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US Hopes to Pledge More for Afghans

By Matthew Lee

The Bush administration is hoping to pledge almost $4 billion in additional aid for Afghanistan at an international donors conference to be held in Paris in June, a U.S. official said Tuesday.

France will host the meeting on June 14 and has set a broad goal of raising $12 and 15 billion to fund Afghan reconstruction projects through 2014. The United States is looking to contribute a minimum of 25 percent of that total, the official said.

The official, who said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would likely lead the U.S. delegation to the conference, spoke on condition of anonymity because the administration has not yet determined what its pledge will be.

International donors have pledged about $32.7 billion in reconstruction funds for Afghanistan since 2001, of which $21 billion has come from the United States.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner announced last month that France would host the June conference, although the exact date was not settled until recently due to the travel plans of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. France and Germany will serve as co-organizers of the meeting.

The donors will gather as NATO tries to better coordinate military and civilian reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan with the help of new U.N. envoy Kai Eide. Eide attended last week's NATO summit in Romania where France and other nations agreed to deploy more troops to Afghanistan to boost the alliance's 47,000-strong force there.

But more manpower is still needed to fill gaps in the force and international assistance to Afghanistan has been criticized as wasteful, with one umbrella group of aid agencies estimating that 40 percent of donations go to salaries of highly paid foreign experts.

Eide has said one of his key roles will be to see that the aid money is well spent.

Source: ANC News