In the war on terror, few battles are as clear and decisive as the one fought these last few weeks in southern Afghanistan. Six thousand Canadian, British, American and other NATO troops trounced resurgent Taliban fighters who dared to fight in the open. "Operation Medusa" dislodged insurgents from trenches and tunnels near Kandahar, killing a thousand or more.The intensity of the fighting surprised some NATO allies, who this summer took over the lead in southern Afghanistan from the U.S. More tests are to come. The insurgents will surely regroup, shun direct engagements with Western troops and resort to the ad hoc terrorism perfected in Iraq. To adapt NATO's nomenclature, the Medusa was injured but the snakes are very much alive.
The battle in the south is not a sign, as some would have it, that Afghanistan has been lost. With U.S. forces tracking al Qaeda along the border with Pakistan and the Kabul government slow to assert itself, a security and political vacuum emerged in that region. In stepped drug lords, former Taliban fighters and tribal chiefs who have little in common except a large stake in continued instability.
Narcotics money and lax Pakistani border control let the Taliban rearm and recruit new fighters. Some schools for girls, a great achievement in post-Taliban Afghanistan, were forced to close. Local chiefs backed the Taliban, while a population who had high expectations for the future turned against Kabul and the West.