NATO’s chief insisted Thursday that Taliban insurgents have been weakened in Afghanistan despite “spectacular” headline-grabbing attacks in recent days.
Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the NATO mission was “moving in the right direction” and that enemy attacks have actually dropped by 26 percent from July to September compared to the same period last year.
“Spectacular attacks capture the headlines. But they don’t capture more ground,” Rasmussen said at a monthly news conference.
“They do not allow the enemies of Afghanistan to seize and hold ground. And the bigger picture is different. Overall enemy attacks are decreasing and the enemy has been weakened,” he added.
A Taliban car bomb attack struck a NATO convoy on Saturday, killing 17 people including 10 Americans, four Afghans, two British contractors and one Canadian soldier.
In another major attack on US interests in Afghanistan, suicide attackers blew up a truck bomb and raided UN and a US development office in the southern city of Kandahar on Monday, killing five Afghans.
Two Afghan guards were killed on Thursday when suicide bombers and attackers besieged the offices of a logistics firm working with foreign forces outside Herat city, close to the NATO-led force’s western headquarters.
Rasmussen said NATO forces would continue to apply pressure on the Taliban-linked Haqqani network in order to coax them into negotiating an end to the fighting in the 10-year-old war in Afghanistan.
“The strategy and our objectives are very clear: to stop Haqqani network attacks on our soldiers and the Afghan population. To that end we will keep the Haqqani network under severe military pressure,” he said.
“The best chance to facilitate such a political process is to keep up a strong military pressure on the Haqqani network and other enemies of Afghanistan,” he said, adding that the group poses a “major threat” to NATO soldiers and Afghans.
