[Guardian] The Taliban have launched more attacks in Helmand than in any other province of Afghanistan this year, defending their territory in remote districts and ferociously pushing the war into government enclaves.
Control of Helmand was won over the past decade by thousands of British and American troops, and with their departure in 2014 the government’s hold began to slip. Insurgents were quick to take advantage. They spent the year making a slow pincer movement, closing in from north and south towards the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. Over the past seven months, Taliban forces overran some of the most hard-won rural bases in southern Afghanistan, losses that went almost unnoticed in the media.
The losses are due as much to poor leadership of the Afghan army and police as to Taliban strengths. Corruption, desertion, “ghost soldiers” whose salaries are claimed by fraudulent commanders, and other problems have hampered efforts to stem the Taliban advance. But there is no question that the insurgent movement has poured resources into Helmand.
Their focus can be explained partly in economic terms. Afghanistan produces most of the world’s opium, and Helmand is the biggest single centre for production in the country, so whoever calls the shots in the province can get a sizeable share of drug business. The drug business was always an important source of funding for the insurgents, but it has become more so as opportunities for extortion and skimming from foreign forces started drying up, and wealthy Gulf donors began redirecting their cash to militant groups fighting closer to home.
But the lure of Helmand goes beyond its opium economy. The Taliban have put it at the centre of a long-term strategy to expand their reach in the south. They see it as a stepping stone to other areas and hope to make Helmand the first province they “liberate”, Taliban sources say. They even dream of turning it into a safe haven for leaders based in Pakistan. That would make their insistence that the whole leadership is on Afghan soil a reality.
To move top commanders, the Taliban would need to feel confident about holding core territory while driving Afghan security forces from the province and protecting their leaders from any raids. That would have been almost impossible when 60 Nato spy blimps were scattered across the province, watching fighters from the sky. There is now only one, Reuters recently reported.
It would still be difficult, but Helmand boasts good exit routes across the border to Pakistan or through neighbouring Nimruz province to Iran, and strong supply lines to other parts of Afghanistan. All the provinces surrounding Helmand have a strong Taliban footprint, with most of the adjacent districts already under insurgent control. That makes it easy for them to move in reinforcements, and difficult for government forces to besiege all of Helmand.
The Taliban can also count on the sympathy of the Ishaqzai tribe, who constitute a sizeable part of the province’s population. The current Taliban leader, Akhtar Mansour, and many in his close circle, are Ishaqzais and the tribe was alienated by the US forces and their Afghan allies in the early years after the fall of the Taliban regime.
The Taliban’s hopes of securing full control of Helmand may be overly optimistic for now, because the loss of Lashkar Gah would be such a devastating blow to morale and confidence that US and UK forces are likely to provide considerable support for some time to come.
The Taliban are also struggling with internal splits about leadership and whether to undertake peace talks, which could undermine their focus on the fighting in Helmand.
But if the government forces cannot rein in their own problems with corruption and attrition, it will still be hard to stop – much less reverse – the Taliban momentum in Helmand, and possibly beyond. And if the insurgents can consolidate even the advances they have made so far, it will be enough to make the province an important base for them and a heavy drain on government troops and resources for Kabul for many years to come.
#1
As I understand it, we've avoided doing anything kinetic about the poppy fields because we wanted to win the hearts and minds of the poppy farmers. Since that ship seems to have sailed, why not plow the poppy fields under and salt the earth? The money is either going to the Taliban or ISIS, depending on who gets thar fustest with the mostest.
Posted by: Matt ||
12/28/2015 11:52 Comments ||
Top||
A huge hall filled with almost a thousand journalists, his formal "year-ender" December 17 news conference, broadcast live on all the major Russian TV networks and websites.
A question about Turkey, and why it shot down a Russian warplane in November.
President Putin was still furious. With a sneer and a snort, he let loose a volley of trash-talk.
"If anyone in the Turkish leadership decided to lick the Americans in a certain place -- I don't know if they acted correctly or not -- I don't know whether the Americans need that."
Laughs, and even applause from some of the Russian reporters. Foreign journalists looked stunned.
What Putin left out was the real ending of that Russian expression: "lick someone's a*s." But every Russian in the room knew what he meant.
Vladimir Putin has a presidential potty mouth that he uses to great effect.
The public first heard it in September 1999, when Putin was an unknown prime minister. Russia was hit with several deadly terrorist bombings of apartment buildings. Vowing revenge, Putin didn't hold back: "We're going to pursue the terrorists everywhere," he said. "That means, you'll excuse me, we'll catch them in the toilet, we'll wipe them out in the sh*t house, finally."
That tough talk shocked many Russians. They'd never heard anything like that from a leader before. But it also boosted their spirits; a tough, vigorous leader had their back and would fight to protect them.
A few months later, the ailing president, Boris Yeltsin, stepped aside and Vladimir Putin took the reins as Russian president.
But he didn't change his locker room talk.
At a summit meeting in 2002, a foreign journalist asked the president whether Russia was repressing human rights in the breakaway republic of Chechnya, where most people are Muslim.
"If you're really ready to become an Islamic radical and you're ready to have yourself circumcised, I invite you to Moscow," he shot back. "We have a multi-faith country and we have experts in that. I'll recommend doing the operation so that nothing grows back."
Male circumcision is practiced more by Muslims than any other religious group.
The first translator was left speechless and sputtered an attempt at explaining what Putin had in mind. "Uh...uh...uh, uh come to Moscow..." Another translator jumped in: "If you want to do a circumcision....You are welcome...and everyone is tolerated in Moscow." No translation was provided regarding anything not growing back.
Putin's sense of humor often has an ironic twist to it. "If a grandmother had certain sexual indicators, she would be a grandfather," he said in June of 2006, answering a question about sanctions against Iran.
Michele Berdy, who writes a column on the Russian language for The Moscow Times newspaper, has followed Putin's rhetorical style for years. She thinks "it's a way of being like the guy next door."
"I always thought it was a controlled way of slipping into 'Hey, we're all just one of the guys, sittin' around, throwin' back beers, and talkin' about life the way it really is,'" she adds.
The Russian president occasionally veers off into country-bumpkin expressions, which occasionally defy translation.
One of the first ones was a goat reference when Tony Blair was visiting," Michele Berdy recalls.
"Above us is Allah, under us are goats," is what Putin's interpreter translated him as saying to the former British Prime Minister. But a Moscow Times article explained that the Russian for goat has a second translation -- bastard, or something even more insulting -- and suggested that the interpreter suffered from excessive modesty.
"It involved goats and prisons and allusions that the translators, I think, understood but had no idea what to do with," Berdy adds.
But there was no issue about what he meant when he put down a question about his supposed wealth in 2008 with this zinger: "That's such garbage! They picked it out of their noses and smeared it on their papers!"
Putinisms have become famous in Russia, and it doesn't hurt that they're often about sex.
"They've asked me when I began having sex," Putin said in July, 2006, at an internet conference. "I don't remember ... I remember exactly when I did it the last time. I can define that right down to the minute."
Many of Putin's zingers are launched in apparent anger, which helps to solidify Putin's macho image.
"It's also this sort of 'man's man,' slipping into foul language, and always putting somebody down, making fun of somebody," says Berdy. "Like the Turks licking the Americans. It's insulting and it's putting down the Turks and the Americans in the process."
In December 2011, young people wearing white ribbons on their coats gathered on the icy streets of Moscow to protest what they said were rigged parliamentary elections. Putin smirkingly derided the symbol of their protest movement. "Frankly speaking," he said, "when I saw those little ribbons, I thought it was some sort of action against AIDS. I'm embarrassed to say I thought they were wearing condoms."
That comment infuriated the opposition and Vladimir Putin's crude expressions have not gone down well with many in Russia's educated class, the intelligentsia. For them, speaking proper, literary Russian is highly valued. But Putin, when he is not making off-color jokes, does speak excellent Russian.
"That's why I've always thought that his slipping into this is very strategic," notes Michele Berdy. "He decides when he want to leave standard literary Russian and get into non-standard Russian."
Putinisms are decidedly not politically correct, but PC language now is a dirty word in Russia. Some Russians deride the West for wimping out in a lame attempt not to insult anybody.
For most American or European politicians, comments like Putin's would be impossible to get away with.
In Russia, however, they seem to be part of Putin's political attraction. After all, who can miss the point of this shorthand explanation of how the law should work, that he unleashed in 2003:
"Everyone has to understand, once and for all, that you've got to obey the law all the time, and not just when they grabbed you 'in a certain place.'" I think I just figured out why 0bean doesn't think he needs to follow the rules . . . .
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
It was a classic "Putin moment."
