responsible for what the US military does in the country.
The Afghan government hasn’t yet said that publicly, but an Afghan television station recently aired the argument, perhaps floating a test balloon for the Afghan government.
Gen. Zalmay Wardag told Shamshad TV last week, “Unless there is a formal treaty signed between Afghanistan and the USA, the Americans operate under the decision of the UN. Afghanistan is not responsible for their operations.”
The problem with this argument is that Afghanistan is trying to become responsible. It has recently demanded, for example, that US troops stop night operations in villages. Tehran could point out that it could also demand that drone flights over Iran be stopped.
Wardag said, “There is no official or formal commitment that they [the Americans] will operate under the laws of Afghanistan in the war on terror. Therefore, Afghanistan is not responsible in this regard.”
Ever since capturing the US drone earlier this month, Tehran has been leaning heavily on the Afghan government, saying it is legally responsible for the violation of Iranian airspace.
The US drone is believed to have flown out of Shindand, an air base built by the Soviet Union in western Afghanistan, not far from the Iranian border.
Iran, meanwhile, announced that it delayed the announcement of the capture of the RQ-170 stealth drone “for several days” in order to expose American lies. Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi said Iran waited for the Americans to deny the loss of the drone and then put it on display.
But the US never denied the loss. It said nothing at all when the drone went down. After Iran said it had captured the drone, a brief announcement from NATO in Afghanistan said US controllers had lost command of the aircraft and assumed it went down.