By DPA,
Brussels : Hundreds of police officers began deployment Wednesday to areas captured by NATO’s biggest offensive so far in Afghanistan, in a bid to stave off the return of insurgents, a spokesman for the Afghan ministry of the interior said by video link to Brussels.
Operation Mushtarak – meaning “together” in the local Dari language – was launched Saturday by NATO’s United Nations-mandated International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the Afghan National Army (ANA) to re-establish government control over the central Helmand province, in the south of Afghanistan.
“The operation is going smoothly and joint security forces are heading forward,” Zemeray Bashary told journalists at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels via a video conference link from Kabul.
To maintain rule of law after soldiers are gone, he said “1,100 extra police” was sent Wednesday to the two districts of Helmand where Taliban-led resistance was strongest, namely Murjah and Nad Ali.
Bashary claimed the deployment was a month earlier than planned.
“In the long run, 1,600 Helmand police will be deployed in those two districts” he added – indicating that a bigger number will be posted in Murjah where Afghan police were not present previously.
In the past, military gains from ISAF troops were frustrated by the inability of local Afghan institutions to hold on to newly conquered territories, leaving insurgents with an easy way to reassert their influence over local population.
Bashary vowed that the mistake would not be repeated.
“We will definitely gain the hearts and minds of the people,” he said, promising the construction of schools, roads and bridges and provision of other essential services.
The spokesman for the ANA, General Zahir Azimi, said in the same video conference that “most of the area” had been cleared of insurgents, which hosted “around 1,000 Taliban before the operation was launched.”
“Some of them have fled, some have been captured, some have laid arms and hid among the local population,” Azimi said.
Training of Afghan army and police is a central plank of ISAF’s new strategy for Afghanistan, which aims to start troop draw-down in mid-2011, leaving local security forces to take control of their own country.
However, NATO allies are facing a significant shortfall in the number of international training teams required to bring Afghan army and police officers up to scratch.
A senior US official confirmed Wednesday that about 2,000 additional men are needed, on top of the almost 40,000 extra combat troops that are to strengthen ISAF’s numbers over the course of 2010.