Pakistan is urging NATO to surrender to the Taliban:
Pakistan’s foreign minister, Khurshid Kasuri, has said in private briefings to foreign ministers of some Nato member states that the Taliban are winning the war in Afghanistan and Nato is bound to fail. He has advised against sending more troops.
Western ministers have been stunned. “Kasuri is basically asking Nato to surrender and to negotiate with the Taliban,” said one Western official who met the minister recently.
The remarks were made on the eve of Nato’s critical summit in Latvia. Lt Gen David Richards, the British general and Nato’s force commander in Afghanistan, and the Dutch ambassador Daan Everts, its chief diplomat there, have spent five days in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, urging the Pakistani military to do more to reign in the Taliban. But they have received mixed messages.
One of the arguments he uses:
Gen Orakzai insists that the Taliban represent the Pashtun population, Afghanistan’s largest and Pakistan’s second largest ethnic group, and they now lead a “national resistance” movement to throw out Western occupation forces, just as there is in Iraq.
The problem with that particular argument:
But his comments have deeply angered many Pakistani and Afghan Pashtuns, who consider the Taliban as pariahs and a negation of Pashtun values. Gen Orakzai is the mastermind of “peace deals” between the army and the heavily Talibanised Pashtun tribes on the Pakistani side of the border, but these agreements have failed because they continue to allow the Taliban to attack Nato forces inside Afghanistan and leave the Taliban in place, free to run a mini-Islamic state.
Well, it’s a nice try at least. I wonder how far Gen Orakzai thinks positively about the Taliban. A suggestion like this is quite… strange to say the least. The violence is not as widespread as he seems to try to make it look like. Sure there are certain regions / provinces in which NATO is actively fighting a lot of Taliban, but it’s not a civil war or anything close to it, nor is it true that NATO is fighting everywhere. It’s mostly limited to Kandahar.
Oh, and he also tried to discourage NATO from sending more troops to Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is not lost. NATO has to focus completely on making this mission a success. More troops if necessary and more money to rebuild the country / develop local economies.
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