KABUL, Afghanistan – Gen. David Petraeus handed over command of the Afghan war Monday, leaving behind a country racked by political instability whose fledgling security forces are fighting a weakened but deadly insurgency that kills coalition troops and Afghan civilians and officials nearly every day.
His successor, Gen. John Allen, will confront those challenges –and many more – as he guides NATO-led forces through the handoff of security control to Afghan forces by the end of 2014 – a process that is still in its earliest stages.
“There will be tough days ahead,” Allen said at a ceremony in Kabul, “and I have no illusions about the challenges we will face together.”
His first day in command offered a grim snapshot of those difficulties. Three NATO soldiers were killed Monday by an improvised bomb in eastern Afghanistan, and another died in a separate incident in the south, NATO said.
Elsewhere in Kabul, Afghan officials gathered at the presidential palace to pay tribute to the second powerful political figure to be assassinated in less than a week. Jan Mohammed Khan, a former governor and a close ally of the president, was gunned down Sunday at his home.
To gain entry, the two killers pretended to be members of Khan’s tribe, seeking his assistance as a tribal elder, Afghan officials said. Khan gave one of the men 3,000 Afghanis – about $60 – before they began shooting, the officials said. A member of Parliament was also killed.
The gunmen in turn were killed by Afghan security forces, though one of them held off police for nearly eight hours.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, as they did for the assassination last Tuesday of President Hamid Karzai’s powerful half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who was shot dead by a close associate.
On Monday, a Karzai spokesman lionized the slain men as national heroes, dismissing as defamation the criticism of both men’s unsavory alliances and suspected ties to the drug trade. The spokesman, Waheed Omer, said their deaths were part of a concerted attempt to disrupt Afghanistan’s security.
“The enemy is trying to remove these personalities,” he said. “They want to remove them in a very systematic manner.”
At the handover ceremony, Petraeus offered similar warnings about the dedication of the insurgents, whom he said were willing to carry out “barbaric” and indiscriminate attacks against civilians.
Indeed, the United Nations recently said civilian casualties in the past six months had risen sharply compared with the same period a year ago. It blamed 80 percent of those killings on the Taliban and other insurgents.
“We should be clear-eyed about the challenges that lie ahead,” Petraeus said. “There is nothing easy about such a fight.”
Still, as Petraeus prepared to depart for Washington to become the next director of the CIA, his overall assessment was hopeful.
He said Afghan and NATO troops had pushed back Taliban fighters in their southern strongholds of Helmand and Kandahar provinces. And he said there were fewer insurgent attacks on security forces in the past 2-1/2 months than in the same period in 2010, “even though there are over 80,000 more Afghan and ISAF forces this year, and we have been on the offensive.”
He also cited as signs of progress the transition of seven cities and provinces to Afghan-led security. The central province of Bamiyan – home to the ancient Buddha statues that were destroyed by the Taliban a decade ago – was handed over Sunday, and officials said that more areas would begin the formal transition this week.
Most of the seven areas included in the first round are relatively stable, or have handled their own security for years with little help from NATO forces. Afghan officials in Kabul and some of the seven areas have acknowledged that the change will be more symbolic than substantive, at least in the short term.
The senior U.S. military officials at the ceremony, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, praised Petraeus for 37 years of military service.
Mullen called Petraeus “one of the most successful and storied generals of our time.”
“Dave has set the standard for wartime command in the modern era,” Mullen said. “There is no one, no one, in the pantheon of American military leadership who so perfectly symbolizes the scope of the effort of our armed forces.”
This report includes information from the Washington Post.