KABUL - The top NATO civilian in Afghanistan said Wednesday that coalition forces have "regained the initiative" in the war, but he added that President Hamid Karzai's recent criticism of U.S. and NATO strategy is "not helpful" in the lead-up to a key summit in Lisbon this weekend, The Washington Post reports.

Ambassador Mark Sedwill said he and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. and NATO commander in the country, plan to report at the Lisbon conference that international forces have made significant progress against the Taliban since President Obama sent 30,000 additional U.S. troops to the region last summer.

"It's still clearly fragile, and there are significant risks and will be a long, hard campaign ahead, but we believe in 2010 we have achieved what we wished to - regaining the initiative after having lost it in the past few years," Sedwill said, addressing reporters at a morning briefing in Kabul, the Afghan capital. "We think we are in a different mode to where we were before, and the reason for that is simple: We've finally aligned our resources with the demands and objectives of the campaign. That's what the surge is all about."

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