Friday, October 30, 2009

US not losing Afghan war, but Taliban has 'momentum': Clinton

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday that the United States was not losing the war in Afghanistan, but acknowledged 'the Taliban has momentum' in the eight-year-old conflict.Clinton's comments on the Taliban in an interview with ABC television repeated earlier statements from war commander General Stanley McChrystal and other top US officials.Her comments came hours ahead of President Barack Obama's talks with his top military chiefs, the latest in a string of strategy sessions at the White House as he weighs whether to send tens of thousands more US troops to Afghanistan."It's not going to be a repeat of the same, old approach. We're trying different things," Clinton said."When the president makes his decision, I think that will be evident."Obama has spent weeks deliberating over a request for 40,000 more troops by McChrystal, who warned in a dire assessment that the war could be lost without more boots on the ground."This is not an open-ended, never-ending commitment," Clinton warned on NBC television.Afghan President Hamid Karzai, once a darling of the West, has fallen out of favor with Washington since Obama took office. His legitimacy and credibility have also been at stake following a first round of elections in August riddled with fraud."There might have been too much emphasis on the central government and the idea that there could be some kind of nation-building that would transform Afghanistan overnight," Clinton told CNN. "Well, we don't accept that. We don't think that's going to happen. But what we do believe is that we have to work with the president and the cabinet and officials in Kabul and the officials at the local level, and that's going to be our approach."

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