The number of U.S. troops sent to southern Afghanistan to launch a major offensive is sufficient to seize and hold areas currently under Taliban control, the top U.S. military officer said Sunday.
"We have enough forces there now not just to clear an area but to hold it. So we can build after. That's really the strategy," Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CBS's "Face the Nation."
Some 4,000 Marines launched a wide-ranging operation Thursday in Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold, in what Mullen termed "the first significant one" since President Barack Obama dispatched an additional 21,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan to battle a mounting Taliban insurgency allied with Al Qaeda.
Previously, the only military forces on the ground in the area were British troops who frequently exchanged fire with Taliban militants but lacked the necessary presence to take on the insurgency.
Washington is deploying the additional forces in a bid to facilitate the development work and improved governance required to undercut local support for the Taliban.
"We've got to move to a point where there's security so that the economic underpinnings can start to move and... create governance so that the Afghan people can get goods and services consistently from their government," Mullen said.
The area south of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand, is the world's biggest opium-growing region and a route for Taliban fighters joining the insurgency from across the Pakistan border.
Operation Khanjar, which involved thousands of Marines moving into the Helmand valley to extend the reach of the Afghan central government, has faced generally light resistance.
But Mullen warned that despite early advances, "I suspect it's going to be tough for a while".
Violence continues to plague Afghanistan, eight years after foreign troops first invaded the country to overthrow the Taliban and hunt Al Qaeda.
On Sunday, the Canadian Armed Forces said an injured soldier who had been repatriated to Canada for medical treatment had died.
The death of Corporal Charles-Philippe Michaud brought to 122 the number of Canadian troops killed in the war-torn country.