A top U.S. general said on Wednesday that there will be no quick success in fighting the insurgency in Afghanistan, and that the situation may get worse before it improves.
U.S. President Barack Obama announced last week that the country would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan in early 2010 to defeat the Taliban and establish law and order.
"Achieving progress in Afghanistan will be hard and the progress there likely will be slower in developing than was the progress achieved in Iraq," Gen. David Petraeus, who executed the U.S.-led Iraq surge in 2007, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Petraeus said he believes Obama's new Afghan policy "will over the next 18 months enable us to make important progress."
However, he said, "Afghanistan is no more hopeless than Iraq was when I took command there in February 2007", adding that "the level of violence and number of violent civilian deaths in Iraq were vastly higher than we have seen in Afghanistan."
WASHINGTON, December 9 (RIA Novosti)
