US deployment to Afghanistan outstrips Soviet war

BRUSSELS: The US-led war in Afghanistan is now longer than the Soviets’ futile campaign in the benighted nation — and after nine years and 50 days of battle, the West is also groping for an exit.

Afghanistan’s brutal terrain remains littered with the rusting hulks of Russian tanks captured during the 1979-89 war, and is now testing more than 140,000 US-led forces fighting rebel guerillas to keep their own ally in power.

After NATO announced plans to end its combat mission by 2014, many of those who lived through the Soviet years say they remember similar attempts to build up local security forces and manage a dignified withdrawal.

While troops are making some gains against Taliban insurgents in pockets of the restive south and east of the country, progress remains uneven and violence is at an all-time high, the Pentagon admitted in a report last

Pervez Musharraf Claims Never Succumbed to Pressure

Pakistan’s former President Pervez Musharraf struck a defiant note in a speech Saturday in Houston, saying the United States should contribute money, but not advice, to his country’s counterterrorism efforts.

The U.S. should assist as Pakistan tries to root out the Taliban and al-Qaida from within its borders, “but don’t get into micromanaging how to do it because we know how to do it better than you,” he said.

In an address sponsored by the World Affairs Counsel of Houston, Musharraf issued a stinging critique of U.S. conduct in neighboring Afghanistan and gave the 700 listeners at the Omni Hotel his formula for defeating the Taliban.

Several dozen protesters stood about a half-block from the hotel on the nearest public property waving signs accusing the former president of being a dictator. Musharraf, a military general, assumed power in 1999 in a bloodless coup d’état and resigned in August last year under threats of impeachment by a coalition government.

In Houston, he received a standing ovation and one man shouted, “We love you!”

After ticking off the economic advances he said Pakistan made under his rule, the former military strongman said that his country didn’t need outside help to become an economic powerhouse.

“I am a firm believer that Pakistan is a country that has the resources and human capital to rise on its own with no assistance from anybody in the world,” he said to applause from an audience filled with Pakistani expatriates.

He said the U.S. and Pakistan created the mujahedeen, or holy warriors, who flocked to Afghanistan in the 1980s to throw off the Soviet invaders. But the U.S. abandoned 35,000 mujahedeen fighters after the Soviets were driven out, and they formed the nucleus of what would become al-Qaida, he said.

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Pervez Musharraf Claims Never Succumbed to Pressure was first posted on October 11, 2009 at 6:08 pm.