AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE,
Brussels: Three years into its mission in Afghanistan, NATO is moving confidently into the unruly south but as violence escalates concern is mounting about when the government will be able to take control.
Senior officers are sure NATO has the military means to help stabilise conflict-scarred Afghanistan and adequately defend themselves, while leaving troops under US command to continue to hunt down the Taliban.
But with the move south set for completion next month, remnants of the fundamentalist former regime have stepped up attacks on coalition and alliance troops, and unrest has even festered in Kabul, the relatively stable capital.
In Paris on Tuesday, NATO's top military commander General James Jones, reiterated that “from my standpoint, the mission as it is currently sourced is adequate.”
By moving forces into the south — a region which, along with the eastern sector bordering Pakistan is the most dangerous in Afghanistan — the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) will virtually double in size.
It will grow from around 9,500 troops to more than 16,000 thanks largely to British, Canadian and Dutch personnel who are already deploying in the area.
As it has fanned out to most points of the compass, ISAF has set up civilian and military reconstruction teams aimed at spreading the influence of President Hamid Karzai's weak central government beyond Kabul.
But all are aware that the real test is in the south, in the region around Kandahar, and then the move east in the following months, as NATO absorbs most US forces and finally sets up bases across the entire country.
“This is a time for steady nerves and to continue the work,” warned US ambassador to Kabul, Ronald Neumann, in a telephone conference with European journalists, a conversation in which he predicted “more fighting this summer”.
“They are going to try to test us and if we don't show strong resolve we will face hell for it,” said Brigadier General Andre Var, second-in-command of the French military delegation at NATO.
Officers explain the resurgence of violence in the south — among the worst since the Taliban were ousted by a US-led coalition in 2001 for harbouring Osama bin Laden — by the arrival of fresh troops in the area.
In some remote locations, there has virtually never been any presence, international or national, leaving the Taliban, drug cartels and tribal groups largely untroubled, they say.
“We're kicking over a rock and staying,” said one NATO source, suggesting that if the Taliban were testing them the troops would respond.
Nevertheless some officers are surprised by the tenacity of the resistance and the way fighters manage to group in the hundreds.
“We were expecting a resurgence of offensives in spring, but not like this,” the commander of Dutch forces General Dick Berlijn said on Thursday after his troops were ambushed in southern province of Uruzgan.
But for NATO strategists, the real long-term threat is not posed by a resurgent Taliban — something they tend to play down — but rather the need to help the government combat the illegal drugs trade and improve dire living conditions.
Violent anti-American demontrations in Kabul a week ago, sparked when a US military truck crashed and soldiers then shot into a crowd of people who stoned them, were the latest sign of a growing frustration among Afghans.
“I would suggest very clearly that the outcome of Afghanistan will not be determined by military capabilities alone,” Jones has warned.
“We are not really preoccupied by the security aspect, we are serene about that at NATO,” Var said. “It's more the way out of the crisis that worries us, and how and when Afghanistan will be able to walk on its own two feet.”
