The peacekeeping effort in Afghanistan is worsening because the United States concentrated its efforts in Iraq and strategists underestimated the difficulty of the task, Italy's foreign minister said, according to Reuters. Massimo D'Alema, who is a keen proponent of the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan but opposed the Iraq war, said Italy's roughly 1,300 troops will remain in Afghanistan. But he called for an international conference among NATO members, the United Nations and Afghanistan's neighbours to discuss the mission, according to excerpts from a forthcoming book published on Saturday by Italy's ANSA news agency. "We can send all of the troops that we want, but if in 2006 the production of opium rose 160 percent, this is the most resonating evidence of failure," D'Alema was quoted as saying in the book.
