KANDAHAR: Milkseller Hafiz-ullah, shopkeeper Gul Ahmad and taxi driver Yaseen — all in Afghanistan’s southern city of Kandahar — have never heard of Nato.

They are not aware the US-led alliance of mostly European nations has for months been moving thousands of troops and military hardware into southern Afghanistan on the most ambitious mission in its history.

“What’s Nato?” Hafizullah replied when an AFP correspondent asked if he knew the group would soon take over from the US-led coalition that has been in the area for years hunting down Taliban and other insurgents.

“I thought they were all Americans,” said the milk merchant from a nearby village, referring to international troops in the south.

“Nato is coming?” Ahmad asked, also unaware of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) that the alliance leads, and that will assume command of the southern region around the end of July.

“Let them come,” he said dismissively of this latest group of foreigners to venture into Afghanistan’s turbulent south.

This ignorance about Nato and the ISAF is due in part to the lack of education among much of Afghanistan’s population of roughly 25 million people in which only about 70 per cent of adults is estimated to be literate.

But it also belies antipathy about foreign forces whom some — including the insurgent Taliban — call “invaders”, like the Russians in the 1980s and the British in the 19th century.

“I don’t know about Nato. I know there are American troops in Afghanistan,” said Yaseen, the taxi driver. “They’ve invaded our country.”

This is an attitude the Nato deployment will be hoping to soften with their focus on community needs and development, and beyond the counterterrorism priorities of the coalition.

The new ISAF force — which will number about 8,000 in the south, more than double the troops there last year — will look much the same as their coalition predecessors except perhaps for a green and white ISAF badge on their uniforms.

“You can’t really differentiate Nato soldiers and coalition soldiers. But their approach will be different,” said ISAF spokesman Major Luke Knittig.

“It will be a wider strategy that targets security to allow focused development which in turn allows the government to deliver vital goods and services to the people,” Knittig said.

Nato-ISAF would publicise this strategy through the media and meetings with village elders, who are influential in deeply traditional south Afghanistan.

ISAF commander Lieutenant General David Richards has “made it very clear that he wants to sit down with shuras (community meetings) and development councils in some of the more remote areas of the southern provinces,” Knittig said.

This approach will be “complemented” by the coalition’s continued counterterrorism mission in the south, he told AFP.

Dry and rugged southern Afghanistan is the birthplace of the Taliban movement that took control of most of Afghanistan by 1996. It has seen the worst of an insurgency launched by Taliban extremists after they were driven from government in late 2001.

Nato Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer is another official to emphasise that the battle against the insurgents depends on winning public support, including through development, as much as warfare.

While the public may be unaware of Nato’s historic expansion from northern and western Afghanistan and Kabul into the south, officials in the war-wearied south are hoping the new command will bring some changes.

“I think with the arrival of Nato — an experienced force — and with the international credibility they have, they will change the situation,” said Mohayedin Khan, spokesman for the government in Helmand that sees some of the worst violence.

“First of all, Nato will give more legitimacy to the deployment of foreign troops in Afghanistan,” defence ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zahir Azimi said, referring to the perception of US troops as invaders.

And “besides military power, Nato enjoys strong political power worldwide. It can pressure the ‘roots of terrorism’ in regional countries,” he said, referring to the trainers and financiers of the rebels whom Afghan officials say are based abroad.

The United States, “busy in Iraq, Iran and North Korea”, had not been able to do this effectively, Azimi said.

“With Nato taking over, I believe they have the power to achieve this.”—AFP