Nato to take over Afghanistan operation

The US servicemen will be moved from the relatively peaceful eastern part of Afghanistan to the volatile southern region, where Nato troops, including 5,000 British soldiers, have been fighting an increasingly bloody war with Islamist Taliban fighters.

The deployment will mean that 14,000 of Nato's 32,000 International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) troops under British command would be provided by the US, its biggest contingent under foreign control since the Second World War.

The agreement yesterday came as European nations failed to agree to send more troops to cover shortfalls identified by commanders. The secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, at the Nato meeting in Slovenia, urged other countries to send more troops to the country.

He said: "I am grateful that the United States has decided to bring its forces under Isaf. It should not be used as an argument that we can now rest on our laurels."

The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said: "The aggregation of that is the situation that's really not acceptable. I believe a little more progress was made today and we'll just have to keep working on it."

The US troop transfer had been expected later in the year, but officials said the fierce nature of the fighting with the Taliban in the south made it necessary to pool British, Dutch and Canadian troops under Nato with separate US forces.

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article1771902.ece