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Extra troops should go to border: Afghan FM
AFP - Sunday, November 23
KABUL (AFP) - - Extra foreign troops pledged to fight a Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan should be deployed on the border to stop militants arriving from Pakistan, the Afghan foreign minister said Saturday.
The troops should also end insurgent control in numerous areas otherwise Afghanistan will have to use its "own traditional ways", Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta said, apparently referring to tribal militias.
There are nearly 70,000 mostly Western troops in Afghanistan under NATO and US command but a Taliban-led insurgency has been at its most intense this year, leading to demands for more soldiers and a change in strategy.
"We do appreciate and we do agree to the international community sending more troops to Afghanistan," Spanta told a press conference, adding these forces must "control infiltration on the border areas of our country."
"The international community is serious in the job they have undertaken and they know very well where the terrorists are coming from, where the infiltration is taking place," he said.
Afghanistan's partners also recognised that the "nests of terrorism" outside the country needed to be shut down down, he said, referring to militant sanctuaries across the border in Pakistan.
Asked about the Afghan ways of fighting the violence that he had referred to, Spanta briefly mentioned traditional "self-defence forces", a likely reference to tribal militias.
The possibility of relying on militias to fight the insurgency has been raised in recent months although there are concerns this could extend the influence of warlords and undermine the government.
The minister also referred to long-mooted talks with Taliban militants who agreed to lay down their weapons and accept the democracy-based constitution drawn up after the fall of the Taliban government in 2001.
Also at the briefing was the Danish foreign minister, Per Stig Moeller, whose country has about 750 soldiers in Afghanistan many of them in the volatile opium-producing southern province of Helmand.
Moeller said Denmark planned to send in more troops and police trainers and to double its contribution to Afghanistan's reconstruction and development.
He said he supported talks with Taliban who agreed to the conditions laid down by the government.
"We should not Talibanise Afghanistan but if we can civilise Taliban, it is not bad," Moeller said.
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