NATO takes command of peacekeepers in Kabul

NATO took command of international peacekeepers tasked with enforcing security in the Afghan capital, heralding the 54-year-old alliance’s first mission outside Europe.

At a ceremony in central Kabul outgoing German commander Lieutenant General Norbert van Heyst passed the flag of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to NATO Lieutenant General Goetz Gliemeroth.

“NATO’s takeover of the ISAF mission demonstrates our nations’ long-term commitment to stability, security and the future development of the Afghan people,” Gliemeroth, also of Germany, said yesterday on accepting command of the mission.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai and German defence minister Peter Struck were among 300 military, United Nations, NATO and Afghan officials witnessing the handover ceremony at a school in central Kabul.

“The task ahead now is to continue building democratic structures,” Struck declared after the landmark handover. “Afghanistan must not lapse back into anarchy and chaos and Afghanistan must not again become the home of global terror as was the case under the rule of the Taliban.

“We must go on to make our contribution towards the formation of government structures until the Afghan authorities are capable of guaranteeing safe and secure environment by themselves.”

The force of 5,300 soldiers from 31 nations, including 110 US peacekeepers, has been deployed in Kabul since December, 2001. It was set up weeks after the defeat of the hardline Taliban regime to safeguard the capital.

Twenty months on, war-torn Afghanistan’s provinces are rife with instability from in-fighting between rival warlords and an intensified insurgency by fighters loyal to the Taliban, al-Qaida and rebel Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Even in Kabul, a relative island of safety amid the unruly 32 provinces, the peacekeepers have been targeted in rocket and suicide car bomb attacks.

However, despite the violence, calls from Afghan and United Nations leaders to deploy ISAF troops in the provinces remain unheeded by the international community.