[DEBATE] : Taliban can't be defeated: British commander

[Riaz K Tayob]

Taliban can't be defeated: British commander

North Korea Times

Sunday 5th October, 2008

(IANS)

The senior-most British army commander in Afghanistan says the 
international community should strike a political deal with Taliban 
militants as they cannot be defeated militarily.

'We're not going to win this war. It's about reducing it to a manageable 
level of insurgency that's not a strategic threat and can be managed by 
the Afghan army,' Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, commander of the 16 Air 
Assault Brigade, said in remarks published Sunday.

'We want to change the nature of the debate from one where disputes are 
settled through the barrel of the gun to one where it is done through 
negotiations,' Carleton-Smith told the Sunday Times in an interview.

'If the Taliban were prepared to sit on the other side of the table and 
talk about a political settlement, then that's precisely the sort of 
progress that concludes insurgencies like this. That shouldn't make 
people uncomfortable,' he added.

His comments follow a controversy over similar remarks attributed 
recently to the British Ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles.

A French newspaper quoted a French diplomat this week as saying 
Cowper-Cole thought the Afghan war was 'doomed to fail' and that 
Afghanistan might best be 'governed by an acceptable dictator'.

But British Foreign Minister David Miliband later described the report 
as 'garbled,' and said the reported comments did not reflect British 
policy.