LONDON, 7 February 2008 — NATO is facing a “real test” in Afghanistan but progress is being made to tackle the Taleban insurgency, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on a visit to London yesterday. “Yes, I do think the alliance is facing a real test here but we shouldn’t underestimate the transformation that NATO itself has gone through in really learning how to fight this fight,” she told reporters.
Rice is in London holding talks with Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband as the United States and Britain bid to draft in more NATO forces to help fight the resurgent Taleban in southern Afghanistan. The talks come the week after Germany rebuffed US calls for more troops in the area, the scene of most of the fighting against the Islamist militia, in a tiff played out publicly.
Rice said they were engaged in “a different fight than the one NATO was structured to do,” conceding: “It has taken some time.” But she said progress had been made through the partnership of the international community with the Afghan government, particularly in the fields of good governance, healthcare and education.
Proof of that was the change in tactics by the Taleban militia, who want to “intimidate, brutalize ... and terrorize” ordinary Afghans, she said. “I think the Taleban has changed tactics and we have to be strong enough to deal with that situation,” she added.
Germany will deploy a rapid reaction force in northern Afghanistan in the summer to replace a Norwegian contingent, Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung announced in Berlin yesterday. “We have agreed to fulfill this task because we see a need for a rapid intervention force,” Jung told a press conference.
The announcement comes as Germany faces mounting pressure from the United States to contribute combat troops to the international force battling a Taleban insurgency in southern Afghanistan. Jung last week rejected a request by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates to send soldiers and helicopters to the violence-wracked region.
There are currently about 3,100 German troops stationed in Afghanistan. Nearly all of them are deployed in the capital Kabul and the relative stable north as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.
The people of northeastern Afghanistan believe that foreign troops deployed there have helped to make the region significantly safer, a German study released yesterday has found.
The survey carried out in February 2007 showed that 99 percent of the population felt safer over the course of the two previous years. Of those people, 76 percent said that they felt “much safer.”
“The improvement is largely attributed to the presence of foreign troops,” according to the poll conducted by researchers from Berlin’s Free University.
It found that 80 percent of some 2,000 Afghan households questioned felt that foreign troops have had a positive impact on their physical security. “They held a similarly positive view of the role of the Afghan government,” the researchers said.
In contrast, 87 percent of the population felt that local militia leaders had no real influence on the security situation. Only six percent believed that they had made the region safer, a development the researchers interpreted as evidence that the militias’ influence was waning.
The study was conducted in 77 villages in the Afghan provinces of Baghlan, Badakhshan, Kunduz and Takhar and claims to be the first scientific study gauging the attitude of the Afghan people to foreign soldiers.
