Islamabad, Oct 16 : Top military commanders from Pakistan, Afghanistan and NATO met here last evening for their first three-way talks since the US forces infuriated Pakistan last month with an attack on a border village.

The commanders also discussed the prevailing condition in the tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghan border.

Pakistan Army Chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, his Afghan counterpart Gen Bismullah Khan, and the commander of Afghanistan’s NATO force, General David McKiernan, attended the talks, reported The News.

Jalalabad (Afghanistan), Oct 16 : Taking a cue from a recent successful experiment whereby a tribal leader ousted the Taliban from his district in Afghanistan, the US now increasingly wants to encourage other tribal elders in the strife-torn country to do the same.

In what is being described as a substantial policy shift, the US wants to “use tribes to bring law and order to the vast areas of the country beyond the government’s authority”.

Hajji Malik Zahir, the tribal leader accomplished this, a task which the armies of Afghanistan and America could not over the past seven years, with the help of sticks, knives and small arms which his tribesmen had for self-defence.

Kabul - Six Afghan police and 18 militants were killed when Taliban fighters attacked several police posts in a second attempt in three days to capture a provincial capital in southern Afghanistan, police said Wednesday.

Taliban militants attacked a police post on the outskirts of Lashkargah, the capital of Helmand province, on Tuesday night, killing six policemen, provincial police chief Assadullah Shirzad said.

Taliban spokesman Qari Mohammad Yousif Ahmadi, talking about the same firefight, said Taliban fighters killed 12 police and soldiers in their attacks on three security posts. Ahmadi spoke by phone from an undisclosed location.

New York - The Afghan government told the UN Security Council Tuesday that the former Taliban rulers have become a threat to the country seven years after they were toppled from power.

Taliban and al-Qaeda forces have intensified the fighting at Afghan borders with Pakistan, timing their campaign to presidential elections in the United States this year and presumably in Afghanistan in 2009 "to force a change in international commitment" in Afghanistan, the country's UN ambassador Zahir Tanin said.

Kabul - Three NATO-led soldiers were killed on Tuesday in a roadside bomb attack in eastern Afghanistan, the military said.

The soldiers were part of more than 50,000 NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) that have been deployed to Afghanistan from 40 nations following the ouster of the Taliban regime in late 2001.

ISAF did not reveal the nationalities of the dead soldiers, nor did it say where in the eastern region the incident took place. Most of the forces operating in the eastern region under the alliance's command are from the US.

Bagram (Afghanistan), Oct. 14 : The U. S.-Afghanistan Air Force has decided to shift its strategy to combat the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Military commanders at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, say they''re employing new procedures to "amplify" what the Air Force was already doing to avoid civilian casualties, such as using a fly-by tactic with F-15 attack Eagles to scatter anti-coalition forces.

This follows strikes in August, which led to the death of about 90 innocent people.