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Taliban Influx Threatens 'Hot Months' in Afghanistan
May 19 (Bloomberg) -- As U.S. troops deploy in southern Afghanistan for a new anti-insurgency push, Afghan General Salendar Shah Behnam says his intelligence is picking up another movement: of 250 Taliban into the western province of Farah. A planned U.S. offensive this summer threatens to push insurgents into the west, roiling previously calm areas that border Iran, Afghan and Italian commanders say. The classic Hammer and Marshmallow tactical maneuver. The influx of Taliban, combined with violence linked to Afghanistan's Aug. 20 elections, could lead to "several hot hot months," Brigadier General Rosario Castellano, commander of 3,900 NATO troops in the west, told reporters in Herat. As part of President Barack Obama's push to focus military efforts on Afghanistan, the U.S. is sending 17,000 troops to the south of the country to quell Taliban activity that British, Canadian and Dutch forces have struggled to contain. The first U.S. airborne units have started arriving at Kandahar airport. "The Taliban are like a balloon, you push one place and they show up elsewhere," General Esmatulla Alizai, 52, the police chief for the province of Herat, the most populated province in the west, told reporters May 16. "The extra Americans will have a positive impact on security in Helmand but could cause problems here." With the new Taliban moving into Farah, which is wedged between Herat and Helmand provinces, their numbers there total about 400, said Major General Behnam, commander of the Afghan Army's 207th Corps, which covers the same western zone as the Italian-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces. Behnam said another 500 Taliban fighters are based in the north of the western zone, where the population is mostly Pashtun, the ethnic group that provides most of the Taliban's support. The western population is largely Tajik and Hazara. Benham has 5,000 soldiers under his command, up from 3,000 a year ago, and should have 8,000 by the end of the year. He's also received 60 Humvees and 270 other light armored vehicles so far this year. In July, an extra 450 Spanish and 450 Italian soldiers will arrive to provide security during the election. On the night of May 15, an Italian patrol was ambushed in Badghis province, north of Herat, the second firefight for the Italian contingent in three days. In both cases, the Italians shot back and didn't sustain casualties. "Italians are going to have to get used to these things happening more and more," Castellano, a 49-year-old Italian paratrooper, said in an interview at NATO's main base near Herat, the capital of the province of the same name, and Afghanistan's second-largest city after Kabul. The Italian-run base, which houses 1,900 soldiers including Spanish, Lithuanian, Slovenian, Albanian, and Bulgarian troops, has a pizzeria capable of producing 700 pies a day, a restaurant complete with aquarium, two cafes, and a fully equipped gym. None of the 2,200 Italian soldiers based in western Afghanistan has died in combat. Six Italians have been killed in Afghanistan since 2002, all in the Kabul region. By contrast, the U.K. has lost 21 soldiers in southern Afghanistan since the start of this year. Six Afghan police were killed May 17 in an attack on checkpoint in Helmand. Herat, with a population of about 500,000 and animated tree-lined avenues, has few of the police checkpoints and concrete blast barriers that mar central Kabul. Yet even though there hasn't been an attack on Italian soldiers in the city center since 2006, the Italians take few chances. On a recent visit to take reporters to a hospital, a school, and a woman's jail and training center the Italians have built, the journalists and Italian diplomats were protected by six naval commandos and two armored vehicles. When NATO expanded beyond Kabul in 2004, it divided the country into five areas. Italy took four provinces in the west, Germany took the even-quieter north; the U.S., the volatile east along the Pakistani border, and Britain, Canada and the Netherlands alternated command of the south. The Kabul area switches among France, Italy and Turkey. The U.S. push into the south will lift the number of U.S. troops to about 43,000 from 26,000. Another 42 nations have 35,000 soldiers in the country, led by Britain's 9,885. Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in Washington yesterday that the next two years will be pivotal in Afghanistan. "I'm hopeful that we'll see the trends turn," Mullen told an audience at the Brookings Institution policy research group. "I think we need to make it happen pretty quickly." Castellano said insurgent activity is likely to pick up this summer because the Taliban will be flush with cash from their opium poppy harvest. Two-thirds of Afghanistan's poppies are grown in Helmand, with 103,000 hectares (250,000 acres) under cultivation, three times the area in 2002, according to the Vienna-based United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Overall, the number of hectares given over to poppies fell 19 percent in Afghanistan, though it remained constant in Helmand. The need to protect the drug trade may limit the Taliban's willingness to shift operations to other parts of the country. "They will fight hard in Kandahar and Helmand because the majority of their poppy crops and their funding comes from there," said Colonel Gregg Julian, a Kabul-based spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Posted by: GolfBravoUSMC 2009-05-19 |
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