ten times the work of reconstruction in Kosovo and adding that seven years after the 1995 Dayton Accords, Bosnia was “still not a fully functioning state.”

Ahtisaari stressed the vital necessity of international efforts and said that the ICG had called on the U.S. to respond to requests for increased security assistance. 

“It is outside support and security that makes the differences between hope and fear, between refugee return and refugee massacre,” he said. “Right now, that support is inadequate.”

“The international community must engage now and decisively to present a common front to Afghan people… must show that it is willing to stay in the thick of a peace process and… nip factional fighting in the bud.” 

Panelist Robert Templar, director of ICG’s Asia Program, praised the “remarkably peaceful” process so far of preparing for the loya jirga, but worried that the outcome of the loya jirga had not yet been considered. 

The council is set to meet for six days, which Templar said was “about the time it would take to get tea” to all 1,600 of the delegates expected there.  

As for security problems, he told the audience that many of the returning refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) were returning to Kabul - almost 40 percent of them, according to panelist Roberta Cohen - because Kabul presented the safest place for people to return. Templar described a “disconnect” between Afghanistan's interim authority, led by Hamid Karzai, and the people and power bases outside of Kabul. 

“To imagine that peace can be enduring in the current situation is very dangerous,” Templar said, stressing the need for addressing all these issues. 

Cohen, a senior foreign policy fellow at Brookings with a specialization in humanitarian issues, warned that “the Western coalition military priorities may be undoing the long-term stability” of the region. 

“We speak about Afghanistan as if it were a post-conflict situation,” she said. 

As more refugees return to Kabul, slums are springing up around the outskirts of the capital, Cohen said; aid agencies, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, are severely under-funded; and with all the talk about making Afghanistan better for its women, security is still the most vital concern for Afghan women. 

Cohen also criticized the setup of the loya jirga, saying that the council is not meant to include warlords who have been associated with war crimes. But such warlords will be present, she said, undermining the important human rights component necessary for any future government. 

O'Hanlon agreed with the panelists who said that more needed to be done, but he favored a “midlevel” involvement – “more than we're doing now, but let's not have any illusions.” 

He felt that a larger U.S. ISAF presence would be unrealistic, but that a few thousand more U.S. troops would be helpful if they could work with regional militias and take on a role of monitoring rather than peacekeeping.