U.S. forces target Taliban stronghold of Kandahar
KABUL (SANA): The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan pledged Monday to retake the symbolic Taliban home ground of Kandahar in a campaign that builds on early signs of progress from the huge infusion of American and foreign forces.
“We’re absolutely going to secure Kandahar,” Gen. Stanley McChrystal told reporters traveling with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who arrived Monday to talk with his commanders and Afghan officials.
The recent three-week offensive to evict insurgents from the strategic south Afghanistan town of Marjah is a model in spirit if not in practice for the larger, more complicated task of squeezing the Taliban in Kandahar.
The Afghan war is in its ninth year and unpopular with a majority of Americans. The challenge for the Obama administration is to demonstrate clear progress against the entrenched Taliban insurgency this year. The number of U.S. forces in the country soon will reach roughly 100,000 – nearly triple the size of the force when Obama took office.
Preparations for the fight in the southern Afghan region around Kandahar have already begun, McChrystal said Monday.
The fighting will not resemble the recent successful operation to retake the area around Marjah, also in southern Afghanistan.
“Kandahar is much larger, much more complex,” McChrystal told reporters.
Gates cited “bits and pieces of good news” but cautioned against overconfidence. His visit was his first since the start of the campaign in Marjah, once so thoroughly under militant control that a Taliban flag flew on a main road.
The NATO-led force is now growing in districts surrounding Kandahar that are under the Taliban thumb. That is part of a gradual increase in pressure ahead of an eventual military operation, McChrystal said.
“There won’t be a D-Day that is climactic,” he said. “It will be arising tide of security when it comes.”
Gates met Monday with Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai and said he was of “like mind” with the Afghan leader, who is finishing details of a plan to offer jobs, vocational training and other economic incentives to tens of thousands of Taliban foot soldiers willing to switch sides.
Getting top Taliban leaders to the negotiating table is an even greater challenge. The Afghan government on Monday said it will hold a three-day peace gathering in Kabul beginning April 29 to chart a plan for moving forward on reintegration and reconciliation.
Karzai said the government will embrace thousands of Taliban “who are sons of this soil and have been forced into militancy by circumstances or by various other events … and that’s a process that has the approval of our allies.”
Gates cautiously agreed, saying: “The timing of this, really I think, in many respects depends on the conditions on the ground in terms of when people, particularly the more senior commanders, realize that the odds against their success are no longer in their favor.”
Gates said the military offensive launched last month is encouraging but stopped short of saying that success in Marjah suggests that the war is at a turning point.
“People still need to understand there is some very hard fighting, very hard days ahead,” Gates told reporters traveling with him.
The major military phase of the campaign around the Marjah ended without a high casualty toll for U.S. troops and the Afghan security forces fighting alongside them.
At least 19 civilians were killed during the allied operations. The losses likely would have been worse without strict new rules pushed by McChrystal that limit air strikes, raids on homes and other risky combat operations.
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