The United States will commit $40 million to underwrite the cost of holding elections in Afghanistan this summer, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday, as she began selling the Obama administration’s new Afghanistan policy to friends and foes.
“We do not support or oppose any candidate,” Mrs. Clinton told reporters on her way to an international conference on Afghanistan that begins on Tuesday in the Netherlands. “We want to ensure the elections themselves are going to have legitimacy and credibility.”
The American pledge, aimed at closing a $100 million shortfall in the United Nations’ fund-raising for the August elections, is part of what she hopes will be a raft of proposals on a variety of issues, including restoring Afghanistan’s security and stemming its corrosive drug trade, she said.
But the administration will face war-weary allies that are reluctant to commit more troops to Afghanistan as well as suspicious neighbors like Iran, which will attend the conference but has rebuffed President Obama’s recent attempts at dialogue.
Mrs. Clinton said the United States would present a pragmatic strategy built on defeating Al Qaeda rather than trying to transform Afghanistan into a Western-style democracy.
“We’re entering this with a very clear-eyed, realistic view of what is possible,” she said of the new policy, which Mr. Obama announced last Friday and will discuss with NATO allies in Europe later this week.
In a sign of its determination to break from the Bush administration, the Obama administration no longer uses a signature Bush phrase, the “war on terror,” Mrs. Clinton confirmed. “The administration has stopped using the phrase,” she said, “and I think that speaks for itself.”
Mrs. Clinton said she had no plans to meet with the Iranian representative, though she suggested that she would not avoid an informal encounter. Iran has a constructive role, she said, especially in counternarcotics, because heroin made from Afghan poppies fuels a rising drug habit in Iran. The drug flow had become an “internal security” problem for Tehran, she added.
“The fact that they accepted the invitation to come suggests they believe there is a role for them to play,” Mrs. Clinton said.
With the NATO allies generally unwilling to deploy additional combat troops to Afghanistan, the United States is emphasizing economic and development issues. Mrs. Clinton said she would stress the need to help the Afghans improve their governance and jump-start aid projects, which have been bogged down by waste and rampant corruption.
Less than a quarter of the aid pledged to Afghanistan from 2002 to 2008 has been delivered. Forty percent of it has gone back to the donors because of poor coordination with the Afghans.
Underscoring the administration’s promise to scrutinize the use of aid money, Mrs. Clinton brought along Jacob J. Lew, the deputy secretary who oversees the State Department’s budget. Mr. Lew will travel to Afghanistan from the conference.
“We are looking at every single dollar, as to how it’s spent and where it’s going, and trying to track the outcomes,” she said. “There is very little credibility for what was invested; it’s heartbreaking.”
The pledge of $40 million for the election will help pay for the distribution of ballot boxes and the counting of ballots. It is separate from the costs of providing security for the election.
The conference, though led by the United Nations, is largely Mrs. Clinton’s initiative. She pushed for it to be held and for Iran to be included on the list of invited countries. She will be accompanied by Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The regional focus, she said, is a change from how the Bush White House viewed Afghanistan policy. Mr. Obama is to discuss the policy with the leaders of China and Russia at an economic summit meeting in London this week, and later at a NATO meeting in France and Germany.
While American allies have already welcomed the new focus, the United States is not ready to discuss one delicate issue: those suspected of being insurgents held at the American military prison on the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
In a report to be issued this week, the Asia Society calls for the United States to close the Bagram detention center and to turn its prisoners over to the Afghan police. The treatment of those Afghans, the report says, has blackened the image of the United States in Afghanistan.
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