WASHINGTON, March 26: The United States has no plans to send its troops into Pakistan to search for possible Al Qaeda/Taliban men escaping from Afghanistan, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said.
The Pentagon believes that following the battle at Shahikot, Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters might have gone across the border into the tribal areas in Pakistan, and the prospect had been raised in press reports here that US troops might undertake hot pursuit inside Pakistani territory.
But the defence secretary, answering a question at a briefing on Monday, ruled out the option of US troops entering Pakistan, saying: “President Musharraf has been enormously cooperative. He has put forces along that (Pakistan-Afghanistan) border. He has been cooperative in every respect that we’ve requested of him. It is a very rugged, difficult border. I don’t doubt for a minute that in almost any one of the 360 degrees of Afghanistan’s border, that some clever person or persons couldn’t get across. On the other hand, he (Musharraf) and his forces are working very hard to help us to stop them from coming across and, to the extent they come across, stop them and arrest them. And he’s done a good deal of that.”
Mr Rumsfeld sounded far more sceptical about Iranian cooperation in checking cross-border movement of Al Qaeda and Taliban men. He said there was no question that Iran had not been doing “what Musharraf and the Pakistanis have been doing —— indeed, quite the contrary.” There was “no doubt at all” that people had been moving back and forth across the Iran-Afghanistan border, “to the great disadvantage of the interim government of Afghanistan and the Afghan people.”
The defence secretary also reiterated US charges that Iran was “complicit” in the affair of the ship seized while allegedly carrying weapons for Palestinians and was “very active” in funding Hezbollah, whose men “ended up” in amascus and then carried out operations in occupied Pales-tine.
Asked what then would be the US approach to dealing with Iran in the “global war on terrorism,” Rumsfeld said, ominously, that his guess was that “we’ll see more about Iran and other countries as we go along. One doesn’t do everything at once.”
AFGHAN ARMY: The US has, meanwhile, announced that it will begin a training programme for a new Afghan national army in four to six weeks.
The plan calls for training cycles of approximately 10 weeks in duration and will be led by 125 to 150 US Army Special Forces soldiers. Collective training at the squad, platoon, company and battalion level will follow individual training.
A “train the trainer” programme will also be implemented to train a cadre of Afghan officers and non-commissioned officers who will eventually assume training responsibilities from the US-led training task force.