Afstan: NATO ISAF taking over in east in October

Confirmed. Glad to see reasonable coverage in Canadian media:

NATO agreed yesterday to take command of peacekeeping across all of insurgency-hit Afghanistan next month after the United States pledged to transfer an extra 12,000 troops to its force.

Pentagon officials said the transfer of troops currently in Afghanistan's eastern region would entail the biggest deployment of U.S. troops under foreign command since World War II...

This will be helpful (though there has been little response to the call for more NATO troops):

The ministers also agreed to provide substantial amounts of military equipment for the Afghan army, which has been fighting alongside NATO troops battling with Taliban insurgents in the south of the country...

Rumsfeld said a number of countries had stepped forward in response to appeals from NATO commanders for up to 2,500 extra troops to join the operation, but said more were still needed [Poles are accelerating deployment of their battalion]...

And note:

[The command shift]...would still leave about 10,000 American troops, including Special Operations units, under exclusive American control...

Asked whether the American soldiers might be used to buttress the alliance’s efforts in the south, where British, Canadian and Dutch forces have faced tough fighting while inflicting heavy casualties on Taliban fighters recently, a NATO spokesman, James Appathurai, said he knew of no limits imposed by Washington on where they could go.

But American officials said it was unlikely that American units would be shifted in large numbers to the south because they were needed on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where attacks have also intensified...

Mr. Rumsfeld said that, in addition to supplying more forces and equipment, NATO governments were under pressure to lift so-called national caveats that restrict how and where their forces could be employed in Afghanistan. The biggest hurdle, officials said, are countries [e.g. Germany, Italy, France, Spain - MC] that bar their troops from being moved to the south, where the toughest fighting has been occurring. It is “difficult for the commander when he is not able to move forces around,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, adding that the caveats in the aggregate created a “situation that is not acceptable.”..