NATO agreed to expand its military operations into eastern Afghanistan, even as it struggles to find troops to hold off a dogged Taliban-led insurgency in the volatile south. The agreement, endorsed at a meeting of alliance defence ministers, would see some 12,000 US troops come under NATO control within Afghanistan’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) within weeks. “Expect this to happen very soon indeed,” NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told reporters in Portoroz, Slovenia after a first day of talks. Full Story