Afghan aid is trapped in limbo

Associated Press

TERMEZ, Uzbekistan — Therapeutic milk for malnourished Afghan children sat locked in a warehouse Wednesday, with aid groups leaving town, security restrictions tightening and a route vital for transporting food and medicine into the heart of northern Afghanistan closed.

Aid officials had touted this city on the Uzbek-Afghan border as the center for an operation that could rush aid directly to famine-threatened parts of Afghanistan. But the "land bridge" has yet to live up to its promise.

Uzbekistan, citing security concerns, has so far kept its border closed, including the so-called Friendship Bridge, the only crossing over the Amu-Darya River, which forms the frontier.

"As soon as stability will be restored in northern Afghanistan, we will consider opening the bridge," said Uzbek Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahodir Umarov.

That means no vehicles can make the tantalizingly short, two-hour drive — along what is said to be a decent road — from Termez to Mazar-e-Sharif, the main city in northern Afghanistan only 40 miles away. The road goes across the Friendship Bridge, built by the Soviets for their failed 1979-89 war in Afghanistan.

Some 1,540 tons of U.N. aid supplies have passed through Termez over the past week, shipped by barges across the Amu-Darya to the Afghan port of Hairaton.

But that’s merely a "symbolic" amount, said Gil Gonzalez, a spokesman for the French aid group Action Against Hunger.

In contrast, five times that load — more than 8,250 tons — have been shipped to Afghanistan over the last month the long way, through Turkmenistan, a route that takes four days and is further complicated by the difficult process of getting visas for the restrictive former Soviet republic.

U.S. and U.N. officials are pushing Uzbekistan to open the bridge. But given the sensitivity of operating in this authoritarian country, they have refused to criticize Uzbek leaders for their hesitancy.

"We are very hopeful that in the near term, perhaps a few days, perhaps a week, we will be able to open the Friendship Bridge which will bring an increased amount of humanitarian assistance," Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of U.S. operations in Afghanistan, said Wednesday in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent.