US Defence Secretary Robert Gates on Friday urged Nato allies to modify their military strategy to combat the growing Taliban influence in Afghanistan's poppy-growing southern region.
Gates wants Nato forces in the south to abandon the current piecemeal strategy of fighting the Taliban province-by-province in favour of a region-wide command structure, as US military planners consider a possible major build-up of forces in the area next year, according to US defence officials.
The five provinces of Nato's Regional Command-South, or RC-South, comprise one of the main battlefronts of the war. Experts say the insurgents, financed by Afghanistan's $3 billion opium trade, now cut a swath of influence across several provincial borders. Gates discussed strategy on Friday in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia with counterparts from Canada, Denmark, Britain, the Netherlands, Australia, Estonia and Romania, whose forces account for about 90 percent of the 18,000 Nato troops in the south. The United States has about 3,500 troops in southern Afghanistan.
But commanders have asked for more than 10,000 additional forces for the south, a request that awaits President-elect Barack Obama when he takes office on January 20. "Future US troop contributions to RC-South will be under the command of the RC-South commander. They will be his assets to deploy as he sees fit," Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters. "We hope that would be a precedent-setting move such that other countries would similarly empower the commander to use troops to the total advantage of the region," he said.
Up to now, Nato has tried to combat insurgents in the south by assigning security responsibilities for different provincial sectors to different countries. By encouraging allies to cede authority to commanders with regional authority, officials say, Nato could be more effective at disrupting the flow of fighters, weapons and money.
"The enemy that we're dealing with in Afghanistan does not respect boundaries, so the more we can push co-operation across the boundaries we have set up, the better," said one senior US defence official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The switch to a regional command, however, may be difficult to implement due to political pressure in some European capitals to maintain control over troops' combat role and reluctance to cede authority.
Violence in Afghanistan has surged to levels not seen since the 2001 US-led invasion toppled the country's former Taliban rulers, prompting commanders to call for more troops and the Bush administration to undertake a series of strategy reviews. "There's an arc of Taliban penetration that goes through northern Zabul, Uruzgan, Helmand and Kandahar. The US in these areas, like the Canadians in Kandahar and the British in Helmand, are operating with an economy of force," said Seth Jones of RAND Corp.
US Army General David McKiernan, the top Nato and US commander in the country, has asked for an additional three brigades, or well over 10,000 troops, specifically for the south. The Pentagon plans to send more troops to Afghanistan next year, but that force is headed for eastern Afghanistan. Obama favours sending more troops to Afghanistan.
But Gates told Congress earlier this year that additional forces would not be available until the spring or summer due to commitments in Iraq, where the United States has about 150,000 forces. The United States has 32,000 troops in Afghanistan - about 46 percent of a total Western military presence of 70,000. Approximately 14,500 US troops are under Nato command and 17,500 under US command.