Afghanistan welcomed yesterday a US decision to send more troops but reiterated that the strengthening of Afghan security forces was the long-term answer to defeat militants.
US President George W. Bush announced on Tuesday the US would withdraw about 8,000 combat and support personnel from Iraq by February next year.
He said a fresh Marine battalion and an Army combat brigade would go to Afghanistan by January, in response to soaring attacks by Islamist militants nearly seven years after the al-Qaeda-backed Taliban were ousted.
“The government has a common stance on this: we need and welcome more foreign troops to tackle the war along with local forces,” chief presidential spokesman Humayun Hamidzada said.
“In the long term, the strengthening of national entities, their training and equipping, is the solution,” he said.
The US has 33,000 troops in Afghanistan, about half the total number of foreign troops in the country.
US-led troops toppled the Taliban in late 2001 after they failed to hand over al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
But bin Laden and other al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders are still at large and there is growing anger among Afghans and the government about civilian casualties caused by foreign forces, mostly in air strikes on suspected militants.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has led the country since shortly after the Taliban were ousted, said last month the presence of foreign troops had not led to the success of the war but had resulted to civilian casualties.
The Taliban said sending more troops would not solve Afghanistan’s ills.
“Sending troops to Afghanistan won’t solve problems but intensify fighting and provide more opportunities for Taliban fighters to attack their enemy,” a spokesman for the group, Zabihullah Mujahid, told the Pakistan-baed AIP news agency.
“We know the casualties of American forces will increase with the arrival of more troops. If they want a solution, all foreign troops need to leave Afghanistan,” he said.
Critics also said the modest shift in US forces to Afghanistan announced by Bush falls short of his commanders’ requests.
Bush’s remedy: 4,500 more troops by early next year to bolster what he described as a “quiet surge” in US and NATO forces in Afghanistan over the past two years. The US president also called for doubling the size of the Afghan army in five years.
The US troops will include the deployment of a Marine battalion before year-end to replace another battalion that is scheduled to come home and an army combat brigade in January that originally was supposed to go to Iraq.
Critics said it was not enough, however, warning that the next attack on the US was more likely to come from the Afghan-Pakistani border regions than Iraq.
“The effort in Afghanistan must move to the forefront and once again become our top priority,” said Representative Ike Skelton, chairman of the US House Armed Services Committee.
US commanders have said they need at least three more brigades, about 10,000 combat troops, to confront a better trained, increasingly sophisticated “syndicate” of Islamic militants able to move across a rugged, open border.
“To protect the 10 million Afghans, plus the 3 or so million that are in Kabul, given the numbers that we have here, they just don’t work out totally,” Major General Jeffrey Schloesser, the No. 2 US commander in Afghanistan, told reporters on Friday.
“You know, it’s very difficult for us to be able to do that, given the numbers we have, given the terrain we have,” he said.
US forces are not losing the war, but it is “a slow win,” he said.
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