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| Afghanistan |
| NATO to lead all Afghan peacekeeping from next month |
| 2006-09-28 |
| NATO agreed on Thursday to take command of peacekeeping across all of insurgency-hit Afghanistan next month after the United States pledged to transfer an extra 12,000 troops to its force. Pentagon officials said the transfer of troops currently in Afghanistan's eastern region would entail the biggest deployment of U.S. forces under foreign command since World War Two. Afghanistan is experiencing the most serious violence since hardline Taliban Islamists were ousted in 2001. Militant attacks in eastern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan, have tripled in some areas, the U.S. military said on Thursday, despite a peace agreement on the Pakistani side meant to end the violence. Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf stressed his commitment to fighting the Taliban in talks with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "President Musharraf said he was determined to deal with the Taliban and reduce the level of cross-border activity," a spokesman for the prime minister said. The NATO accord came as European nations failed to plug all troop shortfalls identified by commanders battling the Taliban insurgency, and will mean the United States providing 14,000 of some 32,000 NATO troops that will be under British command. "I am grateful that the United States has decided to bring its forces under ISAF," Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told reporters after a NATO meeting in Slovenia, referring to NATO's International Security Assistance Force. "It should not be used as an argument that we can now rest on our laurels," he added, urging other allies to come forward with extra troops for the more dangerous south. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said it was "perfectly understandable" if other NATO allies restricted where their troops could operate, but added it undermined NATO's flexibility on the ground. "The aggregation of that is the situation that's really not acceptable," he told a news conference. "I believe a little more progress was made today and we'll just have to keep working on it." RESURGENT TALIBAN The U.S. troop transfer had been expected later in the year, but alliance officials said battles with resurgent guerrillas in the south showed the urgent need to pool British, Dutch and Canadian troops under NATO with separate U.S. forces. The Taliban resurgence has soured relations between Kabul and Islamabad, crucial allies in the U.S.-led war on terrorism that are both battling Islamist militants. Afghanistan and Pakistan have agreed to tighten security cooperation and to hold meetings of tribal leaders to encourage them to go after militants, Afghanistan's ambassador in Washington said on Thursday. Ambassador Said Jawad, providing details of a dinner on Wednesday at the White House attended by the U.S., Afghan and Pakistani presidents, said Pakistan had agreed to take action against militants based on Afghan intelligence. "Pakistan agreed that if it is provided with specific demands, names or lists of targets that it will comply," Jawad said in a brief interview. Afghanistan is angry about the support a resurgent Taliban can get in Pakistan and is suspicious of a peace agreement struck in Pakistan this month. The pact is meant to end violence by pro-Taliban militants in Pakistan's North Waziristan border region. It is also meant to choke off cross-border attacks into Afghanistan. But the number of attacks on the Afghan side of the mountainous border, in the provinces of Paktika and Khost, had risen since the pact was signed, the U.S. military said. "There has been an increase in activity, certainly along the border region, especially in the southeast areas across from North Waziristan," a U.S. military spokesman, Colonel John Paradis, told a news conference. Referring to accounts from soldiers on the ground, Paradis said: "They have seen, in some cases two-fold, in some cases three-fold increases in the number of attacks." |
| Posted by:ed |
| #1 I thought the US wouldn't allow its forces to be under anything other than full US command. Am I wrong? Is some sort of arrangement here that protects US troops from possible problems? |
| Posted by: gorb 2006-09-28 23:15 |