KABUL - Afghanistan's government will provide more than 1,000 police reinforcements for the southern province of Kandahar in response to Taliban attacks that killed dozens of people there ahead of a coming offensive on the insurgent stronghold, an official said Tuesday.
The Interior Ministry agreed with a provincial request for more security, Kandahar Gov. Tooryalai Wesa said.
Wesa asked for more police after multiple bombs over the weekend killed at least 35 people in Kandahar city. The Taliban called the attacks a "warning" that they are ready for the war's next phase.
Afghan and NATO troops are planning to move into Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual birthplace, later this year after securing another stronghold in neighbouring Helmand province. The southern push is part of a new counterinsurgency strategy and follows President Barack Obama's decision to send 30,000 new American troops to Afghanistan to reverse insurgent gains.
Some of the 1,100 new Afghan police in Kandahar will come from the capital, Kabul, and some will be recruited and trained locally, Wesa said. It will take a few months to put the new forces in place.
Interior Minister Hanif Atmar pledged to send more security forces when he visited Kandahar on Monday to attend funerals of the bombing victims. Atmar put the number of new police at 1,200 in Kandahar city and the surrounding province.
Kandahar city's police now number more than 2,000, and U.S. and Canadian trainers have been working to build up a professional force. The police are traditionally one of Afghanistan's least-trusted institutions.
Building up Afghan security forces is a key goal of the international coalition in the war, now in its eighth year. Obama hopes to begin withdrawing troops by 2011 and start turning over security to local institutions strong enough to prevent the Taliban's return to power.
Afghan National Police forces were the first responders to Saturday's attacks in Kandahar, and the international coalition praised their performance in preventing escapes from the main prison in the city, which was apparently the goal. The Taliban attacks mirrored a 2008 assault that allowed hundreds of inmates, many of them insurgents, to escape.
Wesa also appealed to the central government Tuesday to send more agents to gather intelligence about the insurgents, who operate freely in Kandahar city and control many of the surrounding villages.
"One of the big problems we face is lack of intelligence information," Wesa said.
Also in southern Afghanistan, the international force seized nearly a ton of marijuana seeds discovered in a vehicle Tuesday at a checkpoint in the Garmser district of Helmand province, NATO said. Troops detained one person in the vehicle; the seeds will be destroyed.
NATO confiscates and destroys drugs that it finds, but the current military strategy is aimed at Taliban insurgents, not drugs.
For years, the Afghan government and the U.S. tried to eradicate crops, but that led some impoverished poppy farmers to swell the ranks of the insurgency. Now, farmers are left alone, even though Afghanistan produces 90 per cent of the heroin worldwide, with Helmand province alone responsible for nearly half of this.
Russian officials say heroin smuggled into their country from Afghanistan is endangering their national security and say the alliance must do more against the trafficking.
Victor Ivanov, director of Russia's Federal Drug Control Service, expressed his country's concerns to U.S. and Afghan drug officials Tuesday in Kabul.
"The Afghan government needs the international support because it lacks finance, resources and forces," he told reporters at a Tuesday evening news conference, noting that Afghan budget pales in comparison to the multibillion-dollar international drug trade.
NATO has said the alliance understands Russian concerns but that defeating the insurgency comes first and will help resolve the drug problem.
