KABUL: Afghanistan yesterday welcomed a US pledge to send up to 30,000 extra troops by mid-2009, but the Taleban warned Washington its forces would be “cruelly defeated” as the Soviets were in the 1980s.
The statements came one day after the top US military officer said that tens of thousands of new troops could be sent to Afghanistan by next summer to help Kabul combat a Taleban-led insurgency that has gained pace in recent years.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, put the total deployment at between 20,000 and 30,000 troops.
If the Pentagon opts for the high end of the range, the number of US troops here would nearly double.
Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesman Sultan Ahmad Baheen said Kabul hoped the additional US forces would be sent to the volatile south and areas along the eastern border with Pakistan, where Taleban fighters are the most active. “We welcome the increase in US troops in Afghanistan. We have, however, two main demands,” said Baheen. “The first is that these forces should be deployed in places where they are needed —- particularly in Helmand and along our eastern borders, from where terrorists infiltrate into our country. Secondly, this increase should help intensify the training and equipping of Afghan national security forces so they are able to better contribute to the fight against terror and defend the country.”
A spokesman for the Taleban dismissed the US troop pledge, saying it would be as useless as a similar “surge” by the Soviets in the 1980s, and would only provide the insurgents with more targets. “They now want to send more troops to Afghanistan ... The Russians also sent that many troops but were badly defeated,” said the spokesman, Yousuf Ahmadi, referring to Moscow’s doomed decade-long occupation of Afghanistan.
“When the US increases its troop levels to that of the Russians, they will also be cruelly defeated,” warned Ahmadi, who claims to speak on behalf of Taleban chief Mullah Omar. “More troops —- that means there will be more targets for the Taleban,” he said by telephone from an unknown location.
US President-elect Barack Obama has pledged to withdraw forces from Iraq and redeploy them to Afghanistan as part of his plan to tackle militancy and instability in South and Central Asia.
Gen. David McKiernan, the US commander in Afghanistan, had asked for more than 20,000 extra US soldiers to counter the rise in insurgent violence, seven years after US forces invaded the country to force the Taleban from power.
In 2008, almost 290 international soldiers and 1,000 Afghan security forces have been killed by insurgents. Eleven foreign troops have been killed in Afghanistan in the past 10 days —- four British Marines, three Canadians, three Danes and one Dutch national.
