Innsbruck (Austria): The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) is expanding its presence in Afghanistan, despite attacks last month on a local base at the height of the cartoon controversy.
The organisation will double the size of the mission to 21,000 by the end of November, officials said on Tuesday.
NATO is currently moving into the southern sector with 6,000 more troops mostly from Britain, Canada and the Netherlands.
That deployment is expected to be completed in the summer and will quickly be followed by the alliance moving into the east - considered the most dangerous part of the country.
However, British Defense Secretary John Reid said the eastern expansion would probably not involve the dispatch of fresh troops, but instead will be a "reallocation" of US combat troops already in the region for the NATO peacekeeping mission.
NATO commander in Afghanistan General James Jones, said their mission was nation building and a separate US mission will take over the search for Taliban and al-Qaida operatives.
Jones says that narcotics, not militants, are the biggest problem now facing the country. He said that neither the Taliban nor the al-Qaida were in a position to re-start an insurgency of "any size or major scope".
The NATO mission is to support the government of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai as it takes control of the whole of the country where warlords have been operating for over two decades.
Afghanistan in December inaugurated its first Parliament since 1969 after elections in September.
Karzai, who took over after the ousting of the Taliban, won the country's first direct presidential election held in October 2004.
(With inputs from AP)
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