Afghanistan's army will take a lead role in operations across the country within the next two months as Nato-led international troops pull back, a Defence Ministry official said Wednesday. Zahir Azimi, a ministry spokesman, said: "The national army is ready and will take lead in all operations in the next two months."
The announcement comes as the Taliban declared the start of a new "spring offensive" targeting Afghan and foreign soldiers, as well as civilian government employees. In London, the Ministry of Defence confirmed that three soldiers killed by a roadside bomb Tuesday were British. Nine Afghans also died.
They were on a routine patrol in the district of Nahr-e-Saraj, in Helmand province, when their vehicle hit the bomb, the ministry said, bringing to 444 the number of British soldiers killed in the country since 2001. Earlier Wednesday, militants killed Malim Shawali, an official from the High Peace Council, and one bodyguard in Helmand. Four bodyguards were wounded in the ambush in Greshk district as Shawali was en route to an event.
President Hamid Karzai established the High Peace Council in 2010 to start peace negotiations with the Taliban. Taliban attacks increased in the first quarter of this year. The United Nations said in a report last week that the number of civilian casualties rose by about 30 per cent in the first three months of 2013, when compared with the same period last year.
Nato forces are to handover security responsibilities to their Afghan counterparts and leave the country by next year, and foreign troops will take on an advisory role. Azimi, the Defence Ministry spokesman, said the army was more than capable of combatting "any threat" after 2014, and the current mistrust of local forces was a "psychological war" waged by the insurgents.
"It doesn't mean there will be no threat at all. There will be terrorism and insecurity but ... capabilities of the army would be at a level that could combat all those threats," he said. He said the army still depends heavily on the international forces for intelligence gathering, air power and logistics transport, and would continue to need air support from foreign troops until the end of 2014.