Kabul (Afghanistan): US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice promised victory over a resurgent Taliban during an upbeat visit to Afghanistan on Wednesday and called the country's embattled President one of the most respected leaders in the world.
Rice acknowledged that the rise of violence in Afghanistan in recent months is a cause of concern for the United States and the US-backed government of President Hamid Karzai.
However, she said that democratic gains in the country in the nearly five years since the fall of the Taliban, were not erased.
"That Afghanistan has enemies is not a surprise to anyone," Rice said following meetings with Karzai and with military commanders. All her meetings were held behind heavy fortifications.
Rice said that the United States is committed to Afghanistan for the long haul as she declared, "We are not going to tire, we are not going to leave."
Meanwhile, Karzai said that optimism about his country's gains does not mean he is blind to its challenges, among them corruption and the drug trade.
Terrorists "are trying to attack us where they can," Karzai said adding, "When we speak of success, it doesn't mean that we forget the problems."
A clearly frustrated Karzai had criticised the coalition's anti-terror campaign last Thursday, deploring the deaths of hundreds of Afghans and appealing for more help for his government.
However, Karzai did not repeat that criticism with Rice by his side. Rice gave little sign that she was worried about the direction of the fight against terror even while acknowledging the scope of the challenge.
"This is an international force that is determined to try to undermine the aspirations of free people and they are not going to win," Rice said.
"We have to realise that we have a common enemy. We can all do more. We can all work harder we all need to constantly assess our strategy, look at our tactics, make certain that we are responding to their change in tactics, because this is a thinking enemy," she said.
After a few hours in Afghanistan, Rice was headed to Moscow for a meeting with counterparts from the Group of Eight industrialised nations in which the topic was expected to be Iran's disputed nuclear program.
She had been in Pakistan on Tuesday for meetings with President Gen Pervez Musharraf and other Pakistani officials.
While there, she heard Pakistan's military government challenge neighboring Afghanistan to identify the terror hideouts that Afghanistan claims exist in Pakistan.
"Our view is that we have two good friends and two fierce fighters in the war on terror," Rice said following meetings with Musharraf and Foreign Minister Khursheed Kasuri.
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Musharraf became an unlikely ally of the Bush administration following the Sept 11, 2001, attacks when he pledged cooperation against terrorists who traveled easily between Pakistan and the lawless Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Karzai has criticised Pakistan for not doing enough to go after terrorists along the mountainous border between the two nations.
The deadliest fighting in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 has killed more than 500 people, mostly militants, since mid-May and raised fears of a Taliban resurgence.
Afghan officials have said that the Taliban is making an all-out push to scare Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and Romania from deploying some 6,000 troops to the region.
Outside Kabul, there is little visible evidence of improvements in infrastructure or services since the Taliban regime was ousted.
It has allowed forces loyal to the hard-line Islamic regime to regain strength and sympathy in their former strongholds in the poorer southern provinces of Uruzgan, Helmand, Zabul and Kandahar.
The Taliban is also being fueled by the return of a flourishing drug trade. Afghanistan produces 90 per cent of the world's heroin supply with its poppy crop. The profits of drug trafficking are helping fund the militants.
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