KABUL: Afghanistan's new leaders head to Europe on Monday to showcase their plans to foster peace and revive the economy, but a spate of Taliban attacks threatens to overshadow their optimistic message.
President Ashraf Ghani and chief executive officer Abdullah Abdullah will visit NATO headquarters in Brussels and attend a donor conference in London in a public show of unity after they signed a power-sharing deal in September.
Afghanistan faces serious challenges including a fragile economy, declining aid funds and a worsening Taliban insurgency as the US-led NATO force wraps up its 13-year war against the militants at the end of this year.
The "national unity government" has struggled to get off the ground, with no ministers yet confirmed two months after Ghani was inaugurated.
In Brussels, the two Afghan leaders will meet NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Monday and attend a meeting of NATO foreign ministers on Tuesday.
Hamid Karzai, president from 2001-2014, had a troubled relationship with the NATO coalition, but Ghani has tried to reset ties.
"When we have meetings with NATO, we will talk with confidence about the future," Ghani said on Sunday. "There is no more suspicion between Afghanistan, NATO and the US."
NATO's presence in Afghanistan will change on December 31 from a combat mission to a support mission, with troop numbers cut to about 12,500 -- down from a peak of 130,000 in 2010.
Much of the fighting has been taken over by Afghanistan's hard-pressed army and police, and NATO troops will be restricted next year to "training, advising and assisting" the local security forces.
The Taliban have marked the final weeks of NATO's war with high-profile attacks in Kabul on foreign compounds, guesthouses, US convoys and a suicide strike on British embassy car that killed six, including a British bodyguard.
On Saturday, a South African father running an education charity and his two teenage children were killed at their home in the city after three militants stormed the building.
Kabul has been hit by at least nine attacks in the last two weeks.
<Center><b><i>Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2014</b></i></center>
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