Dutch commander says Taliban weakened

A Dutch general who until recently was NATO commander in southern Afghanistan said Tuesday the Taliban militia remain dangerous in some pockets of the country but now lack the strength to mount a major offensive.

Maj. Gen. Ton van Loon said a much-anticipated Taliban offensive has not developed in the south and the numerical strength of the hardline Islamic militia, which were forced from control of the country in a U.S.-led war in 2001, was overstated.

"My experience is you always take a zero off," van Loon said at a news conference at the Atlantic Council of the United States, a nonprofit group of supporters of NATO, the trans-Atlantic alliance that plays a leading role in trying to revive Afghanistan and stamp out radical groups.

"There are still pockets and they can be very dangerous," van Loon said. "But it is completely different from what they have been saying about their influence."

Taliban fighters have been driven from such target areas as Kandahar city and parts of Helmand province, he said. "They have lost the war," he said.

Still, van Loon said the NATO allies have a hard fight on their hands trying to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, most of whom are illiterate and living in a country where farmers harvested enough poppies last year to make more heroin than the world consumes.

And, he said, weapons continued to flow to insurgents from Pakistan, Uzbekistan and elsewhere. Van Loon said they included Iranian weapons but that "there is no reason to assume this is organized" by the Iranian government.

The Dutch general said it was very important for NATO to avoid civilian casualties in its clashes with Taliban. "Sometimes we have to stop operation or do them in a different way," he said.

On Monday, Taliban fighters attacked Afghan and U.S.-led coalition troops with rockets and gunfire in the Shah Wali Kot district of Kandahar province, sparking a four-hour battle, a coalition statement said. Fighter aircraft bombed three enemy positions, it said.

As of Monday, at least 325 members of the U.S. military have died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to the Defense Department.