Peacekeeper Commander Mired in Afghan Combat - New York Times

Peacekeeper Commander Mired in Afghan Combat - New York Times: "KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 14 — Leaning against the red webbing that passes for upholstery in a military aircraft, Lt. Gen. David Richards, the British commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, scanned a press clip as he flew back to the capital from Kandahar, the center of combat operations in the south.

The article was by a well-known British columnist who had written in The Guardian that he was “baffled by Richards’s naïveté about the Taliban.” The author, Simon Jenkins, contended that NATO could not possibly win against an enemy that could “count on the tacit support of tens of thousands of fighters from tribal militias.”

“I am not naïve; he’s naïve,” General Richards shouted over the roar of the plane engines. He dismissed as “nonsense” the idea that the surge by the Taliban across southern Afghanistan this year was driven by ideology or Pashtun tribal grievances.

“This is not a huge popular uprising,” he added, bristling. “And to distort the truth is so unjust for the people here who want us. And it is unhelpful since it undermines the fabric of what we are doing.”

“People do not want a return to the Taliban,” he said, “but we need time to allow that aspiration to win.”

Already half through his one-year command in Afghanistan, General Richards, 54, does not have much time.

He now commands the 31,000 troops of the International Security Assistance Force, including 12,000 American troops, spread across the whole country.

The British general, who has led NATO’s most elite fighting force, the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, since 2001, served three tours in Northern Ireland, and was commander of British peacekeeping forces three times — in East Timor in 1999 and twice in Sierra Leone in 2000."

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