Afghans sceptical about fresh troops

ut Afghans on the fringes of Kabul are sceptical about those plans.

I met Hayit Allah pushing a wheelbarrow close to his mud-wall compound. He was an elderly man with a wiry spryness, and still worked in the dusty fields with his four sons.

He told me that the security situation was good close to his village. But he said that just five minutes' drive away, the villages were all Taliban-controlled.

But he was not worried about it, he said, and believed more foreign troops would be a bad idea.

His neighbour Haji Rabat, also a farmer, endorsed this view. He thought that deploying more US forces in Afghanistan would be a big mistake.

"Every time the Americans send more troops they create more problems with us," he said. "The only way to resolve this conflict is to negotiate with the insurgents."