Monday, September 11, 2006

Bush strategy, if he has one, may be helping Taliban

Bush is an idiot; chapter 1,910

Santa Barbara News-Press:

NEW YORK - A leading Afghanistan scholar says that America's military counterterrorism strategy has failed to eliminate the Taliban - and may actually be contributing to the growth of the insurgent Islamist group.
Barnett R. Rubin, director of studies and senior fellow at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, said in a recent interview that a strategy devoted to destroying Taliban remnants has diverted resources from developing a strong central government in Kabul.

''There was from the beginning and still is a contradiction between the counter-terrorism or counterinsurgency mission and the mission of building a stable, sovereign Afghan national state,'' said Rubin, who served as an advisor to the U.N. special representative for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, in 2001.

Five years after the fall of the Taliban, President Hamid Karzai's government is hampered by rampant corruption, growing insecurity, runaway opium production and widespread discontent over the slow arrival of prosperity.

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