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Afghan security better than expected-US official

24 Oct 2011 21:31

Source: reuters // Reuters

WASHINGTON, Oct 24 (Reuters) - Security in Afghanistan is improving even more quickly than anticipated, a senior U.S. defense official said, despite concerns that a brisk troop drawdown might handicap the effort to build lasting stability.

The official, speaking in an interview last week, said that estimates earlier this year from the U.S. intelligence community had not predicted the decline in violence documented in select security trend figures released last week by the U.S.-led NATO force in Afghanistan.

"What we're seeing is that things are going not just as well as we expected, but in many cases better than we had expected," said the official, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

The official said the increase in the monthly number of insurgent attacks in Afghanistan, which had been climbing steadily since 2005 and peaked at over 4,000 in August 2010 alone, had decreased during the last fighting season.

He credited that trend to the extra 33,000 troops that President Barack Obama deployed following his 2009 overhaul of Afghan war policy, along with the strides made by Afghanistan's own security forces.

Obama is now pulling those surge forces from Afghanistan -- withdrawing 10,000 this year and the remainder by the end of September 2012 -- as Americans' attention turns to their ailing economy and and the presidential election on the horizon.

Yet the trend of overall security across Afghanistan after a decade of war remains a subject of dispute. Even the most confident military officials recognize the obstacles to sustaining improvements made in places like southern Helmand, including a surge in high-profile attacks and insurgents' ability to shelter and resupply in western Pakistan.

While foreign forces have touted improved security in the Taliban's southern heartland, the picture is much less encouraging in the Afghan east, where militants from the Haqqani network, blamed for a series of bold attacks on American targets, take advantage of rugged terrain and the porous border to the east.

The Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO), which advises aid and other groups on security, warned this month that the war appeared to be "escalating, not diminishing."

The Pentagon is expected to release its latest security trend figures for Afghanistan in greater detail later this week.

The U.S. official said that the surge troops' focus not just on battling the Taliban but also shoring up the local soldiers who will take over from them had been important in turning around the tempo of enemy attacks over the last fighting season.

"The narrative is wrong if people think that U.S. forces went in and did the fighting and pushed the Taliban back and left," he said.

Still, he said, "We still want to be very cautious about that, because it's a war and in a war the enemy gets a vote." (Reporting by Missy Ryan; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)