Afstan: UK Defence Secretary surprised by "Tenacity of Taleban"/Taliban took beating

Not what one expected when the Regional Command (South) mission started:

BRITISH troops in southern Afghanistan are fighting in conditions that sometimes go “beyond the bounds of stamina and endurance”, Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, admitted yesterday.

With so much of the British operation taken up with fighting the Taleban in Helmand province in the south, there had also been little time for reconstruction efforts, Mr Browne said.

“We do have to accept that it has been even harder than we expected: the Taleban’s tenacity has been a surprise, absorbing more of our effort than we predicted it would and consequently slowing progress on reconstruction,” Mr Browne said in a speech to the Royal United Services Institute in London...

Mr Browne said there were signs that the Taleban were tiring. “Local leaders in some areas are showing signs of wanting to reach an accommodation to limit or indeed to stop the fighting,” he said...

NATO's top general (no, it's not Gen. Ray Henault) says that by fighting so hard the Taliban took a beating (pity the story does not mention Canada, the UK, or the Netherlands).

International forces defeated Taliban militiamen when the group made its first attempt to stand and fight earlier this month, NATO’s top general said today. But the general warned that military progress was being undermined by the unchecked spread of the drug trade across Afghanistan.

Gen. James L. Jones of the Marines, who commands all NATO forces, said that between one-third and one-half of the Taliban’s 3,000 hard-core fighters — as opposed to what he called a larger number of “weekend warriors’’ — were killed during several weeks of heavy fighting in the southern province of Kandahar before the insurgents retreated...

Asked about whether lasting damage had been inflicted on the Taliban in the fighting, which led to high casualty rates among NATO troops as well, General Jones said, “What we don’t know is their ability to regenerate themselves.’’

But he said the offensive in Kandahar should yield two long-term benefits: the end of the region as a safe haven for the insurgents, and a demonstration to the Taliban that it cannot defeat NATO forces in open combat...

This story does mention the Canadians, British and Dutch.