Taliban says Afghan stress weakened Holbrooke

The Afghan Taliban said on Tuesday diplomat Richard Holbrooke was a "giant of American politics and diplomacy" but had been weakened by the challenge of trying to end a war that has dragged on for nearly a decade.

Taliban Spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi said the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s caused the death of their leaders, although he did not cite medical evidence, and added the conflict may mean other U.S. officials follow Holbrooke to "lighten their burden by simply going to the other world".

"The protracted Afghan war and the descending trajectory of the Americans' handling of the warfare in the country had had a lethal dent on Holbrooke's health as a high-ranking American official," Ahmadi said in a emailed English-language statement.

"He was grappling with a constant psychological stress."

The Taliban, hardline Islamists who are the leading group in the insurgency that Holbrooke was trying to end, governed most of Afghanistan from 1996 until they were ousted by U.S.-backed troops after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Their fight has gained momentum in recent years, with the conflict spreading to once relatively peaceful parts of the country. This has also been the bloodiest year of the war, with record civilian and foreign troop casualties.

Holbrooke, who negotiated the 1995 accord that ended the Balkans war and was U.S. President Barack Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, died on Monday at age 69, after surgery to repair a tear in his aorta.

Ahmadi said Holbrooke was the latest in a long line of senior officials who were devastated by the effort of running a war in Afghanistan, citing the deaths of Soviet leaders Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and Leonid Brezhnev.

"They relieved themselves of the hard task of the Afghan mission by retreating into the lap of death," he said.

"The recent symptoms are indicating that an outbreak of the same epidemic diseases has started in the political and military echelons of America," he added.

General David Petraeus, top U.S. and NATO commander for Afghanistan, briefly collapsed at a Senate hearing in June but blamed dehydration and skipping breakfast.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in an interview published in August that he aimed to retire next year, although his press secretary shot the comments down as no more than "musings" over a wish to quit, which Gates has done before.

"Some of them lighten their burden by simply going to the other world and others, while being still alive, choose to avoid shouldering the mission," Ahmadi added.

The American embassy in Kabul did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the statement.