UK to send more troops to Afghanistan

KABUL - Britain is to send 900 more troops to Afghanistan to fight the resurgent Taleban who have unleashed a wave of bombings, ambushes and raids in a recovery the international community failed to predict.

Taleban violence has intensified this year to its most severe since US-led forces ousted the hard-line Islamists in 2001 for refusing to hand over Osama bin Laden.

The violence surprised the Afghan government and its Western backers and raised fears that NATO peacekeepers taking over from US forces in the south are being sucked into a war.

"If we have thought that the Taleban would not recover from their defeat in 2001, we were wrong," said Tom Koenigs, UN special representative for Afghanistan. "They have recovered and they get help through international terrorist networks."

The US-led coalition has responded with offensives, and hundreds of people, most of them Taleban, have been killed in the past two months, according to US and Afghan figures.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said observers must be "very careful not to confuse what is happening in the south with a strategic threat to the Afghan government."

The Taleban "are losing hugely in having confronted, now, coalition forces in that part of the country," she told reporters after talks in Washington with Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett.

US and Afghan government forces killed more than 40 suspected Taleban in a ground and air assault on a militant compound in the south Monday, the US military said.

One Afghan soldier was killed and three US-led coalition soldiers wounded in the attack, 10km north of the capital of Uruzgan province, Tirin Kot.

"The enemy frequently used the compound as a sanctuary to conduct operations against local Afghans, government officials and coalition forces," the US military said.

In separate incidents, gunmen attacked a police post about 30km southwest of Kabul Sunday night. Nine attackers were wounded and captured, the Interior Ministry said.

Two rocket-propelled grenades were fired at a NATO base in Kabul yesterday. No one was hurt, the force said.

But more than 60 foreign soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan this year; a casualty rate that makes it as least as dangerous for the troops as Iraq.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai held a top-level security meeting with his foreign allies and the UN's Koenigs yesterday. If past analysis was wrong, now was the time to correct it, Koenigs said. "The security in the south is much more fragile than we have analysed, even half a year ago," he said.

"In the south we face the first phase of an insurgency, an insurgency using, frequently, terrorist methods, an insurgency fuelled by international terrorist networks, and an insurgency not respecting any civilian lives."

British commanders in Afghanistan demanded the extra troops in response to a surge of attacks since elite paratroopers began pushing into remote southern mountain areas in Helmand province.

When they arrive NATO will have 18,500 troops in Afghanistan. Washington had been hoping to reduce its troops in Afghanistan but now has about 23,000 here, the most since 2001.

Prime Minister Tony Blair today said Britain's mission in southern Afghanistan was "dangerous and difficult."

"These are difficult times for Afghanistan ... but backing away is not an option," Koenigs said. "If one has not reached the goal in the expected time, one has to increase the commitment, not decrease it."

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said drug money was fuelling the Taleban and called on European countries to do more in Afghanistan since their societies were hurt by narcotics.

"Western Europe ought to have an enormous interest in the success in Afghanistan, and it's going to take a lot more effort on their part" he said during a trip to neighbouring Tajikistan.

British commanders said Taleban attacks might wane.

"The Taleban have seized some local initiative," one senior commander said. He said they were attacking in fairly large forces in exposed positions and taking heavy casualties.

"One wonders how long the Taleban can ... continue to take such casualties," he added. But he said it was too early to predict whether attacks will soon subside. "We don't precisely know at this stage the state that the Taleban are in."

- REUTERS