President Hamid Karzai announced in March that most of the districts in Kabul province, which shares a name with the country’s capital city, would be among seven regions where the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) would transition security control to Afghan forces in July.
But Ashraf Ghani, chairman of the security transition and a former Afghan finance minister, said on Sunday there would be no official handover ceremony for the Kabul districts because Afghan forces had effectively been responsible for the area since 2008 when ISAF handed over security control of Kabul city.
“Today is the last day of the transition in six areas and despite insurgents trying to disrupt the process, it ended with great success,” Ghani said during the Panjshir province transition ceremony in the town of Parakh. Panjshir has been an anti-Taleban stronghold for more than a decade.
While Afghan forces have had control of Kabul city for the past three years, there are still several NATO bases in the area, as well as ISAF headquarters, and foreign troops have been called in to help Afghan forces on several occasions.
The security handovers in the past week are the very first step in a slow process that aims to put the Afghan Army and police in control across the country by the end of 2014.
Secrecy shrouded the first handover last Sunday of central Bamiyan province amid Taleban attack threats and in the shadow of the July 12 assassination of Karzai’s brother Ahmad Wali Karzai.
In the past week ISAF has also handed over the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, southern city of Lashkar Gah, western city of Herat and Mehtar Lam district in eastern Laghman province. But the Taleban-led insurgency, which has been fighting Afghan and foreign troops for the past decade, made its mark during the transition week.
Gunmen killed a top Karzai adviser and a member of the country’s parliament in a district of Kabul, a bomb attached to a bicycle exploded in northern Mazar-i-Sharif, killing at least five civilians and seven policemen were killed in an attack on a checkpoint on the outskirts of Lashkar Gah. The first phase of transition began several days after the first US troops left Afghanistan as part of US President Barack Obama’s planned drawdown of about a third of the 100,000 US forces there in the next year.
A surge of US troops has helped improve security in the south of the country over the last year, but there has been spreading insecurity in once peaceful northern areas, fiercer fighting in the east and record civilian casualties.
The initial security handovers have been described by foreign military officials as mostly “soft openings,” because they are effectively under Afghan control already. The next phase of security transition has not yet been announced.
