BRUSSELS, Jan 26: Nato pledged on Friday a robust response to an expected offensive early this year from Taliban-led insurgents in Afghanistan, as the United States offered to boost aid and possibly provide extra troops.
“The message has been clear that the international community intends to keep up the initiative in Afghanistan,” Nato Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said after talks between alliance foreign ministers in Brussels.
“That means more reconstruction, and we have heard more nations stepping up to the plate as far as their activities are concerned in the field of reconstruction and development,” he said.
On the need for more troops to confront the Taliban, Scheffer said: “Force generation will no doubt be discussed in Seville, Spain,” between defence ministers at meetings on Feb 8-9.
Nato spokesman James Appathurai said: “Allies are going to step up their civilian, military and economic efforts, with increased pledges for funding... and more forces on the ground.” He said they welcomed an offer from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to provide 10.6 billion dollars in aid over the next two years and keep more than 3,000 troops already in Afghanistan there for an extra four months.
A senior US official said the new aid would in part finance an increase in size of the Afghan army and police forces.
“Many allies around the table, I can't go into specifics, discussed increases that they are planning for this year,” Appathurai said during a lull in the talks.
Around 4,000 people were killed in the insurgency last year in Afghanistan -- many of them rebels -- and US officials say suicide attacks have more than quadrupled since 2005.
In Kabul, an Afghan analyst told AFP that the US package was not the answer.
“The former Soviet Union also spent billions of dollars on modern weapons and military facilities but they failed to defeat the resistance with hardship and weapons,” said analyst Waheed Mujda.
“This US funding is more of a hurried political move than a deeply studied answer to the needs of this country,” he said.
The US offer is partly aimed at easing European concerns that Washington is so focused on Iraq that it might leave them to shoulder the burden in Afghanistan.
But the United States also wants Nato to go after the Taliban, which does not sit well with some of the 26 allies which see the alliance's role as primarily as stability provider.Nato leads some 33,000 troops from 37 nations under the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which is trying to spread the influence of President Hamid Karzai's weak central government to outlying regions.
But the Taliban, ousted by a US-led coalition in 2001 for harbouring Osama bin Laden, have waged a virulent insurgency against the military alliance in the south and east of the country.—AFP
