BRUSSELS – NATO-led forces have regained the momentum against Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan but still face a tough fight this year, the head of the alliance’s military committee said Thursday. Italian Admiral Giampaolo Di Paola told a news conference he was confident the international military mission would complete its objective of handing over security responsibility to Afghan forces nationwide by 2014.
“The tide has been reversed, that is in my humble assessment,” he said after the first meeting of NATO’s military brass at alliance headquarters in Brussels this year. General David Petraeus, the commander of NATO and US forces in Afghanistan, told the assembled military chiefs via videoconference that the campaign was on “the right track,” the admiral said.
Despite the gains, Di Paola said, “we need strategic patience. There will be a tough fight ahead in 2011.” This followed an upbeat assessment Petraeus gave in a letter to US troops released this week, saying foreign forces had seized the initiative on the battlefield over the past year, pushed back the Taliban in the rebels’ southern strongholds and inflicted enormous losses on mid-level insurgent leaders.
Last year was the deadliest one for Western troops in Afghanistan since the US-led overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001, with 711 foreign soldiers killed. Di Paola drew a parallel with the darkest days of World War II, when Nazi and Japanese forces appeared to have the initiative. “Think of World War II: 1942, if you were an American you knew were in the worst moment of history, and still the tide had already changed,” he said.
“There was a lot of fighting in ’43, ’44, but in ’42 when the horizon was very bleak and the sky was very dark, the light was already coming in… What was happening in 1942, that’s what’s happening today in Afghanistan,” he said. He refused, though, to be drawn into a comparison with Vietnam in 1975, when US-trained Vietnamese soldiers were overrun by communist guerrillas.
“What I have seen of the Afghan security forces, of the way they are trained, the way they do operate, the way they start training themselves is something that was not there in 1975,” Di Paola said. NATO aims to increase the number of Afghan security forces from 256,000 to 306,000 by October this year, a crucial part of its strategy to begin handing over security to Afghan forces this year and complete the transition by 2014.
