WASHINGTON, Nov 21: The United States on Friday expressed the hope that the United Nations would stay in Afghanistan despite recent attacks on its workers.

“The UN decision to relocate some aid workers in some parts of the country is temporary ... their commitment remains strong,” the US State Department’s deputy spokesman Adam Ereli told a briefing in Washington.

The United Nations, he said, understood “the stakes and is not going to leave Afghanistan.”

Dispelling the impression that the situation in Afghanistan was slowly sliding back to the pre-October 2001 status, he said: “We’re not back to the same position where we were two years ago. Two years ago, there was a government in-charge of Afghanistan that was giving a haven to terrorists who were planning and launching operations worldwide from Afghanistan. That regime is no longer there. The terrorists have been largely run out of the country. Most of their senior leadership has been caught, and the rest are pretty much on the run.”

He, however, acknowledged that there were remnants of those groups” that wanted to set the clock back in Afghanistan but they “will not succeed.”