A top NATO general says the alliance's massive, two-week-long anti-Taliban offensive in southern Afghanistan has been "successfully completed."

Lieut.-Gen. David Richards, head of the 20,000 NATO-led force, hailed Operation Medusa in the insurgent stronghold of southern Afghanistan as a "significant success.''

Reconstruction and development efforts will soon begin in three southern areas, said Richards, after coalition forces drove insurgents from their positions.

"The ability of the Taliban to stay and fight in groups is finished," said Asadullah Khalid, Kandahar province's governor. "The enemy has been crushed."

NATO launched Operation Medusa on Sept. 2 with the aim of clearing out Taliban fighters from a Panjwaii district near Kandahar. NATO said its troops killed 512 Taliban and captured another 136.

For the people who lived there, the victory comes at a cost.

"The bombing and the fighting destroyed our mosque, our homes and our vineyards," said one farmer. "The Taliban are gone, but so is most everything else."

Gen. David Fraser, the Canadian NATO commander in southern Afghanistan, said: "There has been battlefield damage largely because of where the Taliban went. We will go back out there and we will help rebuild that."

No damage estimate has been calculated yet, nor has a timeline been set out for rebuilding.

Convoy attacked

NATO's announcement comes on the day three Canadian soldiers were slightly wounded and an Afghan civilian was killed when a suicide bomber attacked a military convoy in southern Afghanistan.

The bomber, who also died in the blast, plowed his vehicle packed with explosives into the Canadian convoy west of Kandahar city.

At least eight other civilians were also wounded in the attack. NATO is not releasing the identities of the injured soldiers.

A Canadian military vehicle was slightly damaged in the attack and the bomber's vehicle was destroyed, according to an Associated Press reporter on the scene.

Canada has about 2,200 troops in southern Afghanistan. However, an additional 450 soldiers and up to 15 tanks are about to be added.

"First of all, we want to make sure they're well prepared, well trained and ready to go off to Afghanistan before we send them. So many of the soldiers won't go until later on this fall," Gen. Rick Hillier, chief of Canada' defence staff, said Sunday on CTV's Question Period.

"While we're sending those soldiers in, we're reducing the force in place now because we're handing over command of region south, on or about (the first of) November. . . . That means we'll top out at about 2,500 soldiers all together."

Canadians 'stretched'

With the infusion of troops, Canadians will make up more than 10 per cent of the NATO contingent in Afghanistan.

NATO's top commander last week renewed an appeal for allies to urgently provide up to 2,500 troops for the battle with the relentless insurgents in southern Afghanistan.

Hillier said Canadians serving in the region are "stretched" in their resources, yet he maintained they have the capability to "sustain this mission."

However, he conceded, "one of the things we have to do is use our people -- all the men and women in uniform; air, land and sea -- much better.

"In the past decade, I believe that we've done 100 percent of our deployed operations probably using not more than 45 to 50 per cent of the people in uniform. Now what we're going to do is use them all.

"There are many jobs, many tasks and many parts of the mission that don't have to be done by soldiers trained in combat operations."

Hillier said this would be accomplished by addressing the often-heard complaint that there are too many fighting the war from behind "desks."

All personnel will be rotated much more efficiently, he said.

Hillier said it will likely take another two to five years before NATO forces can hand over security responsibilities to the local army and police.

Richards has said he expects the military campaign against the Taliban to last another three to five years. 

U.S. convoy attacked

Hours after Sunday's attack on the Canadian convoy, a bomber ran up to a U.S. military convoy on the outskirts of Kabul and detonated explosives he was carrying, injuring two American soldiers and two civilians.

The U.S. military has made no comment on the incident.

This attack come a day after 7,000 U.S. and Afghan government forces launched a major offensive against Taliban fighters in the central and eastern provinces of Paktika, Khost, Ghazni, Paktya and Logar.

The offensive, codenamed Operation Mountain Fury, is the third major operation launched in recent weeks against the Taliban.

With a report from CTV's Matt McClure and files from The Associated Press