Col. Gary Cheek, commander of U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan, said that Afghan insurgents are “significantly weaker” than a year ago.

Cheek claimed militants were tiring in the face of the growing authority of President Hamid Karzai’s government and its foreign-trained security forces, and were attracted by an American-backed reconciliation program.

Many of the clashes were now “limited to the border region where insurgents can launch small-scale attacks, then attempt to return to Pakistan,” Cheek said at a news conference marking the end of his 11-month deployment in Afghanistan.

“The insurgency in Afghanistan is not over, though certainly by any logic our adversaries should call it quits. I would characterize our enemies as significantly weaker that they were a year ago and their influence continues to wane.”

Meanwhile, Pakistan leader Pervez Musharraf claims that the recent arrest of a senior al-Qaeda operative has helped to “break the back” of the terrorist organisation.

“We have broken their back. They cease to exist as a cohesive, homogenous body under good command and control, vertical and horizontal.”

Some European security experts have been sceptical about Mr al-Liby’s importance to the terrorist network, but Gen Musharraf maintained that his capture was “very significant” and that it had led to other key arrests in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi. …

“Whatever they are now capable of doing is individual and group actions divorced from central command and co-ordinated centrally. They are on the run in the mountains, not in contact with each other,” he added.

Personally, I won’t be holding any VT (Victory in Terrorism) celebrations any time soon.

Speaking of victories, Iraqi security forces are getting better. They have already arrested five people for a market bombing last week. Interestingly enough, only one of them is an Iraqi. The other four are jihadists from Palestine.

In other news,
Japan has promised to build a $100 million power plant in southern Iraq.