Gates says Taliban must take legitimate Afghan role

ISLAMABAD, Jan 22 : The United States recognizes that the Taliban are now part of the political fabric of Afghanistan , Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said here on Friday, but they must be prepared to play a legitimate role before they can reconcile with the Afghan government.

That means, Mr. Gates said, that the Taliban must participate in elections, not oppose education and not assassinate local officials. “The question is whether the Taliban at some point in this process are ready to help build a 21st century Afghanistan or whether they still just want to kill people,” Mr. Gates said.

The defense secretary made his remarks in an interview with Pakistani journalists at the home of the American ambassador to Pakistan , Anne W. Patterson. Mr. Gates was on the second day of a two-day visit to the country.

American officials have given qualified support to a proposed Afghan initiative to give jobs, security and social benefits to Taliban followers who defect. Mr. Gates has said there could be a surge of such followers willing to be integrated into Afghan society, but he has voiced skepticism about whether the Taliban leadership is ready to work peacefully with the Afghan government.

“The question is, what do the Taliban want to make out of Afghanistan ?” Mr. Gates told the journalists. “When they tried before, we saw want they wanted to make, and it was a desert, culturally and in every other way.”

Later on Friday, Mr. Gates told a group of senior Pakistani military officers that the Pakistani Army had to reshape and adapt itself to fighting insurgencies, much as he said the American military has after nearly a decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan . Mr. Gates implicitly said that the real threat to Pakistan was the collection of militant groups on the border with Afghanistan and not its archrival in the region, India .

“Fighting along the Afghan border and in the tribal areas has required dramatically different skill sets and equipment than preparing for a potential conventional conflict with another country’s army,” Mr. Gates said in remarks at Pakistan ’s National Defense University , the country’s main scholarly institution for the military.

In a question-and-answer session afterward, which was closed to the news media, one officer made the argument to Mr. Gates that Pakistan ’s problems with militants on its border were the fault of the United States , according to the Pentagon press secretary, Geoff Morrell. In the nine-year-old war in Afghanistan , the American military has driven Islamic extremists across the border into Pakistan and as a result, according to Mr. Morrell, the tone of the officer’s question to Mr. Gates, was “Hey, we’re in this mess because of you.”

Mr. Gates “took great exception,” Mr. Morrell said, and responded that the situation in Afghanistan was unsustainable after the withdrawal of the Russians from the country in 1989 and that Al Qaeda’s goal is to destabilize the democratic institutions in the entire region. “The notion that you could somehow be immune from them or not a target of this grand plan of theirs is just not realistic,” Mr. Morrell quoted Mr. Gates as saying.

In his formal remarks, Mr. Gates acknowledged the current “trust deficit” between Pakistan and the United States and said it had tainted Pakistan ’s perception of the United States .

“So let me say, definitively,” Mr. Gates said, “that the United States does not covet a single inch of Pakistani soil, we seek no military bases here and we have no desire to control Pakistan ’s nuclear weapons.”