Afghanistan moves to center stage

By M K Bhadrakumar
Asia Times

Three or four seemingly unconnected statements within the space of the past week, and the "war on terror" in Afghanistan acquires new shades of meaning. On Wednesday, Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad said during a visit to the holy city of Qom that the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq "under the pretext of the September 11 terror attack".

A day earlier, Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan, who was on a visit to London, publicly expressed skepticism over the conduct of the Afghan war by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). He warned that NATO is "courting disaster". On Monday, addressing a student gathering in Beijing's Tsinghua University, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf urged Chinese and Russian help in stabilizing Afghanistan. But in the ultimate analysis, it is the sensational revelation by erstwhile Northern Alliance leaders about their ongoing contacts with the Taliban that makes nonsense of the battle lines of the Afghan war.

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