CENTCOM chief has doubts about Taliban reliability

KABUL (Pajhwok): Washington has “grave doubts” about Taliban’s reliability, says US Central Command (CENTCOM) chief.

Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, said the US would be “positioning significant combat power to guard against the possibility that the Taliban decide to interfere in any way with our orderly redeployment.”

He told the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, “I have grave doubts about the Taliban’s reliability, I’ve expressed those publicly going back for a long period of time, but we need to see what they’re going to do here.”

The Pentagon was studying options for deploying forces outside Afghanistan to deal with a possible Taliban surge,” the commander was quoted as saying by Sputnik.

During his testimony since President Joe Biden’s troop withdrawal announcement, Gen. McKenzie acknowledged it would be hard to continue fighting terrorism from afar.

He went on to remark: “I don’t want to put on rose-colored glasses and say it’s going to be easy to do.”

The CENTCOM chief added they were planning for continued counterterrorism operations from within the region to keep violent extremists under persistent surveillance and pressure.

McKenzie claimed that ISIS had been reduced to “several hundred fighters” in Afghanistan, and the Taliban had agreed not to allow the resurgence of Al Qaeda.

Negotiations with Afghanistan’s neighbours were ongoing on the positioning of US intelligence and reconnaissance assets, he explained.

PAN Monitor/mud

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