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.
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