"We're pretty confident" that the additional soldiers and Marines will be on the ground and ready before the August 20 vote, Major General Mart de Kruif, the Dutch commander for the southern region, told reporters.

President Barack Obama has approved the deployment of more than 21,000 US troops as part of a bid to reverse the course of the war against Islamist insurgents challenging the Kabul government.

"Our goal is to have the influx complete before the elections on the 20th of August. And that means we'll have the equipment in, the people in and that people are adapted to the circumstances in Afghanistan," De Kruif said.

The Dutch general, who is due to hand over the command of the south to British forces in November before the Americans take the helm in 2010, was due on Wednesday to brief US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other NATO ministers with troops in the region.

During his visit for the NATO talks, Gates on Wednesday visited a US military cemetery outside of Valkenburg, in the Netherlands, where more than 8,000 American soldiers are buried from World War II.

The ministers, from eight countries contributing forces to the south, will discuss the situation in southern Afghanistan before a meeting on Thursday of all the NATO defence ministers in Brussels.

De Kruif said the extra troops would mean stepped up military operations in the south, a bastion for the Taliban and the opium trade that helps finance the insurgency.

But he also said the additional troops on the ground would result in a rise in violence as the larger international force moves into areas that were previously uncontested.

"This will lead to a significant increase of the operational tempo we have, and you will also see a spike in the amounts of incidents in the next couple of months because we will put a lot of pressure on the insurgents," De Kruif said.

He said the deployment of US forces and more helicopters was a major logistical challenge but so far the effort was on schedule, with most elements of a 10,000-strong brigade of US Marines now in place.

Troops and weapons for one more US Army brigade were due to arrive between now and the elections, he said.

The additional US forces would help break what has been termed a "stalemate" in southern Afghanistan, De Kruif said, as the international coalition has lacked enough troops for a vast region.

The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has managed to maintain and bolster its control in areas where it patrolled but beyond that, "we just ran out of troops," he said.

Describing security conditions in the south marked by attacks against Afghan police and civilians often with improvised explosives, he said: "The last seven months have been tough."

Invoking the sacrifices of US and European allies in World War II, Gates called on the NATO alliance to meet the challenge posed by the Afghan war.

"It is a mission whose importance should not and cannot be underestimated for it is critical to the security of both Europe and the United States," he told reporters.

"Over the next few days the United States and our partners will discuss what remains to be done and I'm confident we will summon the will and the courage to do whatever it takes in Afghanistan, just as we have in the past on battlefields that necessitated memorials like this one," he said of the Netherlands site.

The US force in Afghanistan is due to double to about 68,000 by the end of the year, while 33,000 other foreign troops are now stationed there.

earlier related report
NATO troop among 57 killed in Afghan insurgency
A NATO soldier is among 57 people -- most of them militants -- killed in new attacks, air strikes and clashes in an intensifying insurgency in Afghanistan, authorities said Wednesday.

Afghan and international security forces, who have stepped up operations ahead of August 20 elections, meanwhile destroyed Taliban heroin labs that bankroll the insurgents, the NATO-led force announced.

The International Security Assistance Force soldier was killed in a "hostile incident" in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday, the 40-nation ISAF said in a statement that did not give the nationality of the trooper.

The US military said meanwhile it had killed a Taliban commander with reported links to Iran's Revolutionary Guards and up to 16 militants with him in a precision air strike in the west on Tuesday.

The strike was called in against Mullah Mustafa, who commanded about 100 men, as he travelled in the western province of Ghor, it said in a statement.

"Determining no civilians would be endangered, forces used precision aerial munitions to strike the group, killing Mustafa and as many as 16 other associated militants," it said.

Afghan officials however said they had reports that civilians, including children, were killed. They also could not confirm the targeted commander was among the dead.

The US statement said the commander "had recently met with senior Taliban leaders, and reportedly had connections to Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps -- Quds Force."

Western officials have said Tehran may be involved in the conflict in Afghanistan, where thousands of US troops are based, perhaps by supplying weapons to the Taliban or allowing them to transit through Iran.

An Afghan police chief announced meanwhile that security forces had killed 30 Taliban militants over the past three days in an operation to clear extremists from the troubled southern province of Uruzgan ahead of the polls.

Two police officers had also died, provincial police chief Juma Gul Himat told AFP. "The aim of this operation is to create a safe and secure situation for the elections," Himat said.

Four more Taliban fighters were killed Wednesday in the northwestern Badghis province also aimed at providing a secure environment for the elections, said an Afghan army regional spokesman, Abdul Basir Ghori.

There are fears that attacks by Taliban insurgents or the threat of violence could keep Afghans from voting in the election, the country's second-ever presidential poll and a key test of international efforts to instill democracy.

Authorities said meanwhile that insurgent attacks in the central province of Ghazni on Wednesday had killed two policemen and an Afghan soldier.

ISAF announced separately that its soldiers working with Afghan troops had destroyed a drugs hub in Helmand.

Last week's operation in the southern province, a Taliban stronghold and main producer of Afghanistan's opium and heroin, was backed by British and Canadian helicopters and US jets flown in from the Gulf, it said.

The raid would be a blow to the insurgent campaign as militants use money derived from the drug trade to arm themselves, NATO's International Security Assistance Force said in a statement.

Violence has surged in Afghanistan in the past three years, despite the efforts of an international military deployment now numbering nearly 90,000 soldiers.

US President Barack Obama has pledged 21,000 reinforcements this year, thousands of whom are already in place.

Share This Article With Planet Earth

del.icio.us	Digg	Reddit
YahooMyWeb	Google	Facebook

Related Links
News From Across The Stans

Memory Foam Mattress Review

SPACE MEDIA NETWORK PROMOTIONS Solar Energy Solutions Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison ... Newsletters :: SpaceDaily :: SpaceWar :: TerraDaily :: Energy Daily XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News