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.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS