Ladies and gentlemen, let us start. Unfortunately we have a very tight schedule and the delegation has to leave at exactly 3.45pm. So let me begin by saying that the Security Council has finished today a very interesting and very successful visit to Afghanistan.

At the outset I first of all would like to thank the Special Representative of the Secretary-General [Lakhdar Brahimi] for having prepared this visit with a very tight and exhausting but also very informative programme. I think after having had so many discussions and having seen so much we go home enriched and with lots of information that you can only get in the country. So thank you very much Lakhdar for having prepared this visit and we would also like to thank all the collaborators of UNAMA who have been working hard as an additional burden to make this visit possible.

Secondly, I also would like to thank the Government of Afghanistan and in particular President [Hamid] Karzai for having invited us for this visit and having made it possible to have a discussion with him and most of the ministers of his cabinet and to make it possible also to go to the provinces, that is to Herat and to Mazar-e-Sharif.

Now the Security Council has come to Afghanistan to inform itself on the ground about the progress that has been made in the implementation of the Bonn Agreement. The Security Council also wanted to deliver a few important messages to the Afghan people.

The message to the Afghan people was that the Security Council and the international community it represents are in support of the political and economic reconstruction of Afghanistan. The second message we wanted to deliver was that the Government of Afghanistan could count on the international community’s support in implementing the Bonn Process. The Security Council is looking forward to the discussion that we will have now on the draft constitution and we hope that the Loya Jirga in December will be able to adopt it speedily so that the elections planned for next year can be organized and will be done successfully.

We also wanted to bring the message that the Security Council and the international community expects that everybody in the country especially the factional leaders, the leaders in the provinces and the warlords cooperate with the government in Kabul in the implementation of the Bonn Agreement. We feel that factional controversies, factional fighting should be a matter of the past and not a matter of the future and I think we were successful in delivering this message especially in talks in Mazar-e-Sharif with Mr. Dostum and Mr. Atta who after the talks and discussions with the Security Council publicly announced that they were in support of the Karzai government in Kabul which we welcome.

We also wanted to make clear that security is being enhanced and supported by the international community, by the Security Council. As you all know only recently the Security Council took the decision to expand the mandate of ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] in order to enable us to get more areas of security all over the country and to establish more PRTs, provincial reconstruction teams, in other parts of the country. And as you know the first soldiers of the new PRT in Kunduz, about 50 Germans have already arrived here and full operational ability will be reached early next year with anything between 230 and 450 soldiers. We also have made clear in many discussions not only with government officials but also with members of civil society, with members of the human rights NGOs and especially with members of women’s human rights NGOs that we feel that a stable society and a stable state with institutions as well as with an economic and political set up can only be achieved if you have the rule of law. Especially in the north we learnt that there the rule of the gun has to be changed into the rule of law. All of this can only be possible if basic human rights and especially the rights of women are respected. In this country women of course have gone through considerable suffering in the past decades and it is not only important for the stability of the society and of the observance of human rights, to give women their rightful place in society in politics and in the economy. Women are also a valuable human resource that should not be wasted but would be needed in the reconstruction effort of Afghanistan. The political aspect is [that] if you don’t have women register for the elections you cut your votes in half. So we had very interesting talks with representatives of women’s organizations and we were assured by these ladies that they would certainly bring progress in what they are trying to achieve.

The main conclusion I think was that a lot of success has been achieved, a lot of progress has been made in the country in all aspects, in the political, in the economic and in the social fields, but on the other hand a lot of tasks are still ahead. A difficult way still lies ahead for the country, for its leaders and for its institutions. The core problem that we met in all the discussions whether it was with politicians, local leaders, warlords, NGOs, the key question appeared to us to be security and the security aspect was dominating all our discussions. We hope these discussions will contribute to giving the Security Council a clearer view of what is necessary and how the United Nations and the international community can help. What appeared obvious to us was that security could only be ensured with a comprehensive strategy, not only police and military. It is necessary that the country gets a united army and that the country also gets a national police force and some members, many members of the Security Council are already working on this. But on the other hand the reforms have to be carried out and carried further as they have been so far especially in the Defence Ministry and what we call the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) which has to be undertaken not only because it is part of the Bonn Agreement. For example in the Bonn Agreement Annex One already two years old, it was said that all military units have to be withdrawn from Kabul and its environs where ISAF has taken charge of this area. This has not yet been achieved and I think it is urgent to do this before we get into the hot phase of the preparation of the elections. DDR has to take place also because otherwise it will not be possible to create a national army and a national police force that would extend its powers and its influence all over the country.

Last but not least it is also necessary that the political psychology changes - that is that the country has to move from loyalty to persons especially to warlords to loyalty to institutions. Institution-building is certainly a problem that has to be attacked vigorously in the future.

All in all I can say that the Security Council goes back home to New York with many interesting information with lots of impressions that we will still have to work on when we are back and I will give a report to the Security Council next week on Tuesday and this hopefully will give food for thought in the council and help us in the discussions ahead in order to be better able to support the process of political, economic and social reconstruction of this country. And it has demonstrated I think that Afghanistan is high on the agenda of the Security Council and that the international community is watching what is going on in Afghanistan and is trying to help as best as it can. Thank you very much.

Questions and answers

Question: What are your observations regarding next year’s elections in a still militarized country like Afghanistan because DDR will not be completed before the elections. Do you think it will be possible to have international standard elections and will it be fair?

Ambassador Pleuger: Before you came in here we heard [from] the Chief Electoral Officer of UNAMA about the preparations for these elections and it is obviously very critical that these preparations take place in order to implement the Bonn Agreement on schedule. Now we do realize that in the draft constitution the elections have been divided into two – the presidential elections and the parliamentary elections. I think personally that this is a very reasonable thing to do because it is much easier to elect a President with two or three or four or five candidates rather than having parliamentary elections where you have to divide the country up into constituencies. That is a process which might take a little longer because it’s much more difficult to organize. But from what we have heard from the experts there is a good possibility of achieving what we all want and to have elections in the middle of next year, first presidential and then sometime later parliamentary elections.

Question: When you visited Mazar and you got these promises from Atta and Dostum to support Karzai, I mean they have said this repeatedly in the past. So what guarantees have you got that they are actually going to stop fighting?

Ambassador Pleuger: Well first of all the Security Council is not here to get guarantees but to talk to the leaders in this country and to bring them our message. Both are of course people who are important leaders in this country whose deeds and words have an impact on Afghanistan as a whole. We therefore made it quite clear that the Security Council expects them to cooperate with the central government and that they play a role in a democratic Afghanistan. We particularly asked them about that so that when they gave us the assurance that they would support the government and the Bonn Process we have to take them at their word.

Question: The Security Council recently passed a resolution on the expansion of ISAF troops but so far only your country, Germany, has volunteered any troops. You say security is the main problem but how can it possibly improve in this country unless there is an expansion of ISAF and unless the other countries on the Security Council volunteer the actual troops to do that?

Ambassador Pleuger: Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) have been in place already but the new thing now is that the German PRT comes under NATO and under ISAF whereas the previous PRTs already in place come under [Operation] Enduring Freedom. Therefore this is something new. What is also new is that the Kunduz PRT will be much bigger than the previous PRTs - up to 430 soldiers - and the philosophy is that this is a sort of pilot project and we will see whether this kind of military contingent can create an area of security in which private initiative, NGOs and other agents can work on reconstruction of certain lighthouse projects so that the people can see that the democratization of the country brings something to their daily lives. If this project succeeds I am pretty sure that this will copied in other parts of the country.

Question: I just wondered whether at the back of your mind or even in the forefront of your mind if you saw parallels and lessons in Afghanistan that could be learnt for Iraq, and whether you can comment on what other lessons can be drawn from here that could be useful in other post-war environments?

Ambassador Pleuger: Well of course Iraq is always on our minds but we are here to see the situation in Afghanistan and if any lessons are to be drawn for Iraq we will do that in a discussion in the Security Council on Iraq but not here.

Question: Could you give us your view on how the authorities here are going to combat the Taliban problem in the south and how are you going to hold elections that have any credibility?

Ambassador Pleuger: How the Afghan authorities are going to combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda? You have to ask the relevant authorities in this country. The problem of insecurity in the south has been a major point in all our discussions. The analysis was that there is a certain disenchantment in that area for a variety of reasons but it is not up to the Security Council to tell the Afghan government how to deal with this. What we have said of course is that we hope that the government in Kabul will succeed in providing a sort of inclusive policy that would also deal with the complex situation in the south and that in view of the electoral process the south will fully participate and be able to fully participate in the elections.

Question: Could you enlarge on what you mean by your inclusive policy, do you mean that the Kabul government should start talking to moderate Taliban to bring them on board?

Ambassador Pleuger: This is not a decision of the Security Council, that’s a decision to be taken by the Afghan government. Well we just heard in our last meeting from a number of NGOs that are working in the south that it is necessary to inform the people in the field of how the elections are being organized; of what it means for their personal lives; and of what it is all about if you elect representatives to a national parliament which is a first. They said that because many people do not understand the process they feel left out of it and I think that is an important aspect that has to be taken into account. But the actual measures of course are not up to the Security Council but to be taken by the national government of Afghanistan.

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