Afghanistan Times
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AT Monitoring Desk
KABUL: The US military needs a new strategy in Afghanistan, where peace cannot be won through bomb and bullets, says a soldier who claims killing Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Ladin.
“That’s a difficult question,” Robert J. O’Neill, former Navy SEAL who claims to have killed bin Laden in 2011, told the Boston Herald about the Afghanistan war.
At a veterans’ event in Malden, the ex-SEAL said: “It’s definitely worth trying to defeat the radical ideology we’re up against.”
The 43-year-old Rob O’Neill said he was longer as eager to go to war as he was at 27. “There’s a lot of stuff out there that can’t be solved with bullets and bombs. I hope there’s a better way.”
O’Neill called education as a key element of the Afghanistan strategy making progress. “It’s definitely worth trying to squash the ideology, but it’s also worth trying to educate people.”
“Fifteen seconds after I shot Osama bin Laden, one of my guys asked if I was OK,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, what do we do now?”
The SEAL was told he had just killed the world’s most wanted militant and that his life had changed.
To find political settlement in Afghanistan US Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad said he wrapped up sixth round of talk with Taliban in Qatar, where they made steady but slow progress on aspects of the framework for ending the Afghan war.
However, the current pace of talks isn’t sufficient when so much conflict rages and innocent people die. “We need more and faster progress. Our proposal for all sides to reduce violence also remains on the table.”
