NATO forces in Afghanistan were struck by another suicide car bomb yesterday as they wound down the military phase of their biggest operation against Taliban fighters in the south.
The car bomb exploded near a military convoy in the southern city of Kandahar, killing a civilian believed to be of Pakistani origin and wounding five Afghans, police said.
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said it suffered no casualties in the blast, which had damaged a military vehicle.
Suicide blasts are a hallmark of an insurgency launched by the Taliban after it was toppled from government in late 2001.
There have been move than 40 suicide blasts in southern Afghanistan this year, most of them in Kandahar, according to the ISAF.
The bombings have killed more than 100 people, about 80 percent of them civilians.
The ISAF commander, Lieutenant General David Richards, told a British TV station on Saturday that the military campaign against the Taliban could last for another three to five years.
Richards told Channel 4 News he was determined the campaign would be successful and the Taliban would "start dancing to my tune."
Tackling the booming illegal opium trade -- which many officials have linked to the insurgency -- was likely to take "many years," the general said.
"But if we do that cleverly, then in terms of the insurgency I reckon within between about three to five years this campaign ... people might say `well, we've just about won,'" Richards said.
Meanwhile, Afghan and NATO forces announced yesterday that they had driven Taliban out of an insurgent stronghold in Kandahar Province and were starting reconstruction work.
The combat phase of Operation Medusa, which kicked off on Sept. 2, was over, Kandahar Province Governor Assadullah Khalid told reporters.
"We believe we have cleared the Taliban out of the Panjwayi Pashmul area," ISAF spokesman Major Quentin Innes said.
There were however a "significant" number of Taliban-laid mines and improvised explosive devices in the area and troops wanted to remove them before encouraging the thousands of people who had fled the area to return home, Innes said.
The troops would now help with reconstruction and humanitarian aid, he said.
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