Russia Providing Arms to Taliban: US

Kabul: Russia is supporting and even supplying arms to the Taliban, the head of US forces in Afghanistan has told the BBC.

Commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. John Nicholson accused Moscow of directly arming the Taliban.

"We've had weapons brought to this headquarters and given to us by Afghan leaders and [they] said, this was given by the Russians to the Taliban," Nicholson said in an interview with the BBC.

Meanwhile, American military commanders are drumming up support for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, promising that new troops and equipment and a closer relationship with Afghan forces will reverse Taliban gains.

"This is not another year of the same thing we've been doing for 17 years," Gen. Joseph Dunford , chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Washington Post. "This is a fundamentally different approach."

Taliban has made significant territorial gains, with the group now openly active in 70 percent Afghanistan's territory. Afghan military forces, meanwhile, are taking casualties at a record level. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani continues to drum up support for a peace initiative that would bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, but so far a a breakthrough appears far off.

"American military officers see a growing Russian effort to bolster the Taliban's legitimacy and undercut (the US and) Nato's military effort there," CNN had reported.

A spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry had rejected the claims as "absolutely false", alleging that such announcements were "designed to justify the failure of the American political and military campaigns" in Afghanistan.

 The Soviet Union fought a bitter war against the US-backed mujahedin after it invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Many of those same mujahedin fighters joined the Taliban when it was formed during the civil war that followed the humiliating Russian withdrawal in 1989.

The Taliban's enmity towards Russia was enduring, says Kate Clark of the Afghanistan Analysts Network: "The Taliban always castigated the Northern Alliance for dealing with Russia," she says.

It may be that now Russian and Taliban interests are becoming more closely aligned, she speculates.