by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

August 28, 2008

One week after returning from an Aug. 6-13 fact-finding tour of Afghanistan, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) said “it is an incredibly unstable time” for the United States, for Israel, and for their allies.

Menendez joined four other members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on a weeklong trip that included visits to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Germany.

In a broad-ranging telephone interview from his office on Capitol Hill, the senator told NJ Jewish News that American forces are “in a quagmire in Iraq.” As a result, he said, the Bush administration “took our eyes off the prize. It has allowed the Taliban and al Qaida to reconstitute themselves to pre-Sept. 11 strength” and has “let the Russians know we can do nothing more than bluster at this point.”

Those factors, in turn, have increased the threat to Israel, he said.

“The problem is that we are bogged down in Iraq and facing the new challenges in Afghanistan. That has led other countries who do not have the same type of alliance with Israel to thwart us in our attempts to move in a direction that relates to Iran,” Menendez argued.

“All of these elements have a consequence in terms of Israel’s security challenge as we look at what Iran is doing in the world.”

‘We want to be on the winning side.
We cannot afford not to be.’

As they met with American troops and commanders in Afghanistan, the senators discovered that “the generals have a very clear sense they are up against a significant challenge, with new strategies being promoted by the Taliban with al Qaida influences,” and that terrorists are “coming back and forth across the border from Pakistan with impunity.”

Menendez said American commanders are advocating “a significant increase in troop strength. They are talking about another 10,000 soldiers” to reinforce the 20,000-30,000 now stationed in Afghanistan.

He said there is a necessity “to transition some of the 150,000 American forces out of Iraq” so that the United States military can “deal with places like Afghanistan” and enlist “a more robust response from our allies in NATO.”

Although he perceived that American forces have “been beating the Taliban back,” Menendez said, “in areas where the Taliban are strong, they have begun a new reign of terror against women and against villagers in general.

“Many Afghanis are sitting on the fence waiting to see who is going to win this challenge, and we want to be on the winning side. We cannot afford not to be. They don’t want the Taliban, but by the same token, they are afraid the Americans are not going to stay or that NATO is not going to stay to see the fight out.”

‘Terrible picture’

The senator said another problem lies in the poppy fields of Afghanistan, a prime source of much of the world’s heroin. While he noted that some of the country’s provincial governors “are willing to take on the drug element,” he estimated Afghanistan “produces about $9 billion worth of opium poppies, and about $1 billion of the profits stays with the growers.”

“The bottom line is, Afghanistan is different in so many ways from Iraq, and not only in the military challenge where our real interests lie. It has far less resources than Iraq. It doesn’t have the oil Iraq has. Its populace is not as educated. The only good news I gathered is that at least the Afghan soldiers fight for their country, not for a paycheck, and they fight pretty resiliently,” he said.

In neighboring Pakistan, Menendez viewed the resignation of President Pervez Musharraf as “clearly a problem. The Afghans believe the Inter-Services Intelligence” — Pakistan’s combined domestic and foreign intelligence agency — “is out of civilian control and supports the Taliban, keeping Afghanistan unstable.”

“The ISI seemed at least to be under some control by Musharraf, but now Musharraf isn’t there,” the senator lamented.

“We spent $10 billion dollars there. It is just a terrible, terrible picture. We put all of our marbles in with Musharraf and now we have to try to deal with a new civilian government and get them to understand that their own security is at stake in terms of standing up to the extremists,” he said.

He called the handling of the warfare between Russia and Georgia “another blunder of the Bush administration.” According to Menendez, “Instead of preparing Georgia over a period of time, we basically took a very weak country and put them at the point of the lance. I think it was a mistake.

“As the Germans told us about admitting Georgia into NATO, there are many different dimensions we have to consider. Right now we would be fighting the Russians if Georgia was in NATO.”

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