Taliban fighters seized several villages in southern Afghanistan on Monday and appeared to be marshalling forces for an attack on the region’s largest city, Kandahar.
And that is the good news — such as it is.
If the Taliban does try a conventional assault on Kandahar, it will probably suffer heavy casualties at the hands of NATO and Afghan forces in the area.
Military analysts say the Taliban can use the grape and pomegranate orchards in the Arghandab region just north of Kandahar as cover for their operations. But mounting an attack on the city itself would expose the guerrillas to allied firepower.
The Taliban may be overconfident now because last week the guerrillas launched an attack that freed 870 prisoners, including hundreds of Taliban gunmen, from Kandahar’s prison. But NATO forces and the beleaguered government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai would doubtless prefer for the Taliban to try a stand- up fight than continue with such hit-and-run tactics.
Karzai himself handed the NATO coalition and President Bush a headache Sunday with his threat to send troops into neighboring Pakistan to battle Taliban forces who have taken refuge there.
As threats go, that’s a fairly hollow one, because the NATO coalition will have nothing to do with such a widening of the war, and Karzai’s forces are far too weak to make a meaningful assault on their own. But the threat by the leader of one supposed U.S. ally to attack another supposed U.S. ally only underscores what a quagmire the region has become.
President Bush, speaking in London, refused to endorse Karzai’s threat and called on Afghanistan and Pakistan to hold talks and share intelligence, saying “It’s in no one’s interest that extremists have a safe haven from which to operate.”
Karzai insists Taliban leader Mullah Omar and others are hiding in Pakistan. Pakistan insists they are in Afghanistan. Bush’s plea for the two states to share intelligence can’t paper over some real differences between the two regimes, but it’s not window dressing, either, since lack of good intelligence has consistently hampered operations in the area.
Coincidentally, a report by the McClatchy Newspapers on unday underscored just how weak the U.S.’s own intelligence was in the initial invasion of Afghanistan and subsequent round-up of terrorist suspects now imprisoned at Guantanamo. The eight-month investigation found that at least some of the Gitmo detainees had been denounced by political rivals even though they were actually U.S. sympathizers, not terrorists. At least one detainee, Mohammed Akhtiar, was murdered in Guantanamo by Taliban militants who knew what the Americans didn’t — that he was on our side.
Less horrific but still disturbing are numerous cases where military tribunals failed to distinguish hard- core international terrorists from low-level fighters and innocent civilians merely caught up in the dragnets.
Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken — for the third time — the least the U.S. government can do is sort out the real terrorists from the hapless flotsam at Guantanamo. That would be at least a first step on the long journey back to a credible policy in the region.
