NATO commander says Afghan government key to success of coming southern offensive

Afghanistan’s NATO head: Military push needs gov’t

KABUL — The success of a planned major U.S.-Afghan offensive in the south depends on how quickly troops and civilian development workers can get public services up and running once the Taliban have been driven away, the top U.S. and NATO commander said Sunday.

The military has widely publicized the upcoming offensive in Marjah — the biggest Taliban-held community in the south — although the precise date for the attack in Helmand province remains classified.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal said the element of surprise is not as important as letting Marjah’s estimated 80,000 residents know that an Afghan government is on its way to replace Taliban overlords and drug traffickers.

“We’re trying to create a situation where we communicate to them that when the government re-establishes security, they’ll have choices,” McChrystal said.

Establishing functioning government has been messy even in the relatively safe parts of Afghanistan. NATO forces and international diplomats have to balance the need to increase security with the desire to build up Afghan institutions that have too-often been corrupt or ineffective.

The Taliban threat has also expanded into formerly peaceful regions like the far north. In the latest violence, two Swedish soldiers and their Afghan interpreter were killed Sunday in a gunbattle near the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, Swedish and NATO forces said.

U.S.-led forces also have often had an uneasy relationship with their Afghan partners amid efforts to train the government forces to take over their own security so the international troops can eventually withdraw.

As a sign of those strains, NATO-led forces said Sunday they had arrested a deputy provincial police chief they accused of helping insurgents place roadside bombs north of Kabul.

Officials in Kapisa province defended Attaullah Wahab, saying he was an honest and good officer and complaining that Afghan authorities hadn’t been informed about Friday’s arrest in advance.

Interior Ministry spokesman Zemeri Bashary complained early Friday that the ministry, which oversees the police, wasn’t informed about the arrest in advance. However, the Interior Ministry later said in a statement that it was jointly following Wahab’s activities with NATO forces and that the Afghan government was involved in the ongoing investigation.

NATO said Wahab was arrested Friday in the Kapisa provincial capital of Mahmud-i-Raqi for involvement in the storage, distribution and planting of roadside bombs as well as corruption related to road reconstruction.

Telegraphing the Marjah offensive has raised concerns that the Taliban might plant more bombs — known as improvised explosive devices or IEDs — to inflict casualties on the attackers.

“The number of IEDs around the country went very high in 2009, so we do expect a very large number of IEDs,” McChrystal said.

But the military appears more concerned that the Taliban may return to Marjah later. To prevent that, McChrystal said the Marjah operation will fully integrate military and civilian components, with government officials involved at every step.

McChrystal spoke alongside NATO’s new civilian chief, former British Ambassador Mark Sedwill, who started his new job Sunday with a briefing at NATO headquarters in Kabul.

Sedwill and McChrystal said they plan to work as a single unit — integrating the military and civilian efforts at a level not seen previously.

“We’ve been somewhat out of sequence,” Sedwill said of the previous civilian and military efforts, explaining that civilian government-building efforts have often been less organized and slower to start than military pushes.

Marjah — an area long run by the Taliban and a major drug-production center — will likely end up being a tougher test-case for the civilian side than the military.

“In the example of Marjah, we need to ensure that the government and development follows up any advances that we make in security,” Sedwill said. “To the Afghan citizen, what matters is: Can his kids get to school and is the school open? Is the clinic open? Can they get decent justice from the Afghan government rather than a Taliban motorcycle court?”

Also Sunday, a bomb detonated by remote control struck an Afghan patrol near the southern city of Kandahar, killing three policemen, according to a local policeman, Mohammad Razaq.

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Associated Press Writer Rahim Faiez in Kabul contributed to this report.