NATO Afghanistan Chief Says Taliban Is Waning
The head of NATO's southern command in Afghanistan told Pentagon reporters that the influence of Taliban extremists in the region has diminished and that some 10,000 Afghan families have returned to their homes as the operations of the 11,500 NATO troops in the region continue.
But "bringing increased stability can sometimes only be achieved through kinetic operations," added Dutch Maj. Gen. Ton Van Loon, NATO's commander for the region that includes the volatile Helmand and Kandahar provinces. And "Taliban extremists are too fanatic for compromises." He said, in a briefing late Monday, that adding more unmanned aerial vehicle capability would be "welcome." Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance "is clearly one of the areas that NATO can develop more of so we can actually have more ISR platforms in the air providing us with better situational awareness," Van Loon said. While poppy production in the Helmand province continues unabated, with clear overlap between organized crime in the narcobusiness and the Taliban, Van Loon added that tackling trafficking "cannot be something" that NATO forces do.
"It needs to be the government of Afghanistan in the lead and supported with real alternatives for the farmers," he said. But he added that NATO must "help them to try and make sure that they will receive an alternative–that they are not just deprived of the only income source they have with no alternatives."
On reports that weapons from Iran have been found in Afghanistan, Van Loon said that "we, of course, received the information that this might be the case." But, he added, "we cannot deny or confirm it. We know that there are some high-end weapons like the AGS-17 [automatic grenade launcher], which has shown up in Helmand. Whether this weapon has been brought into Iran for us is very hard to actually be very firm about."
advertisement
