| | Reconciliation with Taliban not likely in near future, Gates says The Washington Post
03/08/2010
By Greg Jaffe
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KABUL – Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday that recent military offensives against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan had gained momentum but that a reconciliation effort proposed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai was unlikely in the near term to cause senior Taliban leaders to lay down their arms.
Such defections will not happen until senior insurgent leaders begin to "realize that the odds of success are no longer in their favor," Gates said in a news conference with the Afghan president.
Karzai has proposed a major peace conference this spring to begin reconciliation with native Taliban who were drawn into the insurgency out of economic necessity or intimidation.
Gates arrived in Kabul to discuss Karzai's plans for his conference and to get a better sense of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's plans for a large offensive in Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city. It will probably take place this summer.
Gates' visit comes about three weeks after McChrystal launched an assault on the southern Afghan city of Marjah, the first major U.S. military operation since President Barack Obama announced his new war strategy late last year. The new approach is built around the addition of 30,000 U.S. troops and an increased focus on building Afghan governance at the district and provincial level. About 6,000 of the new troops have arrived.
McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said the coming offensive in Kandahar will be significantly different from the recent effort in Marjah. U.S. Marines and Afghan forces mounted a large assault on the city, which was dominated by Taliban forces.
By contrast, there is already an Afghan government presence in Kandahar. Instead of U.S. and Afghan forces pushing directly into the city, U.S. officials plan to focus on the region around Kandahar, where the Taliban have been able to exact significant casualties on U.S., Afghan and NATO troops.
The campaign to take back the city is likely to proceed far more gradually than the recent move by Marines and Afghan army and police forces into Marjah. "There won't be a D-Day that is climactic," McChrystal said. "It will be a rising tide of security."
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