Taliban winning, NATO losing in Afghanistan: Kasuri

Senior Pakistani officials are urging NATO countries to accept the Taliban and work towards a new coalition government in Kabul, the Daily Telegraph reported on Wednesday. According to the report, Pakistani 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. Kasuri has advised against sending more troops. “Kasuri is basically asking NATO to surrender and to negotiate with the Taliban,” a Western official who met the foreign minister recently told the Daily Telegraph. The remarks were made on the eve of NATO’s critical summit in Latvia. daily times monitor, Pakistani agencies reported.

 

 

Meanwhile -

 

 

Taliban Taking Back Afghanistan

 

 

Lahore, Pakistan - The majority of Afghans think the Taliban is winning its war against the government of President Hamid Karzai.

 

 

Afghans also think that U.S. and NATO forces who are battling the Taliban across the country are incapable of stemming the Taliban tide. So far this year at least 4000 people have been killed in Taliban attacks, including some 217 people killed in 97 suicide bombing attacks.

 

 

At its summit in Riga on Tuesday, NATO has to decide whether it's going to take Afghanistan seriously and induct desperately needed additional troops, aircraft and development aid from member states who have so far proved reluctant to provide them or face the humiliation of loosing greater parts of rural Afghanistan to the Taliban. The U.S. bogged down in extracting itself from Iraq is unlikely to be able to provide additional troops or war materials for the fight in Afghanistan.

 

 

Pashtun tribal leaders in Peshawar say the Taliban are preparing a major offensive in February for which thousands of men and armaments are being mobilized in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Meanwhile President Hamid Karzai has so far failed to decisively stem the tide of corruption, drugs trafficking and warlordism that continues to beset those areas of Afghanistan where the Taliban are not active.

 

 

After facing a spate of accusations that Pakistan is harboring the Taliban leadership and is unwilling to shut down the Taliban bases on its soil, Pakistani officials have gone on the offensive telling NATO members states that they are certain to lose and that NATO should just give up and talk to the Taliban.

 

 

Pakistani officials are now expressing open criticism of U.S. and NATO policy in Afghanistan as well as strident criticism of Karzai. The U.S. -- unwilling to annoy either Pakistan or Afghanistan, both ostensibly allies in the war on terrorism -- finds it caught between a rock and a hard place.

 

 

Source: Agencies and The Washington Post

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