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LISA MULLINS: I'm Lisa Mullins and this is The World. Change is coming to the war in Afghanistan. It's coming in the form of a new commander of American and NATO forces there. We're going to have more on that in a moment. First, the methods used by militants to attack Afghan civilians may also be changing. Today authorities are investigating whether 90 girls who fell ill at a school north of Kabul were the victims of deliberate gas poisoning. One girl described what happened.

GIRL 1: When we went into the classroom, one of our classmates became unconscious, then as I was trying to leave the room, I fell unconscious as well.

MULLINS: Another girl at the school said she couldn't remember just what happened to her.

GIRL 2: There was a very bad smell. I became unconscious. I don't know what happened afterwards.

MULLINS: Doctors said that the girls suffered vomiting, dizziness, sore eyes and a serious drop in blood pressure. The BBC's Martin Patience in Kabul says Afghan authorities are looking into the incident.

MARTIN PATIENCE: Officials at the Afghan Interior Ministry say they suspect some type of gas poisoning and that the police are still investigating. Blood samples have been sent to a nearby U.S. military base for tests, although it's still unclear who carried out this apparent attack.

MULLINS: Well, do we know the motivation?

PATIENCE: Well, we really don't and it's all speculation, but there have been three similar attacks in three weeks in this same part of the country. So I think most people believe that that's more than coincidence. But if you just look at the general situation in Afghanistan, scores of schools have been closed partly because of the violence. School children just can't physically reach the schools. But second of all, a number of schools have been torched and those schools that seem to specifically have been targeted are the schools that girls attend. So I think this is a specific pattern whereby certainly if you look at Taliban times, girls were effectively barred from going to school. It certainly seems to be that there is a pattern that schools have been targeted in the past and may have been done so again today.

MULLINS: Martin, do we know how many schools such as this exist around Afghanistan? In other words, is this the exception or are there more and more schools now for girls?

PATIENCE: Well, certainly there's more schools. If you look at 2001, effectively no girls were going to school. A few thousand were going in isolated areas of the country particularly in the north which weren't under Taliban control. But if you look at the situation now it's completely different. About four or five million girls are going to school, but there are still major issues. Schools are being attacked, facilities aren't great, and the teaching, there's a real issue with teaching in Afghanistan. It's all very well having the buildings but if you don't have trained teachers, good teachers, thousands of them according to the Ministry of Education here are semi-literate, then education has made progress and they've still got a long way to go.

MULLINS: I want to ask you something about the United States command and NATO. As we know, we're going to be hearing more about this in a minute. General McKiernan who has been in charge of U.S. forces in Afghanistan has been replaced. And I wonder if in terms of how well he has set the scene in terms of coordination with NATO, I wonder if that right now is at issue in Afghanistan. Where are we right now.

PATIENCE: Well, it's in many ways very difficult to say. What's significant of General McKiernan in terms of his coordination with NATO that he was too hearty. He was in charge of ISAF which is NATO led forces, but also American troops. That hadn't happened prior to the arrival of General McKiernan. I think a lot of people thought that was a good thing. You're fighting a war here, and you need to have a chain of command and it was very disjointed before General McKiernan came which made it very difficult to strategize, to put a strategy in place that would be effective. Certainly, on the ground among soldiers he seemed very popular, but I think there's a real feeling that this war is not going as planned. Robert Gates, the Defense Secretary, said that effectively there's a stalemate here and the powers that be at Washington, I think they want greater momentum on the ground.

MULLINS: That's the BBC's Martin Patience in Kabul, Afghanistan.

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