At least 20 Afghan Local Police (ALP) personnel suffered casualties during overnight clashes with Taliban rebels who captured an area near the provincial capital of Afghanistan’s northern Kunduz province, said officials on Monday.
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Cleveland said that recent deployment of US forces in the city is meant to train, advise and assist Afghan partners to enable them to better plan counteroffensives and retake lost areas.
“There still are challenges in Afghanistan, there are unsafe places in Afghanistan”, Cook said, acknowledging that Afghan forces “have seen some setbacks” in the Helmand Province.
The Taliban have seized a number of nearby districts in recent weeks and now threaten to overrun the city itself.
President Obama again slowed the drawdown of forces in Afghanistan earlier this year as Afghan security forces failed to staunch the Taliban’s resurgence.
Helmand is strategically important to the insurgents, as its opium crop produces most of the world’s heroin. He said that a significant majority of the province is controlled by insurgents.
Cleveland, however, dismissed fears that the city is about to collapse to the Taliban, saying Afghan forces are better placed to defend Kunduz and, if needed, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation as well as USA forces will be there to assist and “prevent strategic defeat”.
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Officials are trying to present the deployment as primarily a “training” operation, in keeping with a policy of claiming that everything they do is “non-combat”, but the reality is that there are very limited Afghan forces in Lashkar Gah, and a deployment of around 100 troops by the United States is nearly certain to mean direct combat roles. Around 8,400 US troops will remain in Afghanistan through the end of Obama’s final term in January, almost 3,000 more than he had previously planned.
