Afghan police deploy early in anti-Taliban push

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A major anti-Taliban operation in southern Afghanistan is progressing well, allowing early deployment of hundreds of Afghan police to maintain security once the military phase winds down, officials said on Wednesday.

NATO and Afghan officials told a news briefing via a video link from Kabul that most of the objectives in the operation in Helmand province had now been secured and last pockets of Taliban resistance in the area were being cleared.

"We are now consolidating and linking up those objectives," said Brigadier-General Eric Tremblay, spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

An Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman said 1,100 Afghan police were deployed on Wednesday in Helmand's Nad Ali and Marjah districts, the focus of the offensive by 10,000 Afghan and NATO-led international troops.

"The plan was that after a month the police would be deployed, but that changed and ... the additional forces were deployed in Marjah and Nad Ali today," Zemarai Bashary said.

The assault, one of the biggest in an eight-year war, is the first test of U.S. President Barack Obama's plan to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, where the Taliban have made a steady comeback since a U.S.-led invasion ousted them in 2001.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the offensive was aimed at clearing out insurgents to allow for economic development and demonstrated NATO's strategy of gradually handing over responsibility to Afghan forces.

"The operation is going well," he said in a video message posted on his blog, andersfogh.info.

The upbeat assessment came as the Pakistani military and a senior U.S. diplomat confirmed on Wednesday that the Taliban's top military commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, had been captured this month in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi.

ISAF commander General Stanley McChrystal told NATO ambassadors in Brussels on Wednesday the aim in Helmand was to deploy about 1,900 Afghan police in the two districts to maintain security after the offensive ended, a NATO source said.

Tremblay said troops were still clearing areas of insurgents in the western part of Marjah and cautioned that some Taliban fighters could be expected to return to stage attacks.

Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman General Zaher Azimy estimated 1,000 insurgents had been in the area of the operation.

He said some had been killed, some had been captured, some had fled to other provinces, while others had laid down their arms and hidden among the local population.

He said the allied forces were concentrating on searching houses and locating improvised explosive devices and added: "There is not any particular resistance from the insurgents."

Tremblay said NATO was trying to estimate how many may have fled to neighboring Pakistan, which has for long been a haven for Islamist fighters.

(Editing by Jon Hemming)