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WASHINGTON, D.C. (April 10, 2009) - The United
States does not want to remain in Afghanistan one day longer than
it has to, but the mission will take time, Defense Secretary Robert
M. Gates said during an interview with Afghan television
Friday.
The new strategy in Afghanistan is a result of months of study
and consultation with Afghan leaders and other coalition allies,
Gates said.
The secretary said the U.S. forces will leave Afghanistan when
the country's security forces can handle the challenges on their
own. To that end, he said, the new strategy concentrates on
providing security and helping the Afghan people expand the army
and police.
"Afghans must protect their own security, when all is said and
done," the secretary said. "And so we want to help them do
that."
The United States will send the soldiers of the 82nd Airborne
Division's 4th Brigade Combat Team to Afghanistan to serve as
trainers for the Afghan security forces. The troopers will arrive
starting in the spring and through the summer.
The new strategy also will channel significant money to
development. Gates said a large number of civilian experts in
agriculture and veterinarians will help to revive the farm sector.
Physicians, nurses and other health professionals will help in the
medical field. Lawyers and government administrators will mentor at
the district, provincial and national levels. Gates said he hopes
this will "show the Afghan people ... that life will improve thanks
to these international efforts."
The Afghan people have suffered under the Soviets and the
Taliban. "We're there as partners with the Afghan people to help
them be able to govern themselves, and without somebody from the
outside telling them how to do it," the secretary said.
Trust is key to the process, Gates said, and the Afghan people
have to trust the coalition and understand that "we are there to
help them, not for purposes of our own other than the same purpose
that the Afghan people have, which is for Afghanistan not to be a
safe haven for terrorists who kill them and want to kill us."
Gates said some of the agreements the Pakistani government has
made with the Taliban in western Pakistan are a concern to the
United States. Earlier agreements led to Taliban extremists
crossing the border into Afghanistan, he said. "They no longer had
to worry about Pakistani troops because of the deals," Gates
said.
But leaders are starting to understand the problems the
extremists pose. "I think the Pakistani government is coming to
understand that what is going on in western Pakistan is as great a
danger to the government in Islamabad as it is to Afghanistan,"
Gates said. "The Pakistani army has been doing a lot of fighting.
Thousands of Pakistani soldiers have died in the western part of
the country fighting these extremists. And one of our goals in this
new strategy is to see how we can improve cooperation between
Afghanistan and Pakistan, who have a common interest in getting rid
of these extremists."
Gates said Pakistan's interservice intelligence has contacts
with extremists groups and that concerns the United States. "The
ISI's contacts with some of these extremist groups -- with
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Haqqani network, Commander Nazir and
others -- are a real concern to us," Gates said. "We have made
these concerns known directly to the Pakistanis, and we hope that
they will take action to put an end to it."
Gates said the United States and the coalition are concerned
about the narcotics trade. Drug traffickers are pumping somewhere
between $70 million and $100 million into the Taliban each year, he
said. The trade also feeds corruption and undermines the legitimacy
of the government.
"For both of those reasons, it's important to go after this,"
the secretary said.
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