There will be no quick exit for international forces from Afghanistan, the secretary general of Nato warned this morning at a high-level conference in Kabul.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen told the meeting of foreign ministers that coalition troops would stay in the country even after Afghan troops had taken complete control of security.
He said that when the full transition finally happened, "international forces won't leave, they will simply move into a supportive role".
Opening the conference, held in a government building in central Kabul, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said he "remained determined" that Afghan security forces should take full responsibility of all military and police operations by 2014.
The scale of the problem
facing the Nato forces as they move to hand over control of security in
the country was underlined today when an Afghan soldier killed two US
civilians and another Afghan soldier at a weapons training area in
Mazar-e-Sharif, in the north.
The Afghan soldier appears to have turned on his colleagues, shooting the two Americans and the Afghan before himself being killed.
The incident comes just days after another renegade Afghan soldier killed three British soldiers in their base near Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province.
For most European countries, any transition to Afghan control that would allow them to take their troops home cannot happen swiftly enough.
The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said the conference, the first of nine international meetings to be held in Afghanistan since 2001, marked the "beginning of a very fundamental transition" to Afghan control.
But Rasmussen said the shift would happen slowly, and on the basis of "conditions, not calendars".
"Transition will be done gradually – on the basis of a sober assessment of the political and security situation, so that it is irreversible," he said.
Highlighting the difficulty of locking down the Afghan capital with so many big-name politicians attending the conference, rocket fire on the outskirts of the city earlier forced a plane carrying Ban and Sweden's foreign minister, Carl Bildt, to be diverted as it tried to land. They touched down instead at the US airbase in Bagram, outside Kabul, from where they travelled by helicopter to the conference.
"A few unguided rockets landed on the outskirts of Kabul city last night and in the early hours of the morning," said Lieutenant Commander Katie Kendrick, a spokeswoman for the international military coalition.
Addressing the meeting of some 68 delegates from different countries and international organisations, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, defended her country's decision to start withdrawing some of its troops in July 2011.
The deadline, set last year in a speech by Barack Obama, has been widely criticised for fuelling concerns that the US will not stay the course.
Clinton said the date showed both the country's "sense of urgency and our strength of resolve".
"The transition process is too important to push off indefinitely," she said.
"But this date is the start of a new phase, not the end of our involvement. We have no intention of abandoning our long-term mission of achieving a stable, secure, peaceful Afghanistan. Too many nations – especially Afghanistan – have suffered too many losses to see this country slide backward."
