Lush pomegranate orchards provide perfect cover for the Taliban, who have turned what should be the fruit basket of Afghanistan into one of the hottest spots of the long insurgency.
In the past year, the crude bombs that are the Taliban’s battlefield talisman have been responsible for the deaths of all foreign soldiers patrolling this valley from 13 bases on each side of the Arghandab River, the US military said.
Arghandab, 20km from Kandahar city, capital of the eponymous province in southern Afghanistan that the insurgents regard as their fiefdom, is at the epicenter of a war well into its ninth year.
PHOTO: AFP
The district produces half the 100,000 tonnes of pomegranates grown in Afghanistan each year, but is better known for the harvest of improvised explosive devices (IED), that seem as thickly seeded as the fruit trees.
US troopers on patrol around the villages near Forward Operating Base (FOB) Arghandab point to culverts along canals irrigating the orchards as favorite corners for Taliban ambushes.
An explosion across the river to the east was “probably an IED,” one said.
“Someone might have stepped on it. Or it could have been a controlled detonation,” he said. “Either way, we’re finding them.”
Almost 60 percent of the more than 200 foreign troop deaths in Afghanistan this year were caused by IEDs, the independent icasualties.org Web site says.
In Arghandab, a village school has become a proxy battleground between the Taliban and pro-government forces, said US Army Sergeant Stephen Decatur, as he described last month’s find of “nine medium-to-small, 20 to 50 pound [9kg to 23kg] jugs of home-made bombs planted around the school yard.”
“In January, over the course of 10 days, they found hundreds and hundreds of pounds of explosives and IEDS,” he said, adding that some of the bombs contained up to 136kg of explosives.
“There are a lot of advantages to being in Arghandab, mainly because there is so much agriculture — pomegranate orchards have a lot of cover from observation from the air and close air support,” he said.
As US and NATO forces prepare the slow strangulation of the insurgents over the coming summer months, Afghanistan’s Western supporters are, finally, trying to address the economic fundamentals fueling the fight.
More than 70 percent of Afghanistan’s population are tied to the land as tenant farmers or sharecroppers, experts said. The CIA put unemployment in 2008 at 35 percent and inflation last year at 30.5 percent.
Afghanistan produces more than 90 percent of the world’s opium and the US$2.8 billion a year illicit industry helps drugs gangs pay the Taliban for armed muscle to protect production and distribution routes.
With the realization that the insurgency is largely economic rather than ideological — and that many Taliban foot soldiers are simply unemployed men who need the fighting fee to feed their families — Western donors have started channeling their efforts to the grass roots of Afghan society.
In Arghandab, Washington’s international aid arm USAID believes its program to teach Afghan farmers modern techniques for boosting quality and yield has the flow-on benefit of improving security.
The head of the local council of elders, Haji Mohammad agreed, told reporters the project was creating jobs that gave the fighting-age men of the area an alternative to picking up a gun for US$20 a day.
Since the introduction of USAID’s Afghanistan Vouchers for Increased Production in Agriculture project, Arghandab’s pomegranate yield has leapt by 75 percent, to between 15kg and 20kg of fruit per tree, he said.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in