An Afghan 'future without insurgents'

Col Spiszer says that the battle against the Taleban is being won, slowly

The BBC Urdu service's Haroon Rashid meets Col John Spiszer, brigade commander of US forces in the strategically important Afghan provinces of Nangarhar, Kunar, Nuristan and Laghman.

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The commander of US forces in Afghanistan's four north-eastern provinces says he is not hopeful the insurgency in the war-torn country can be brought under control "any time soon".

"If we reinforce our forces and improve our training and equipment on the Afghan and Nato sides, then it'll take less time," says Col John Spiszer.

Three out of four provinces under his command border with Pakistan.

But the commander is hopeful an Iraq-like deterioration in security would be a flawed assessment, because Afghanistan has "different dynamics".

'Challenge'

The colonel, who took over the command only three and a half months ago, was quite candid in admitting that stopping cross-border movement between Afghanistan and Pakistan is a hard nut to crack.

I think there's a definite possibility that they [the Taleban] may become irrelevant - they're verging on that now Col John Spiszer America's unlikely Afghan allies

"There is movement of money, weapons, and facilitators from Pakistan to this side... a lot of the people leave Afghanistan for the winter and the pass is closed so they can't transit any more and don't want to be trapped on this side.

"But there's no doubt that it makes our job hard... because when you start looking at the terrain, the only way that the threat that we face here can really get re-supplied, based on the mountains and everything else, is through the passes coming from Pakistan. It's a challenge for us, we're just kind of spread thin."

Sitting in his small Jalalabad base office with four computer screens beaming at him, Col Spiszer said he was confident the coming winter would slow down the Taleban.

Col Spiszer says that the Taleban have been driven to the hills

"They never stop their activities. I don't envision us slowing down at all, we have the capabilities to continue to find them and fight them, wherever they come up, and we're going to continue working with our Afghan security force partners in that realm to keep pressure on the enemy," he said.

Some military experts say that better technology provides coalition forces with an edge over the Taleban.

"If you look at how few forces we have, we could not do the job we're doing without those advantages [in terms of] how we operate our mobility and our ability to target the enemy."

Col Spiszer is in charge of an area which is also considered to be a possible hiding place for Osama Bin Laden.

'Isolate locals'

However, he says he has no intelligence on him. "I've got no clue. Give me a shot at him. Give my guys a shot at him. They'd like to be known as the guys who caught him."

Col Spiszer insists his strategy to isolate locals from the enemy in Afghanistan is succeeding.

"The bulk of our engagements with the enemy right now are away from the population, the enemy is up in the mountains, he's largely been forced up there because it's hard for us to pursue him and find him and catch him.

"The roads don't exist and it's difficult terrain, you have to go on foot, so to actually chase people down takes a lot of people and we just don't have that many in many cases to really get after them."

US troops make up the bulk of foreign forces in Afghanistan

He said that Afghan people are "starting to realise that there's a future without the insurgents" and that successful efforts had been made to re-open universities and train more masons, road workers, electricians and plumbers.

Asked whether the Taleban would ever go away, he said that was "their choice", because it could be possible "to stay up there in some of those mountains forever".

"But I think there's a definite possibility that they may become irrelevant - they're verging on that now," he said.

"Unfortunately, we've got to keep fighting them and they keep taking casualties and we keep taking casualties and occasionally there's civilian casualties."