Taliban insurgents are trying to sabotage a security handover in the capital of Afghanistan’s violent southern Helmand province, but Afghan police and troops can protect the city after a year of preparation, British army commanders say.
The late July handover will be a formality, that will make “no difference at all” on a day-to-day basis as Afghans have been in charge of the city since last summer, said Lieutenant-Colonel Alastair Aitken, commander of the 4th Battalion, the Royal Regiment of Scotland.
“It is not since August in 2010 that ISAF last intervened in a security incident within Lashkar Gah city,” Aitken said. “But as a symbol actually it means quite a lot because it means that the Afghans can definitely say publicly that they are in charge of security,” he added.
Lashkar Gah, the busy capital of the southern province of Helmand, is the most volatile of the seven areas where NATO-led forces in late July will kick off a years-long process of transferring security control to their Afghan counterparts. The transfer will be a key test of NATO plans to hand security across the country to Afghan forces by the end of 2014, allowing the United States, Britain and other countries where the public is weary of the long Afghan war to take their troops off the front line. The Taliban are making good on a threat to target the process; successful attacks could undermine confidence in Afghan forces and the overall transition.
Reuters journalists staying at the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base in Lashkar Gah were jolted awake one recent morning by the thump of a nearby explosion. “They are constantly trying to disrupt … That is the sort of thing we anticipate,” Colonel Andrew Jackson, deputy commander of Task Force Helmand, the British-led contingent in Helmand, told Reuters in an interview on Sunday.