US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday played down fears that Afghanistan could become a lost cause but admitted Washington faced a "bumpy" ride to press allies into sharing the burden there.
She made the comments shortly before arriving in London for high-level talks with her close British allies about their common drive to draft more NATO forces into crushing a resurgent Taliban in southern Afghanistan.
Alluding to ruffled feathers within the alliance, Rice said she hoped the need to "tell the truth" about mission needs would not be taken as a "desire to denigrate" contributions allies have made.
She did not name the allies, but Germany last week rejected US appeals for sending combat troops to the south and barely disguised its irritation with the reportedly "stern" way they were made.
"We have made no secret about it that there are certain allies that are in much more dangerous parts of the country," Rice told reporters aboard the plane from Washington to London. "And we believe very strongly there ought to be a sharing of that burden throughout the alliance."
Her talks in London with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband precede meetings with NATO defense and foreign ministers over the next few weeks that will culminate in an allied summit in Bucharest in April.
US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will discuss the situation with his counterparts in Vilnius at the end of the week, she said.
The Guardian newspaper reported yesterday that Britain was to send a fresh force with extra firepower to Afghanistan but this would not increase its overall deployment of around 7,700. British Defence Secretary Des Browne was to make a statement to the House of Commons yesterday.
Rice also played down fears that NATO may not defeat the Taliban. On Tuesday, the International Institute for Strategic Studies warned that Afghanistan risked becoming a "failed state," while yesterday the Senlis Council think tank warned the country was on "a precipice."
"The international community has invested significant time and money in President [Hamid] Karzai and his government," it said. "Unfortunately, these efforts may prove fruitless if they do not move quickly to stabilize the south and Karzai's political support base."
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS