KABUL (AFP) April 5, 2009 — About 17,000 extra US troops headed to Afghanistan will allow security forces to begin overcoming the Taliban in the volatile south, the top US military commander said in Kabul Sunday.

"I am convinced the additional military capacity will certainly start to allow us to turn the tide in the south where it has not gone well," Admiral Mike Mullen told reporters on the first day of a trip to Kabul.

"The trends in the south and east for the last few years are all going in the wrong direction," said Mullen, who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The extra soldiers — who will add to about 70,000 international troops already in Afghanistan, including about 38,000 from the United States — are due to begin arriving in the coming months.

President Barack Obama has also announced 4,000 soldiers for training the Afghan security forces, which Mullen said was "vital".

It comes with an international effort against Al-Qaeda-linked Taliban fighters at a stalemate in the south, where the insurgents control large areas of land, some of them prime opium-producing areas.

Mullen arrived earlier Sunday with the special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, for a series of meetings including with President Hamid Karzai and leading opposition figures.

Holbrooke said a focus of the trip was presidential elections due in August for which the United States would push for fair competition among the candidates amid concern that Karzai will benefit from his position.

"It will be a primary goal of the embassy ... to press for a level playing field, free fair and open elections," the ambassador said.

"We are going to work very closely with our military colleagues at ISAF, with the United Nations and with all the other countries represented here," he said.

Karzai's opposition are concerned he will benefit from his position in the poll, for example by being able to use International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) protection to travel to insurgent hotspots to campaign.

Holbrooke and Mullen also stressed the need for a regional solution to stem the insurgency in Afghanistan with special emphasis on Pakistan where insurgents have bases.

This would include countries like China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia and also Iran, despite Washington's difficult relationship with the latter.

"The door is open for Iran's participation in dialogue, through whatever forms work for them, on Afghanistan, without in any way diminishing the very serious disagreements and different points of view that exist on other issues," Holbrooke said.

The envoy said he had a brief meeting with the Iranian representative to last week's conference on Afghanistan at The Hague but, "I wasn't trying to start a dialogue."

The meeting, which drew together dozens of countries and agencies, focused on a new US strategy for impoverished Afghanistan with insurgency-linked violence at the deadliest since the Taliban were removed from government in a US-led invasion in late 2001.

Washington attacked when the hardliners did not surrender their Al-Qaeda allies wanted after the September 11 attacks that killed around 3,000 people in the United States.

"They (extremists) continue to plan and plot to do it again," Mullen said.

"That is why it is so important that the safehaven in Pakistan be eliminated and the conditions in Afghanistan ... do not not return to an environment in which the safehaven that was here could return," he said.