|
WASHINGTON, D.C. (May 21, 2009) - Without
success on the Pakistan side of the border, efforts to rid both it
and Afghanistan of the Taliban will be significantly harder,
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told the Senate Armed Services
Committee today while testifying on the fiscal 2010 defense budget
request.
That success will be more difficult if the Pakistani government
refuses to take the fight to the militants within its country's
borders, Gates said. But traditional thought may prove hard to
overcome.
"For all of Pakistan's history, India has been the existential
threat," he said. "I think actually it was only with the Taliban's
going too far and moving their operations into Buner, just 60 miles
or so from Islamabad, that for the first time they really got the
attention of the Pakistani government."
Recent actions of the Pakistani government and its army have
indicated the government now understands the nature of the threat
to it and is prepared to take action to deal with the threat, Gates
said.
Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
also spoke before the committee. He acknowledged increasing support
from the Pakistani people to deter the militants' threat to their
country and the government's stepped-up counterinsurgency
operations, but he expressed reservations about sustainability.
"My biggest question about these operations is [the
government's] ability to sustain them over time," he said. "Right
now I'm encouraged by what's happened, but I certainly withhold any
judgment about where it goes, because of the lack ... of historic
sustainment."
In addition to the counterinsurgency effort on both sides of the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border, Gates said, success in Afghanistan
also relies on turning the country's agriculture away from the
poppy crop that supplies drug traffickers and finances criminal and
terrorist activities.
"Before 30 years of war, Afghanistan ... had a strong
agricultural sector, and in fact exported ... a variety of food,"
he said. "So the notion of getting them to adopt alternative crops
is not fanciful, but we have to figure out a strategy where they
get the money and the seeds and the ability to sustain their
families before they get rid of their poppy crop."
The secretary acknowledged Afghan President Hamid Karzai's
concerns about precision coalition airstrikes and their effect on
Afghan civilians, but added that the use of airpower can't be
eliminated. Forgoing that capability, he said, would be like trying
to fight the war "with one hand tied behind our back."
"That said," he continued, "one of the charges, I think, for the
new commanders, will be to look at how we can do this in a way that
further limits innocent civilian casualties in Afghanistan, but
also gets the truth out to the Afghan people about what's really
going on."
|
