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Interview: Prospects in Afghanistan 'Not Looking Good'

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewee: John Burns, London Bureau Chief, New York Times
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor, CFR.org

October 23, 2008

John F. Burns, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for the New York Times, recently returned to Afghanistan, after having been posted there in the 1980s and 1990s. He says that while Kabul is now "commercially thriving," the overall security situation is poor. He says that unlike Iraq, where many people wanted to withdraw, almost from the beginning, he says "there's virtually a consensus that this is a war that we can't afford to lose." Burns says diplomats have downplayed reports of a possible negotiation between the Taliban and the Karzai government, although he does not rule out engaging some nationalist Taliban in discussions. Burns adds, however, "it's difficult to imagine that any faction of the Taliban would relent on the fundamental demand, which is that there has to be a total foreign troop withdrawal" from Afghanistan.

You've been a correspondent in Afghanistan going back to pre-Taliban days. You were there when the American troops liberated Kabul, and you've just been back to Afghanistan. What are the differences in Afghanistan these days?

Well, the war of course is not going well. One could even say it's going badly, but it's not an unmitigated picture of gloom. When you speak of Kabul, there are now 5 million people compared to 1.5 million at the time when the Taliban fell. It's a city that is commercially thriving. There is still an enormous number of poor and impoverished people, which is part of what's gone wrong with the war effort. In security terms, things are pretty gloomy. As you know, [the] numbers of [violent] incidents have increased by about 30 percent in a year. American military commanders are saying that they don't have enough troops. It's not clear where they're going to get the troops unless the Iraq war really winds down.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.