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| Sunday, 24 March 2002 |
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| News Business Features Editorial
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Carter
says U.S. was wrong to abandon Afghanistan
ATLANTA, Saturday (Reuters) Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said on Friday that the United States had "abandoned" Afghanistan in the 1990s, allowing the poverty-stricken Asian nation to become a breeding ground for the extremists believed responsible for the Sept. 11 anti-U.S. attacks. Carter was president in 1979 when the United States began funneling arms and money to Afghanistan to help mujahedeen fighters resist invading Soviet troops. But U.S. and Western aid to Afghanistan fell dramatically after the Soviets retreated from the country in 1989 and the Cold War ended. "We abandoned Afghanistan and other countries did as well, but they (the Afghans) didn't blame them, they blamed us," Carter said in a speech to 500 people at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. "It left a nation filled with hatred and despair and resentment," said Carter, who added that the best way to combat terrorism was to fight poverty and give people around the world hope of a better life. In October, the United States launched military strikes against Afghanistan's Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime and its al-Qaeda allies, who are believed responsible for the Sept. 11 hijacked plane attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon military complex in Washington. Nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks. Carter, who resisted attacking Iran when radical students seized the U.S. embassy in 1979 and held 52 U.S. hostages for 444 days, praised President George W. Bush for the military action against Afghanistan. |
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