Taliban vows to continue war November 24 - Taliban spokesman Zabihallah Mujahid said that the presence of foreign troops in the country means the war will continue and will cause insecurity in Afghanistan and in the region. (World Bulletin, Turkey) The Taliban group criticized on Sunday a decision by Afghanistans Loya Jirga (Grand Assembly) to approve the proposed Bilateral Security Agreement between Afghanistan and the US, vowing to continue its war on foreign troops in the country. We are strongly against the presence of American forces in Afghanistan, Taliban spokesman Zabihallah Mujahid told a Turkish News Agnecy, Anadolu Agency, Sunday over the phone from an undisclosed location. He said the presence of foreign troops in the country means the war will continue and will cause insecurity in Afghanistan and in the region. We will continue our armed resistance until the country is freed from the foreign troops and until they leave our country, he thundered. Members of the Loya Jirga have earlier today approved the proposed security deal with the US and urged President Hamid Karzai to sign it as soon as possible. In a resolution read by Fazal Mohammad Aymaq and Sher Mohammad Karimi, the deputies of the Loya Jirga said that they have approved the overall deal. The 2500 delegates of the Loya Jirga debated the agreement over the past three days. If signed, the deal will allow the long-term presence of US troops in the country despite next years scheduled withdrawal of all US-led foreign forces. Currently, some 52,000 US troops remain in Afghanistan. The US would like to retain nearly 10,000 of these beyond 2014. If the bilateral security agreement is not signed, however, all US troops will be obliged to depart the country next year. Editorial: Karzai’s cake November 24 - The terminally mercurial Afghan President Hamid Karzai is trying to have it both ways once again. Just a day after the US announced that it had reached an agreement to keep a portion of its troops in Afghanistan after their withdrawal begins next year, Karzai undercut the very deal he had been negotiating. The president told the loya jirga that the US did not like or trust him and that he might not sign the agreement as he preferred to wait till next April’s presidential elections were over. (The News International, Pakistan) It is typical of Karzai to leave this difficult decision to his successor, thus giving himself political cover. The US, however, will have none of it since it needs to plan ahead for its post-withdrawal presence in Afghanistan. In response to Karzai’s unexpected about-face, the Obama administration said that it would give the Afghan president till the end of the year to make a decision. The Afghan president is indulging in political grandstanding because he knows that the deal reached with the US will be wildly unpopular in Afghanistan as it exempts US soldiers from Afghan law and allows them to continue carrying out raids. At the same time, Karzai needs this deal because his tenuous grasp on power is maintained mainly due to US support. Karzai himself referred to this when he said that the US needed to treat Afghanistan with dignity and respect – and bring a lot of money. Any deal with the US will have to be ratified by the Afghan parliament, but since a majority of the body is loyal to Karzai it will simply follow his lead. Karzai may just be buying time and trying to make sure he doesn’t look like a sell-out to the occupying force so everyone expects him to eventually agree to the US terms. That doesn’t mean, however, that the deal is going to be good for Afghanistan. The US presence in Afghanistan will continue for at least another decade under the proposed agreement; the force will be small and won’t be able to militarily defeat the Taliban but yet will be a cause of anti-US sentiment, since drones – the new and extremely effective weapon of the time – will always be hovering over their territory as well as that of Pakistan. It will also end up harming the legitimacy of every Afghan government that endorses it, since they will invariably be seen as puppets of an imperialist power. The US has now been in Afghanistan for over a decade and in that time has only plunged Afghanistan deeper into civil war and overseen the resurgence of the Taliban at the cost of tens of thousands of Afghan lives.
Posted on: Sun, 24 Nov 2013 10:58:30 +0000
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