NEW YORK, Sept 2: A year after Canadian and American forces drove hundreds of Taliban fighters from the Panjwai and Zhare districts south-west of Kandahar, the rebels are back adopting new tactics and have driven government forces out of roughly half of a strategic area in southern Afghanistan, said the New York Times in a report published on Sunday quoting Afghan officials.

The newspaper said the setback is part of a bloody stalemate between Nato troops and Taliban fighters across southern Afghanistan this summer. Nato and Afghan Army soldiers can push the Taliban out of rural areas, but the Afghan police are too weak to hold the territory after they withdraw. At the same time, the Taliban are unable to take large towns and have generally mounted fewer suicide bomb attacks in southern cities than they did last summer.

The Panjwai and Zhare districts highlight the changing nature of the fight in the south. The military operation there in September 2006 was the largest conventional battle in the country since 2002.

But this year, the Taliban are avoiding set battles with Nato and instead are attacking the police and stepping up their use of roadside bombs, known as improvised explosive devices or I.E.D.’s.

“It’s very seldom that we have direct engagement with the Taliban,” Brig-Gen Guy Laroche, the commander of Canadian forces leading the Nato effort in Kandahar, told the Times. “What they’re going to use is I.E.D.’s.”

The newspaper said Nato and American military officials have declined to release exact Taliban attack statistics, and collecting accurate information is difficult, particularly in rural Afghanistan.

According to an internal United Nations tally, insurgents set off 516 improvised explosive devices in 2007. Another 402 improvised explosive devices were discovered before detonation.

Reported security incidents, a broad category that includes bombings, firefights and intimidation, are up from roughly 500 a month last year to 600 a month this year, a 20 per cent increase, according to the United Nations.