Gary Thomas
31 October 2006
A senior U.S. diplomat is playing down the resurgence of the Taleban
in Afghanistan, saying it poses no real threat to the government of
President Hamid Karzai.
Artillerymen of Afghanistan's National Army
Artillerymen of Afghanistan's National Army
In a speech Tuesday to an Afghan investment conference in Washington,
Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns said the
surge of attacks by the Taleban does not pose any long-term threat to
the Afghan government.
"Security has to be the primary concern of any government, at any
level of government," he said. "And while we've seen an increased
number of attacks in the regions and some of the provincial cities
and even in Kabul and Kandahar themselves over the past few months,
we do not believe that these attacks pose a strategic threat to the
central government. But they do have an effect because they prevent
government from operating at the provincial level."
In a brief interview after the speech, Burns said he was not saying
there is no security threat in Afghanistan. But, he added, the
Afghan government is stable.
"We don't believe the Taleban represent a strategic threat in this
sense: the government of Afghanistan is secure," he said. "And
there's a problem of security in Afghanistan. It's primarily in the
east and in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Uruzgan and
Helmand.
It is in those areas, Burns said, that U.S. and allied forces are,
along with Afghan troops, fighting the Taleban.
"And that's where you find the Canadians and British and Dutch and
Australian and American forces," he added. "And we are taking the
battle to the Taleban along with the Afghan forces beside us and
working with us. And we intend to continue that because that's our
responsibility as a friend to Afghanistan itself."
Barnett Rubin, senior fellow of New York University's Center for
International Cooperation, says the Taleban may not pose a strategic
threat in the conventional military sense. But Rubin, who was a U.N.
advisor in the Afghan peace negotiations after the Taleban fell in
2001, says the Taleban is eating away at the Kabul government's
authority.
"The Taleban pose a very serious threat to the government of
Afghanistan," he said. "They do not pose a conventional military
threat to NATO, the U.S.-led coalition, or the Afghan government,
which is unfortunately what U.S. planners seem to have in mind when
they make statements like 'the Taleban do not pose a strategic
threat.' But the Taleban are very successfully undermining the
legitimacy of the Afghan government."
Rubin says the Afghan government's failure so far to provide services
like adequate roads and electricity give political ammunition to the
Taleban.
"They [the Taleban] are showing that it cannot provide security to
people, cannot provide development, and that it cannot provide good
relations with its neighbors," he added. "They are attempting to
show that they are a better alternative, and they have provoked NATO
and the United States, unfortunately, into undertaking actions that
make Afghans perceive them as occupiers."
The Taleban have increasingly adopted tactics used by insurgents in
Iraq, such as suicide bombings and improvised explosive devices. At
least 65 U.S. troops have died in Afghanistan this year, according to
the Department of Defense, and about 70 U.S. troops died in
Afghanistan during 2005.
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