President Hamid Karzai said on Sunday he will unveil on March 21
the first provinces where Afghan forces will take over command of the battlefield from Nato, a decade after the US invasion.
Nato plans to begin this year handing Afghan forces the security lead in the battle against Taliban rebels, province by province, with the aim of giving them full responsibility across the nation by 2014.
“We are determined to demonstrate Afghan leadership and ownership of the transition process,” Karzai told the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of defence leaders in the German city.
“I will announce the first phase of transition on the new Afghan year, which is the 21st of March,” he said.
Nato hopes to build up Afghan security forces to 306,000
soldiers and police by the end of the year to begin taking over from around 140,000 foreign troops fighting across the nation.
US President Barack Obama has vowed to begin pulling US troops from Afghanistan in July, although US officials have indicated that only a small number of soldiers would be leaving this summer.
Alliance officials have stressed that the transition would be gradual and dependent on conditions on the ground, in other words the capacity of Afghan forces to lead the fight.
Nato has urged allies to send more trainers to Afghanistan to ensure that the country's security forces, plagued by desertion, illiteracy and corruption, are fit for battle.
Nato's Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Admiral James Stavridis, said the quantity and “quality” of Afghan police and soldiers was on the rise, with 40,000 having passed literacy courses and another 50,000 taking them.
Stavridis said he had seen “significant progress on the ground” during a visit last week to the battle-worn provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, the Taliban heartland, but warned that the gains can still be reversed.
There was one Afghan soldier per five or six coalition forces 18 months ago in southern Afghanistan, but the ratio has now reached one-to-one, he said.
“It's going to be a very tough year ahead, these gains are fragile, they are reversible, but in my view they are indicative of real progress,” he told the conference following Karzai's speech.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said the war in Afghanistan, which was launched by the United States in the wake of the September 11 attacks of 2001, would not be won by force alone.
Last month, the German parliament extended the mission, unpopular in Germany, by 12 months with the condition that troops start coming home from the end of 2011 if security permits.
“Violence in Afghanistan will not end with a capitulation. We will not see clear winners or losers,” he said, voicing support for Karzai's bid to woo Taliban rebels into peace talks.
He cautioned, however, that “the reconciliation process must give Afghans confidence that the rule of terror of the Taliban will not return.” -
Sapa-AFP