Newropeans strongly opposes the continuation of European military involvement in the war in Afghanistan.

The USA have independently decided to send a further 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, assuming this is the answer to the problems of Afghanistan. Furthermore, they expect the Europeans to send between 5 000 and 10 000 additional troops without any kind of European involvement in a joint assessment of the future strategy for Afghanistan.

As Newropeans stated in it’s international policy programme, we are against the notion of the EU increasing it’s global influence through military means and are in favour of EU foreign policy and defence issues being under European democratic control. Current European involvement in the Afghan conflict is clearly following a contrary path on both aspects:

Not only are a large majority of our citizens against military involvement in this conflict; but our governments are by any means trying to prevent democratic processes from influencing their policies, submissive to Washington’s interests and not to their citizens’ will.

For Newropeans, as well as for an increasing number of European military experts, the war in Afghanistan has already been lost and attempts to escalate it will have a detrimental effect on democracy in Europe and to the reputation of Europe worldwide; not to mention the irresponsibility of putting young European soldiers lives at risk for absolutely nothing.

Therefore, we, the Newropeans strongly oppose the continuation of European military involvement in the war in Afghanistan. We ask you, the European governments, acting as representatives of the citizens of the EU to refuse the request from Washington to increase troops. Newropeans demands that the European Parliament proceeds to vote against further military support of EU member states in the war in Afghanistan by 2011.

Newropeans proposes the organization of an international conference concerning the future of Afghanistan involving the EU, the USA, Russia, Iran, China, the Arabic Gulf States, Central Asian states, Pakistan and India as well as all Afghan major stakeholders (including the Taliban). This conference should be organised by the EU and should take place in 2010. Then, a European strategy should be developed, coordinated by the newly appointed European Foreign Affairs Minister, and aimed at organizing European civil support toward an Afghan-own project for the future of Afghanistan.