NATO pushes into troubled Afghan region, but can they keep it?
The red circle shows the area around the horn of Panjwai where the Arghandab and Dori Rivers converge.
PANJWAI DISRTICT, AFGHANISTAN—For too long, the horn of Panjwai has stabbed at allied troops fighting to take the Taliban’s southern strongholds away from the insurgents.
The strip of land, some 30 kilometres long and 10 kilometres deep, tapers to a point where the Arghandab and Dori Rivers converge on the edge of a vast desert. Shaped like a rhino horn, it has been one of the insurgents’ most lethal weapons.
Canadian soldiers pulled out of forward operating bases in the horn around two years ago, leaving insurgents largely unchallenged in their main base of operations against Kandahar city, which NATO sees as “the centre of gravity” in the conflict.
As the virtual government in western Panjwai, the Taliban were free to regroup, plot and train for attacks. They killed any elders who got in the way. The fortunate got the message and left before they could be assassinated.
The Taliban held the horn with such a ruthless grip that they brought prisoners captured in other zones to Zangabad in western Panjwai for summary trial and execution.
Overstretched Canadian soldiers based on the frontline could do little more than mount occasional patrols into the Taliban bastion or watch the enemy through high-powered scopes, and live video feeds from a tethered observation balloon.
Those agonizing days may soon be over.
After days of pummeling the area with airstrikes, U.S. forces delivered hundreds of Afghan troops in an airborne assault on western Panjwai Saturday.
Other allied units are squeezing the horn from the north, west and east as Canadian troops build sand berms and concrete barriers, set up roadblocks and mount patrols to block any escape routes through eastern Panjwai.
Seizing the horn from the Taliban, which put down its first roots there and in the district of Zhari to the north in the 1990s, will be another sharp blow to the insurgents following a surge of 30,000 extra U.S. troops this summer, commanders predict.
“It’s always going to be difficult to tell how much the impact will be because, of course, there are other areas where the insurgency can shift to,” Major-General Nick Carter, commander of NATO troops in southern Afghanistan, told the Toronto Star on the eve of the assault.
“But in terms of the capacity of the insurgency to interfere with Kandahar city, clearly this is an important area.”
The wild card is whether the horn of Panjwai, and other Taliban strongholds in the south, can be held after the insurgents are cleared out.
Canadian and other NATO commanders are cautious when describing what they see as progress in that effort, hoping that Afghan authorities can provide sufficient security and services to keep the Taliban-led fighters on the run.
Carter speaks of “measured progress, not victory overnight” and says the key to defeating the insurgency lies at the district level, where he sees the best chance of reconnecting ordinary Afghans to a representative government.
“I think we now have some momentum,” said the British general, who hands over command to an American Nov. 2. “And I think the insurgency no longer has the initiative in the south. I would say that we have the initiative.”
To protect and build on that apparent progress, NATO is depending on Afghans to provide security, justice, health care, support to farmers and other elements of good government central to the counter-insurgency strategy.
If they fail, the Taliban could easily retake lost ground. And as the political clock ticks down in Western capitals, there isn’t much time to consolidate hard-won gains in southern Afghanistan.
Canadian forces are already in the early stages of what Prime Minister Stephen Harper insists will be a complete withdrawal of Canadian combat troops by the end of next year.
No one has said publicly which country will step into the breach after the Canadians are gone. But it is widely assumed here that U.S. forces will have to do it, just when President Barack Obama has promised to begin pulling out some of his forces.
Obama says the pace of any draw down will depend on how well Afghan authorities are maintaining stability and establishing government services in areas cleared by allied troops.
General David Petraeus, the American commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, is due to deliver a crucial report in the coming weeks to Obama, who promised to review the war strategy in December after sending in reinforcements.
The current military push into western Panjwai is part of the third phase of operations that began with the U.S. surge, which raised NATO troop strength to more than 150,000 in Afghanistan.
In the first phase, the allies created “rings of security” in Kandahar city, with hundreds of new police manning posts alongside American military police, tasked to help keep the Afghan police from squeezing ordinary people for bribes.
Troops swept through the district of Arghandab, the northern gateway to Kandahar, in phase two. The third phase began in mid-September and is still underway as U.S. and Afghan forces press south the Zhari and into western Panjwai.
“It’s been a slow, deliberate process,” Carter said. “What now needs to happen is the areas where the insurgents have pulled back to need to be dealt with” over the next weeks, he added.
With Taliban and Afghan government leaders taking the first, tentative steps toward possible reconciliation, and southern villagers in some areas more willing to take part in traditional governing councils — called shuras — the situation may not be as hopeless as many here think.
After nine years of often brutal war, with no obvious end in sight, it’s easy to forget the Taliban and their allies were roundly defeated at the start of the conflict.
By early 2002, the hard-line Islamist militia’s top commanders, and many of their fighters, had fled across the border to rear bases in Pakistan, where the Taliban’s top leadership still live, meet and plot with impunity.
In the early years after the Taliban’s retreat, it was relatively safe to move around within large swaths of territory the mullahs once governed. Suicide bombings were unheard of. Leftover landmines harmed more people than improvised explosive devices.
Then the U.S. and its allies invaded Iraq, taking the pressure off the resurgent, Taliban-led insurgency, which stepped into a void they helped create by exploiting Pashtun tribal rivalries through assassination and intimidation.
That damage was severe and can only be repaired if Afghans feel included in the decisions of local government, said Richard Berthon, director of stability for NATO in the south.
In many parts of southern Afghanistan, the administrative positions sit empty because people are too afraid to fill them. Insurgents will do all they can to keep those seats empty.
“I think it’s becoming pretty clear that if those underlying instabilities can be managed, if not totally resolved, that actually the Taliban don’t really stand a hope in hell around southern Afghanistan,” Berthon said.
“There is no sense of popular support. And from what I’ve seen over the past year, the insurgency has only been able to operate because (the local) leadership, and their structures, have been degraded, going back to Soviet times (in the 1970s).”
The approach of winter, the season when fighting normally slows down in the south because many Taliban commanders move to warmer climes across the border in Pakistan, may be helping the allies’ gradual advance through insurgent-held territory.
Retreating insurgents have left behind a lethal tangle of booby traps, some so big that they turn whole houses into massive bombs rigged to explode. NATO troops had to come up with a new name for them: house-born explosive devices.
“We’re now almost seeing whole villages, and compounds, which have been really heavily rigged with bombs,” Berthon said. “That means it’s very hard again to get the population to want to go back into there.”
There won’t be much time to persuade villagers and elders to return to places like the horn of Panjwai, where the soil is poor and the area largely depopulated. And the Taliban won’t wait long to exploit any weaknesses.
“It will be tremendously important for leadership to return to these districts,” Berthon said. “It’s very difficult to engage with the population if it’s effectively been decapitated, and there is not even a local village elder to deal with.” (the star.com)
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