US-led forces were winding down yesterday one of their biggest offensives yet in Afghanistan, but an official said it was a mere prelude to a larger assault in the works on the Taliban bastion of Kandahar.
The two-week Operation Mushtarak (“Together”) had symbolically culminated on Thursday when authorities hoisted the Afghan flag in Marjah, a poppy-growing southern area that had eluded government control for years.
A US commander based in Kandahar said that most combat operations had subsided, although US, British and Afghan troops would still need several weeks to exert control over more remote villages in the area of Helmand Province.
PHOTO: REUTERS
“There will be some sporadic fighting, I believe, some tough areas where there are still a few holdouts,” Brigadier General Ben Hodges told the PBS Newshour on US public TV.
“I think most of the significant combat operations, though, will have subsided,” Hodges said.
“I think the majority of the enemy has either been killed or driven out or blended back into the population,” he said.
The assault has been billed as the biggest military operation since the 2001 US-led invasion ended the Taliban regime, and is a major test of US President Barack Obama’s troop surge aimed at turning the tide in Afghanistan.
In a vivid reminder of the Taliban’s reach, suicide bombers on Friday targeted guesthouses in the heart of Kabul, killing 16 people including Westerners and Indians.
The new US-led counter-insurgency strategy, designed to allow Western troops to be drawn down by the middle of next year, dictates military preparation and assault, then establishing civilian security and services such as hospitals and schools.
More than 4,000 families left Marjah amid the assault, many of them taking refuge in the provincial capital Lashkar Gah as food, medicine and other supplies ran low, humanitarian workers said.
But NATO said bazaars were opening and that rebuilding work had already begun on roads and bridges destroyed in the fighting. It warned, however, of the danger of hidden bombs.
In Washington, a senior Obama administration official said that Operation Mushtarak was just a preview of a wider campaign in the works to exert control in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city.
“I think the way to look at Marjah, it’s the tactical prelude to larger, more comprehensive operations later this year in Kandahar city,” the official said on condition of anonymity.
“It’s a goal for 2010. If our overall goal for 2010 is to reverse the momentum and gain time and space for the Afghan capacity, we have to get to Kandahar this year,” he said.
Kandahar is a cultural home to the Pashtun people and was the birthplace of the Taliban movement, which imposed an austere brand of Islam over the country from 1996 to 2001.
“It’s their center of gravity,” the administration official said of Kandahar, describing the US goal as being able to bring “comprehensive population security” to the city.
Alexander Vershbow, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, said that the Marjah offensive was “crucially important” for the Obama strategy.
“The goal of the new strategy is to reverse the Taliban’s momentum, secure the population and redouble efforts to build the Afghan national security forces so that they can take over security responsibility as conditions permit,” he told reporters.
The anonymous administration official on Friday pointed to successes was a key part of the strategy — Pakistan.
“In the last nine months we’ve seen a significant strategic shift in Pakistan,” the official said. “That strategic shift is the decision by the Pakistani security forces to take the fight against the Pakistani Taliban.”
Pakistan has launched a nunmber of offensives in its lawless tribal belt bordering Afghanistan, where much of the Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership is believed to be based.
US officials have long suspected that elements in Pakistan’s powerful spy agency have abetted extremists.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS