So you thought the Taliban had been ousted in Afghanistan? Yes — but there’s a real danger they could be back, NATO’s chief warns:
NATO’s top commander in Afghanistan said Sunday the country was at a tipping point and warned Afghans would likely switch their allegiance to resurgent Taliban militants if there are no visible improvements in people’s lives in the next six months.
Gen. David Richards, a British officer who commands NATO’s 32,000 troops here, warned in an interview with The Associated Press that if life doesn’t get better over the winter, most Afghans could switch sides.
“They will say, ‘We do not want the Taliban but then we would rather have that austere and unpleasant life that that might involve than another five years of fighting,'” Richards said.
Afghanistan is going through its worst bout of violence since the U.S.-led invasion removed the former Taliban regime from power five years ago. The Taliban has made a comeback in the south and east of the country and is seriously threatening Western attempts to stabilize the country after almost three decades of war.
“If we collectively … do not exploit this winter to start achieving concrete and visible improvement,” then some 70 percent of Afghans could switch sides, Richards told The Associated Press.
Not good news and it’s sure to fuel yet another debate during the remaining four weeks of the 2006 mid-term election scramble.
Administration critics will say Iraq has diluted and diverted the American effort and, as a result, Afghanistan is not only not stable but could revert to the bad ‘ol days when the Taliban offered a haven for Al Qaeda.
The administration and its defenders will argue that the U.S. can fight on several fronts and that it would be worse in Afghanistan if terrorist forces and sympathizers were not fighting there (along with Iraq).
But, in the end, if this is the beginning of a new series of pessimistic reports from Afghanistan that will further erode the argument that the Bush administration is making on national security and Iraq. Much will depend on the news stories over the next month. Richards can’t be dismissed as some Democratic party operative trying to play politics around election time so his comments will get considerable circulation.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.