Manila : Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte on Saturday said President-elect Donald Trump had invited him to the US, and endorsed his brutal antidrug campaign, telling him that the Philippines was conducting it “the right way”.
Duterte, who spoke to Trump over phone on Friday, said the President-elect was “quite sensitive” to “our worry about drugs”, The New Tork Times reported. “He wishes me well, too, in my campaign, and said well, we are doing it as a sovereign nation, the right way,” Duterte said.
There was no immediate response from Trump to Duterte’s statement. His transition team could not be reached for comment. Duterte said that Trump had invited him to visit New York and Washington, and that he wanted to attend the summit meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations next year in the Philippines.
“I appreciate the response that I got from Trump, and I would like to wish him success,” he said. “He will be a good President for the US.” Duterte has been leading a campaign against drug abuse in which, since he took office in June, more than 2,000 people have been killed in raids. Police said several hundred more have been killed by vigilantes.
Meanwhile, US President-elect Donald Trump has assured Afghanistan’s leader in a phone call that his administration stands ready to up support to the country if necessary, a Kabul statement said, reports AFP. “If Afghanistan needs more security assistance, his administration, after assessing the needs, will focus on providing more security support,” the statement released by President Ashraf Ghani’s office read.
The statement cited a phone call between Trump and Ghani on Friday, the first official communication between the two since Trump’s November 8 election. “President elect Trump praised the Afghan forces’ defence of Afghanistan and its people and emphasised that the US will continue to remain with the government and people of Afghanistan during his term,” it said.
Fifteen years and hundreds of billions of dollars after the US led an invasion of Afghanistan to oust the Taliban in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, the security situation in the country remains unstable. Afghan police and army units took over providing security for Afghanistan from NATO in 2015.
Their first year was something of a disaster, when they sustained more than 5,000 fatalities and saw the regional capital Kunduz briefly captured by the Taliban. Around 8,400 US and NATO troops are still engaged in assisting Afghan forces in the war against a resurgent Taliban militancy.
