KANDAHAR, Afghanistan— It’s a crucial question with no clear answer: will the Taliban return in strength to Kandahar when the traditional fighting season resumes after the annual opium harvest ends this spring?
It’s a question of immense interest to Canada’s battle group, which will continue to patrol one of the three districts in Kandahar, where the insurgency has always been strongest, until its combat mission ends this July.
With no firm evidence yet one way or the other, but armed with knowledge of the Taliban’s usual fighting calendar and their long history of resilience, Canada’s Task Force Kandahar — now led by a battle group in Panjwaii built around a Royal 22nd Regiment battalion — has had to prepare as if the enemy will be back again in April. With that possibility in mind, the Canadians have been trying to consolidate territorial gains made last year by maintaining a high operational tempo to create an environment stable enough to allow the Afghan government to begin offering services to the local population.
Postmedia News, along with some British and American journalists, have been reporting for several months now that the Taliban were dealt a devastating blow by coalition forces in Kandahar after a huge surge of U.S. troops last spring and summer.
The most obvious evidence that the Taliban may have abandoned Panjwaii is the greatly reduced number of violent confrontations there recently. Only three Canadians have died in Kandahar during the past 6 1/2 months and only a handful of significant incidents have been reported so far this year.
Although these numbers have not yet gained much traction in the Canadian media, as Canada’s mission focus narrowed to Panjwaii because of the U.S. surge, year-on-year casualties for Task Force Kandahar for the last half of 2010 dropped an astonishing 83%. The number of Canadians wounded in 2010 was down, too, although by a slightly lower figure when compared with 2009.
U.S. casualty figures for Afghanistan and for the south jumped about 60% last year. But that spike came before and during the surge. The recent death toll is similar to the same period 12 months earlier, although the number of U.S. forces has at least tripled since the end of 2009.
Parsing U.S. casualty figures for Kandahar is difficult, because of the way they are often broken down, but it appears 19 Americans have been killed in the province during the past three months. This is three fewer deaths than during the same period one year ago.
Nevertheless, there is no simple formula for gauging the actual success of the surge or for figuring out the Taliban’s intentions. Anecdotal reports from civilians in Kandahar suggest that the Taliban were vanquished in Panjwaii and two other districts to the northwest and west of the provincial capital that have always been most dear to them. It is also believed that the survivors had mostly fled to Pakistan while the others were lying low. Civilians figured the Taliban would decide not to return in great numbers in the spring because there was now such a dense presence of NATO and Afghan forces in the area.
Even the often troublesome Horn of Panjwaii, which Canada took responsibility for two months ago, appears to now be almost entirely free of Taliban. However, some insurgents continue to cause considerable trouble for U.S. forces a little to the north of the Horn in neighbouring Zhari and in Arghandab, which is closer to Kandahar City.
The general consensus among Afghans is that rather than fight against overwhelming odds in Kandahar, the Taliban would accelerate their intimidation campaign by trying to murder more provincial government officials, regrouping in their safe havens in Pakistan and shifting their fight to faraway areas where the coalition, until now, has had little presence. There was already considerable evidence that this had begun to happen last summer and fall, especially near the Uzbek and Tajik borders in the north.
If such trends continue, they will present NATO and Afghan forces with fresh challenges. But viewed through the Canadian federal government’s parochial prism, with Panjwaii quiet at the moment and Canada’s combat mission entering its final phase, the war in Afghanistan may be considerably less harrowing for its troops this year than it was from 2006 until last summer.
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий