Afghanistan joins ban at teen's plea

OSLO, Norway — An Afghan teenager who lost both legs in a cluster-bomb explosion helped persuade his country to change its stance and join nearly 100 nations in signing a treaty Wednesday banning the disputed weapons.

Afghanistan was initially reluctant to join the pact — which the United States and Russia have refused to support — but agreed to after lobbying by victims maimed by cluster munitions, including 17-year-old Soraj Ghulan Habib. The teen, who uses a wheelchair, met with his country's ambassador to Norway, Jawed Ludin, at a two-day signing conference in Oslo.

Speaking through an interpreter, Habib said the ambassador called Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who agreed to change his stance on the treaty.

The U.S., Russia and other countries that refuse to sign the treaty say cluster bombs have legitimate military uses, such as repelling advancing troop columns.

Cluster bomblets are packed by the hundreds into artillery shells, bombs or missiles, which scatter them over vast areas. Some fail to explode immediately. The unexploded bomblets then can lie dormant for years until they are disturbed, often by children attracted by their small size and bright colors.

The group Handicap International says 98 percent of cluster-bomb victims are civilians, and 27 percent are children.

Organizers hoped more than 100 of the 125 countries represented will have signed by the end of the conference today. Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere said 92 countries did so Wednesday. The treaty must be ratified by 30 countries to take effect.

Britain, formerly a major stockpiler of cluster munitions, also signed the treaty, which Foreign Secretary David Miliband said showed that a NATO country can defend itself without cluster weapons.

Miliband said he would urge President-elect Obama's administration to reconsider the U.S. stance.

The United States defended its decision not to sign the treaty. James Lawrence, director of the Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement of the State Department, said cluster bombs were sometimes more humane than conventional bombs. As an example, he said that antennas on a building's roof could be taken out efficiently with a cluster bomb, without bringing the building down.

The decision appeared to reflect Karzai's growing independence from the Bush administration, which has opposed the treaty and had urged Karzai not to sign it, according to a senior Afghan official who spoke on the condition of anonymity following standard diplomatic protocol.

In recent months, Karzai has sharpened his public criticisms of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. He has spoken out against aerial bombings and other operations by the U.S.-led forces in the country that have caused civilian casualties, offended cultural sensitivities and undermined popular support for the war that routed the Taliban in late 2001.

The United States has not used cluster bombs since 2003, said Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst for Human Right Watch, who was at the event in Oslo. A NATO policy banning the use of cluster munitions in Afghanistan has been in place since 2007.

The anti-cluster-bomb campaign gathered momentum after Israel's monthlong war against Hezbollah in 2006, when it scattered up to 4 million bomblets across Lebanon, according to U.N. figures.

"Quite frankly, if Israel hadn't done that, we might not have a cluster treaty today," said Jody Williams, who won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for coordinating the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and has condemned cluster bombs with equal fervor.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said his government had decided not to join the treaty, and instead believes the issue of cluster-bomb use should be addressed through the U.N. Convention on Conventional Weapons.

Thomas Nash, the coordinator of the Cluster Munition Coalition, a London-based group of organizations that would like to see cluster bombs outlawed, said Laos was the country most saturated with unexploded cluster munitions, including types that attract children because they look like "little baseballs." They are a legacy of the United States' bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War. Georgians, he said, face their own cleanup problem after what they claim were cluster-bomb exchanges during their country's recent conflict with Russia.