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Afghanistan/South Asia

Afghan police retreat under fire from drug smugglers

2005-04-22

KABUL: Police retreated from a village in a heartland of Afghanistan's drug industry after coming under fire by militiamen accused of trafficking opium into neighbouring Tajikistan, an official said on Thursday. About 150 police pulled back overnight from Chergan Shahr, a village in Badakhshan province 320 kilometres northwest of the capital, Kabul, mayor Mohammed Nabi Bayan told The Associated Press. No casualties were reported.

Officials have appealed in vain for gunmen holed up in the hills surrounding the area to surrender their weapons under a government plan to dismantle Afghanistan's illegal militias and clamp down on its narcotics business, the world's largest. Bayan said police faced 250 militiamen armed with assault rifles and machine guns and that they had pulled back to Ab Ganda, another village in Shahr-e-Buzurg district, after spending two days under sporadic fire.

Posted by:Fred

#4 With the SF in Afghanistan leveraging local forces, one had to become quite deft in moving things along. There have been mistakes, like the handling of the surrounded forces in Konduz, or possibly Tora Bora, but the real facts will not come out for years, so we may never know the Hobbsian choices we had to make then.

But like Steve said, we have avoided taking sides in internal matters. Afghanistan is coming out of centuries of tribal ops. The Brits had a time of it in the last century. The Russians got their asses kicked. The Americans learned from these experiences, made mistakes, had successes, and made things happen. Afghanistan is no longer a santuary for terrorists, unlike PakLand and Waziristan.

Posted by: Alaska Paul 2005-04-22 9:51:11 AM

#3 Agreed. For all the snippy LLL remarks about the blundering Bush administration, we've been surprisingly deft in handling Afghan affairs.

Posted by: Steve White 2005-04-22 8:52:15 AM

#2 Action against militias involved in the drug trade would be a internal matter, more of a police action. We don't get involved in those, there were no airstrikes when the Afghan militias belonging to those two warlords were wacking each other around the last time. We've avoided taking sides, which I think has turned out to be a good thing.

Posted by: Steve 2005-04-22 8:11:45 AM

#1 Why didn't they call in an airstrike?

Posted by: 3dc 2005-04-22 12:26:47 AM

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