KABUL, Afghanistan, Nov. 17 (UPI) -- NATO's top civilian in Afghanistan said Wednesday President Hamid Karzai's criticism of U.S. war strategy is "not helpful" and declared progress is being made.
"It's still clearly fragile, and there are significant risks and will be a long, hard campaign ahead, but we believe in 2010 we have achieved what we wished to -- regaining the initiative after having lost it in the past few years," Ambassador Mark Sedwill told reporters in Kabul. "We think we are in a different mode to where we were before, and the reason for that is simple: We've finally aligned our resources with the demands and objectives of the campaign. That's what the surge is all about."
Sedwill, a Briton, said he and U.S. Gen. David Petraeus will tell this weekend's Lisbon Conference the 30,000 troop surge ordered by U.S. President Barack Obama has made significant progress in the nine-year war, The Washington Post reported.
Sedwill also said Karzai's recent call for an end to Special Operations raids to kill or capture Taliban leaders should not have been made public.
"It is not helpful to have a Washington Post headline suggesting a week before the summit that there is friction between the president of Afghanistan and the alliance, or with the ambassador or the general, over the conduct of the strategy," Sedwill said. "We have different perspectives, and it would be much better if we worked out those different perspectives in private."
