Washington: United States Senator John Kerry has said that talks with Taliban could be carried out after the death of Osama bin Laden.
While hearing a meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he chairs, John Kerry said, “This is a critical moment in the war in Afghanistan, and It is important that we seize that opportunity.” A few Taliban fighters want to leave the battlefield, Kerry added.
“Middle- and low-level Taliban fighters, many of them want to come in from the battlefield. We need to work with the Afghan government in order to make sure that those who wish to lay down their arms can, in fact, do so,” he said. But Kerry said that extremists still crossed the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Senator Kerry said, “It will take adroit and persistent diplomacy to convince the Pakistani military leaders that the real threat to their sovereignty comes not from its eastern border and not from across the Atlantic, but it comes from violent extremists in their own country.”
Meanwhile, Senator Richard Lugar, questioned why the United States was spending some $120 billion a year in Afghanistan, where some 100,000 US troopers are deployed.
“The question before us is whether Afghanistan is strategically important enough to justify the lives and massive resources that we are spending there, especially given that few terrorists in Afghanistan have global designs or reach,” Lugar said.
“To the extent that our purpose is to confront the global terrorist threat, we should be refocusing resources on Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, parts of North Africa and other locations,” he said.
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