Rumsfeld arrives in Afghanistan

KABUL - US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld arrived in Afghanistan yesterday in the midst of the most intense phase of Taleban violence since the Islamists were ousted from power in 2001.

Rumsfeld, on his 11th trip to Afghanistan, was set to meet US commanders and President Hamid Karzai to discuss the violence and plans for NATO to take over military operations from a US-led force in the south this month.

In the latest fighting yesterday, US-led forces and Afghan troops killed about 30 militants in a notoriously volatile district of the southern province of Helmand.

"Early this morning, a joint Afghan-coalition raid resulted in the death of an estimated 30 extremist fighters," said a spokeswoman for the US-led force, Lieutenant Tamara Lawrence.

Coalition and Afghan troops suffered no casualties in the operation in the Sangin district, she said, adding that one helicopter made a hard landing and had to be destroyed.

Groups of Taleban have infiltrated large parts of the Afghan south and east this year and unleashed their most bloody wave of bombings, ambushes and raids.

The violence, nearly five years after the Taleban were ousted, has taken the government and its Western backers by surprise and raised concern for the NATO peacekeeping mission that is due to take over in the south.

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

The Taleban are being fuelled by drug money and benefit from sanctuaries on the Pakistani side of the border, Afghans and US officials say. They are also capitalisting on dissatisfaction with a government many say has failed to help them, analysts say.

Power vacuum

The commander of the US forces in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, said power vacuums in the south where the government had little presence had contributed to the violence.

"It's important to remember that the areas the Taleban is operating in are areas that the government of Afghanistan has not heretofore had the strength and the presence," he said.

"So it's not a question of the enemy being strong; it's very much a question of the institutions of the state of Afghanistan still moving slowing to stand up the Afghan security forces."

But analysts and military officials, including the commander of NATO's Afghan force, have said the international community's attention was diverted by Iraq, allowing power vacuums in Afghanistan that the Taleban have filled.

Rumsfeld on Monday dismissed arguments that the US military's focus on fighting in Iraq has allowed narcotics trafficking and violence to rise in Afghanistan.

Eikenberry said the Afghan insurgency had adopted new tactics in its fight, such as roadside bombs, but he said intelligence did not indicate Iraqi fighters were migrating to Afghanistan.

Britain announced on Monday it would send 900 more troops and additional helicopters to Helmand where British troops have faced fierce Taleban resistance. The reinforcements will arrive over coming months bringing the total to 4,500 in the south.

Six British soldiers have been killed in Helmand's Sangin district in the past month. In all, more than 60 foreign soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan this year.

The Taleban said the British reinforcements would have a torrid time. "We'll attack the British troops with such ferocity they will flee," Taleban commander Mullah Hayat Khan told Reuters by telephone.

British colonial forces suffered heavy defeats in Afghanistan in the 19th century when Britain tried to win over Afghanistan's tribes and make their lands a protective buffer against perceived Russian designs on British India.

The Taleban were ousted after refusing to hand over Osama bin Laden. They are fighting to expel foreign troops and defeat the Western-backed government.

- REUTERS