Taliban takes control of 18 towns in Kandahar, elder says
Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani
By Carlotta Gall and Abdul Waheed Wafa Published: June 17, 2008
ISLAMABAD: Afghan families continued to flee the district of Argandab in southern Afghanistan as Taliban fighters and NATO and Afghan forces prepared to battle over the strategic region Tuesday.
The Taliban have taken control of 18 villages west of the Argandab River and started digging trenches and mines, a tribal elder from the region said. NATO and Afghan forces moved troops in to the region and dropped leaflets from the air warning civilians to stay inside their homes if fighting erupted in their area.
The sudden flurry of activity from all sides, coming days after some 400 Taliban prisoners escaped Friday during a jailbreak in Kandahar, indicates the seriousness of the threat.
Yet Afghan government officials and the United States military played down suggestions that the Taliban was poised to mount an attack on the district center or even on the city of Kandahar, the capital of the south which is situated just a few miles from Argandab.
"Still the Taliban are not in Argandab," said the provincial governor, Asadullah Khaled. "They are in some places. It does not mean they took it all," he said in English in telephone call from Kandahar.
"They will have some fighting, but they are not that strong," he said of the Taliban. Although the governor has in the past raised the alarm when Taliban forces have appeared close to the city, and though he has often called for tougher action from NATO forces in his region, this time he said the threat was not great. "I am not worried."
The United States military said a patrol of Afghan police and American and allied forces conducted a five-hour patrol from daybreak on the west side of the Argandab River valley, where there have been reports of Taliban fighters. The patrol encountered no resistance, said Lieutenant Colonel Rumi Nielson-Green, a United States military spokeswoman at Bagram air base north of Kabul.
"Nothing but normal patterns of life were observed," Rumi said. She could not confirm reports that the Taliban was destroying bridges.
NATO forces dropped leaflets from the air urging villagers to stay indoors when fighting occurred near their homes, said Mark Laity, the civilian spokesperson for NATO forces in Afghanistan.
The leaflets were double-sided and explained that Afghan national security forces, supported by NATO, were coming to the region, he said. On the other side they warned, "Keep your family safe when there is fighting near your home, stay inside, and the Afghan security forces will defeat the enemies of Afghanistan."
NATO forces have been deployed in the areas where there is a threat, he added.
Still, local farmers and villagers have been concerned enough to evacuate their families from a group of villages in the northwest part of the district.
A tribal elder, who did not wish to be identified by name for fear of jeopardizing the safety of family members still in the Argandab area, said he had left his village a week ago, before the prison break, because he sensed the Taliban was preparing something.
On Monday 40 to 50 Taliban fighters surrounded the village and seized control of it and ordered no one to leave, he said. The elder had managed to get his family out early, but two members of the family had stayed back, were on their way out but still had not arrived, he said.
He said the Taliban came from Khakrez, a neighboring mountainous district that they have used as a base for a long time. There were Pakistani fighters among the Taliban, he said.
The elder said he felt that the surge of Taliban into the area was almost certainly connected to the prison break and that some of the escapees had probably taken refuge in Argandab.
Carlotta Gall reported from Islamabad, and Abdul Waheed Wafa reported from Kabul, Afghanistan. Sanghar Rahimi contributed reporting from Kabul.Carlotta Gall reported from Islamabad, and Abdul Waheed Wafa reported from Kabul, Afghanistan. Sanghar Rahimi contributed reporting from Kabul.
ARGHANDAB, Afghanistan — Taliban militants destroyed bridges and planted mines in several villages they control outside southern Afghanistan's largest city in apparent preparation for battle, residents and officials said Tuesday.
More than 700 families — meaning perhaps 4,000 people or more — had fled the Arghandab district 10 miles northwest of Kandahar city, said Sardar Mohammad, a police officer manning a checkpoint on the east side of the Arghandab River. Police on Tuesday stopped and searched every person passing on the road.
On the west side of the river, hundreds of Taliban controlled around nine or 10 villages, Mohammad said.
"Last night the people were afraid, and families on tractors, trucks and taxis fled the area," said Mohammad. "Small bridges inside the villages have been destroyed."
The Afghan army flew four planeloads of soldiers to Kandahar from the capital, Kabul, on Tuesday. Canadian forces have also moved in to the region.
"When we get permission from commanders, we will attack the Taliban," Mohammad said.
The Taliban assault Monday on the outskirts of Kandahar was the latest display of strength by the militants despite a record number of U.S. and NATO troops in the country.
The push into Arghandab district — a lush region filled with grape and pomegranate groves that the Soviet army could never conquer — came three days after a coordinated Taliban attack on Kandahar's prison that freed 400 insurgent fighters.
Police and army soldiers increased security throughout Kandahar and enforced a 10 p.m. curfew.
A Taliban commander named Mullah Ahmedullah called an Associated Press reporter on Tuesday and said that around 400 Taliban moved into Arghandab from Khakrez, one district to the north. He said some of the militants released in Friday's prison break had joined the assault.
"They told us, 'We want to fight until the death,'" Ahmedullah said. "We've occupied most of the area and it's a good place for fighting. Now we are waiting for the NATO and Afghan forces."
The hardline Taliban regime ousted from power in a 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan regarded Kandahar as its main stronghold, and its insurgent supporters are most active in the volatile south of the country.
The U.S. and NATO have pleaded for additional troops over the last year and now have some 65,000 in the country. But the militants are still finding successes that the international alliance can't counter.
Arghandab lies just northwest of Kandahar city, and a tribal leader from the region warned that the militants could use the cover from Arghandab's orchards to mount an attack on Kandahar itself. NATO officials dismiss the idea that the Taliban can mount an attack on Kandahar.
One of the thousands of Afghans fleeing Arghandab said Tuesday that families were being forced out just as grape groves needed harvesting, meaning financial ruin for thousands. Haji Ibrahim Khan said Taliban fighters were moving through several Arghandab villages with weapons on their shoulders, planting mines and destroying small bridges.
"They told us to leave the area within 24 hours because they want to fight foreign and Afghan troops," Khan said. "But within a week we should be harvesting, and we were expecting a good one. Now with this fighting we are deeply worried — the grapes are the only source of income we have."
Two powerful anti-Taliban leaders from Arghandab have died in the last year, weakening the region's defenses. Mullah Naqib, the district's former leader, died of a heart attack in October. Taliban fighters moved into Arghandab en masse two weeks after his death but left within days after soldiers moved in.
A second leader, police commander Abdul Hakim Jan, died in a massive suicide bombing in Kandahar in February.
The assault Monday came one day after President Hamid Karzai angrily told a news conference that he would send Afghan troops into Pakistan to hunt down Taliban leaders in response to the militants that cross over into Afghanistan from Pakistan.
The Kandahar prison on Saturday, a day after the Taliban blew open the gate, allowing the inmates to flee. Israil Sameen/Reuters
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: June 15, 2008
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A roadside bomb exploded near a United States military vehicle on Saturday, killing four American servicemen in western Afghanistan in the deadliest attack against United States forces in Afghanistan this year, officials said.
The attack occurred a day after a prison break in Kandahar, in which hundreds of inmates escaped during a Taliban bomb and rocket attack. The police chief of Kandahar Province, Sayed Agha Saqib, said Saturday that 390 Taliban prisoners were among those who fled the prison during the attack.
The roadside bomb was aimed at American personnel in Farah Province helping train Afghanistan’s fledgling police force, said Lt. Col. David G. Johnson, an American military spokesman. An American serviceman was wounded in the attack.
Marines from the Second Battalion, Seventh Regiment, which is based in Twentynine Palms, Calif., arrived in Afghanistan this year and were sent to southern and western regions to train police officers. Colonel Johnson said he could not immediately confirm that the four Americans killed were marines.
The four deaths on Saturday brought to at least 44 the number of American servicemen killed in Afghanistan this year, according to a count by The Associated Press. No more than two Americans have been killed in any single attack in Afghanistan this year, that tally said.
In Kandahar, Afghan officials put the number of escapees at about 870, while NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said it was around 1,100.
The complex attack included a truck bombing at the main gate, a suicide bomber who struck a back wall and rockets fired from inside the prison courtyard, setting off a series of explosions that rattled Kandahar, the country’s second biggest city.
The rockets demolished an upper prison floor, said Muhammad Qasim Hashimzai, a deputy minister at the Justice Ministry. Nine police officers were killed, said a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Zemeri Bashary.
There were no indications that the militants received help from the inside, but as a precaution the prison’s chief official, Abdul Qabir, was placed under investigation for possible involvement, Mr. Hashimzai said.
A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, said 30 insurgents on motorbikes and two suicide bombers had attacked Sarposa Prison.
NATO was providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assistance to help track fleeing militants, according to a spokesman for the NATO force, Brig. Gen. Carlos Branco.
A man who claimed to be one of the militants who had escaped, Abdul Nafai, called an Associated Press reporter and said the insurgents had minibuses waiting outside the prison in which dozens of the militants fled.
Declan Walsh in Kabul The Guardian, Wednesday June 18 2008
The Taliban dug into defensive positions in a cluster of villages near Kandahar yesterday in apparent preparation for a battle on the doorstep of Afghanistan's second city.
The brazen gambit came days after the Taliban smashed into Kandahar's main prison, freeing 400 militants, and deepening the sense of crisis in the country.
Local elders said fighters had flooded into Arghandab, a rural sprawl of farmhouses and vineyards that stretches north-west of Kandahar city. "They have blown up several bridges and are planting mines everywhere," Muhammad Usman, a taxi driver who had evacuated a family, told reporters in Kandahar.
The Afghan army flew 700 soldiers into Kandahar and Nato redeployed Canadian soldiers in response to the Taliban actions. But the US-led coalition - which operates under a separate chain of command - disputed the seriousness of the threat, saying it had deployed a patrol to Arghandab and found "no evidence that militants control the area".
A Nato spokesman, Mark Laity, said the alliance had a "very mixed picture" about the size of the buildup. "We assume insurgents are there but we have little evidence of hundreds. You have some displaced people who are panicky, some bad guys who are exaggerating and so it's hard to know what is happening," he said.
Laity said Nato aircraft had dropped leaflets on the area urging residents to stay indoors. "We're emphasising potential threats," he said.
The Taliban have long prized Arghandab, whose pomegranate orchards and vineyards make for ideal guerrilla fighting ground. Soviet troops never managed to capture the area during the 10-year occupation that ended in 1989. But it has been vulnerable since the death last year of two leaders of the local Alokozai tribe, Mullah Naqibullah and Abdul Hakim Jan - one from a heart attack, the other in a suicide bombing.
Since then the Taliban have gradually infiltrated the area, but any attempt to establish complete control could exact a high price. A similar move in Panjwayi, west of Kandahar, in late 2006 sparked a punishing Nato offensive that killed hundreds of fighters and forced many more to flee towards the Pakistani border.
Whatever its size, the latest manoeuvre shows that despite the presence of 65,000 foreign soldiers - the greatest number since 2001 - the Taliban can still produce surprises. One commander, Mullah Ahmedullah, said escaped prisoners from Friday night's jailbreak were among their ranks.
"We've occupied most of the area and it's a good place for fighting. Now we are waiting for the Nato and Afghan forces," he told the Associated Press.
The jailbreak was a severe embarrassment for President Hamid Karzai and underlined his government's failure to provide security. Kandahar is under the control of his brother, Ahmed Wali, who heads the provincial council and wields much influence.
Karzai deflected criticism on to neighbouring Pakistan, warning on Sunday he would send troops to kill Taliban leaders sheltering in the tribal areas and North-West Frontier province. Pakistan said it would not tolerate any incursion.
Taliban Fighters Infiltrate Area Near Southern Afghan City
Afghan National Army soldiers waited in Kabul on Tuesday for flights to Kandahar. NATO forces also moved into the region. Massoud Hossaini/Agence France-Presse
By CARLOTTA GALL Published: June 17, 2008
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Hundreds of Taliban fighters have swarmed into a strategically important district just outside Kandahar, the biggest city in southern Afghanistan, apparently in a push for control just days after 400 Taliban members escaped in a spectacular breakout from the Kandahar prison, officials said Monday.
Afghan military reinforcements arrived in Kandahar on Monday and have already deployed in Kandahar Province, said a NATO spokesman, Mark Laity. The soldiers flew from Kabul and more can be expected to follow, he said. NATO forces based in Kandahar Province have also redeployed to be better prepared for any potential threat, he said.
A government spokesman, Parwez Najib, confirmed the news that Taliban fighters had infiltrated parts of the district, Arghandab. “There is not fighting yet,” he said. Afghan and foreign forces are aware of the presence of the Taliban, he added.
It was unclear whether any of the fighters were among the prison escapees.
The move by the Taliban on Arghandab, a district that is critical to the security of the city of Kandahar and therefore to the entire south of Afghanistan, comes amid an increased sense of crisis in Afghanistan. Kandahar is still reeling from Friday’s brazen attack by the Taliban on the prison, in which they released some 1,200 inmates, 400 of them members of the Taliban, including some district commanders.
In a sign of his increasing frustration with the threats to his government, President Hamid Karzai raised the possibility Sunday of sending Afghan troops into Pakistan to hit militant leaders who had vowed to continue a jihad in Afghanistan.
His comments, which Pakistan protested Monday, were welcomed by Afghan tribesmen gathered for a council meeting in the southeastern province of Paktika. “People here have long been asking the government to solve the problem of infiltration from Pakistan,” the provincial governor, Muhammad Akram Khapalwak, said after the meeting. “People were saying today that Mr. Karzai has been too late in saying this, and it should have been said two years ago.”
In Arghandab, local journalists working for the BBC and Al Jazeera quoted local government officials as saying that 500 Taliban fighters had swarmed into 10 villages in the district.
Families were fleeing their homes in Arghandab to take refuge in the city, they said. Some of the families said they had been told by the Taliban to leave, an indication the Taliban intended to make a stand and fight.
Arghandab is a rich, thickly populated river valley of orchards and vineyards running northwest from Kandahar into a range of barren mountains that have been a refuge for mujahedeen fighters and Taliban insurgents. Control of Arghandab is considered critical to control of the city of Kandahar and has been the source of forces that have seized the city in the past.
The Taliban have been pushing into Arghandab for months and have made several attacks on police posts and tribal leaders from the area over the last year. The deaths of Mullah Naqibullah, the longtime leader of the Alokozai tribe that populates Arghandab, and another senior commander, Abdul Hakim Jan, who was killed in a huge suicide bombing in February, have critically depleted the tribe, which has always fiercely opposed the Taliban.
Canadian troops and the Afghan police pushed back a Taliban force after it made a brief show of force in Arghandab in October. Families fled as the troops moved into the district, but the Taliban fell back quickly and the operation was over within days.
Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.
US soldiers travel to their post in south Afghanistan. Photograph: Rodrigo Abd/AP
British commanders believe they can win the fight to bring democracy and peace to Afghanistan. But the Taliban are on the march again and the drug barons' poppy fields are blooming. In this remarkable dispatch an acclaimed writer travels across the badlands of a country at the crossroads
Jason Burke The Observer, Sunday June 25 2006
Walk out of the gates, past the bored British soldiers in their guardhouse, past the Afghan troops on the outer wall, past razor wire and take the dusty path through the ramshackle cemetery. Go past a new, whitewashed villa built for a local 'businessman' and on through the labyrinth of narrow alleys and traditional mud-walled homes and then turn left through a passage way and there you will find the scruffy bazaar of Lashkar Gah and the Taliban. Two men, both bearded and wearing the trademark thick-coiled black turban, were sitting in the shade behind a friend's workshop. They had agreed to talk to The Observer. 'I am proud to be a Talib,' said Fazl Rahman, 40. 'Why should I deny it? Why should I be afraid?'
'The foreigners are here for their own reasons,' said his younger comrade. 'If they were here to help us, everyone would be living better. But look.' He pointed to the dirt street outside, the shacks, the sagging electricity cables, the thin trees that provide scant protection from the heat of the early afternoon sun and then waved his hand towards the camp a few hundred metres away, the longest-established British base in Helmand province. 'All foreigners are our enemy,' he says. 'You are a journalist, so we don't harm you. But if you were a soldier we would kill you. Afghanistan is the castle of Islam and the foreigners are destroying our religion.'
The summer heat on the blasted desert plains of Helmand has yet to peak. Only in the autumn will the temperatures begin to drop, the dust fall and the winners and losers of the war that has started - or rather restarted - in recent weeks become clear. Men such as Brigadier Ed Butler, the overall commander of the new British deployment, believe that the eventual victors will be 'the Afghan people'. The losers, it is hoped, will be a rough alliance of Taliban religious militants, disgruntled warlords, independently minded tribesmen, bandits and drugs barons who together are the biggest obstacle to peace and stability in the world's 173rd (out of 178) poorest state. 'It is a complex and rapidly evolving situation, but it is winnable', Butler told The Observer last week. 'We have a window of opportunity.'
The consequences of that window closing did not need explaining. The average life expectancy in Afghanistan is 45; the country produces most of the world's opium; it has harboured or produced hardline Islamic militants for three decades. No one doubts that now, nearly five years after the ousting of the 'Taliban Mk I', the critical moment has come. 'If we fail now we will have a narco-terror paradise and a population of 15 million people who will be even more miserably off than they are now, and a lot angrier to boot,' said one senior Western diplomat in Kabul last week. 'It will be a small chunk of hell on earth in the middle of Asia.'
The British operations in Helmand are, of course, only one part of a broader military strategy. From the end of next month, Nato will assume command of almost all combat operations in Afghanistan, except for the American-run hunt for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda along the eastern border with Pakistan. Nato will have about 25,000 troops from 26 nations on service in the country. Helmand is the key test of a new more general approach aimed at bringing security through combat operations, winning local 'hearts and minds' and training Afghan security forces to a sufficient level to allow an eventual coalition withdrawal. Though Butler and other senior officers deny the application of an 'Iraq template,' the mantra 'we don't want to stay here a second longer than we have to' and the aim of promoting 'an Afghan face' are familiar.
To gauge the new strategy's chances of success - and to understand the root causes and nature of the violence it confronts - The Observer spent a week with British forces and a week driving alone through the parts of Afghanistan most affected by the insurgency, travelling hundreds of miles through towns where government authority is restricted to a few square metres around the police station or administrative offices, cities living in fear, through miles of thin fields grazed by emaciated livestock or full of the stubble of recently harvested poppy, across and across huge plains of nothing but sand and rock.
On Tuesday evening at nine o'clock, the gate of the British camp in Lashkar Gah swung open to allow Sergeant Nick Wright, 11 other British soldiers, four Afghan policemen and an interpreter called Noor to walk out into the gathering darkness. Through the two hours' patrol, Wright, who has carefully learnt the Pashto vocabulary on the special 'language cards' distributed to all the troops, maintained an impeccable courtesy. With Noor translating, he watched as the Afghan police stopped vehicles, politely questioned their drivers, wished them health and a good evening and moved on. There was no hostility - though outside Lashkar Gah Wright said he and his men had occasionally been stoned - and children waved at the passing soldiers. 'I always say salaamaleikum and sangay (how are you?),' he says. 'It makes a big difference. We are always being invited into houses for tea.'
A 15-minute helicopter ride to the north is Camp Bastion, a £50m complex still under construction in the middle of the desert which is home to a reinforced contingent of the Parachute Regiment. Lieutenant-Colonel Stuart Tootal has sent his men into remote valleys in north Helmand, previously the undisputed fief of drug dealers and the Taliban. His soldiers have on several recent occasions encountered stiff resistance, killing at least 20 enemy combatants.
Like Wright's men, and in sharp contrast to American troops, the Paras too have been trained to respect local customs and to avoid civilian casualties. In one recent firefight, a unit came under attack from grenades thrown from behind a wall, but decided against retaliating for fear of injuring women and children.
Tootal's men, again in contrast to other nation's troops, do not seize opium that they find. 'It would just make a family destitute and turn people against us,' said one officer.
The aim is to establish secure zones - like 'inkspots on blotting paper' - that will spread throughout the province. The Paras are well trained, relatively well resourced by the standards of many British deployments (though they lack helicopters), in good spirits and have a well thought-out mission. Will it succeed?
There are significant problems. Though the deployment seems a large one, the 5,000-odd troops have 23,000 square miles and a million people to look after and a lot to do. After troops are committed to logistics, administration, rested, put on guard duty or simply left standing around because of a chronic lack of transport capability, there are relatively few left to go out on the ground. There is no attempt to control the roads - 'simply too dangerous', according to one senior soldier - which means that the inkspots are joined only by air. This leaves a lot of space free for the enemy.
There is also some uncertainty as to who exactly the enemy are. As always in Afghanistan, numbers are vague. Major General Chris Brown, the most senior British officer in Afghanistan, last week said there were about 1,000 Taliban, a figure that most analysts reject as a massive understatement, particularly given the ability of the Islamic militia to increase its size enormously for short periods by drawing on tribal levies.
Even if true, in Helmand, classified American briefing documents obtained by The Observer reveal, the main threat is from drug barons. Some funnel money to the Taliban, others fight alone to protect their smuggling routes or laboratories. 'Hunting man,' said Brigadier Butler, 'is a difficult game.' Another problem for UK forces is the deeply unpopular opium eradication programme. Though the British troops are not directly involved, they are tarred by association.
There are also divisions within the British government. The Army wants to initiate 'quick-impact' projects - such as offering primary healthcare - to win the prized 'hearts and minds'. The Department for International Development believes such projects undermine the already parlous image of the Afghan government. 'Schools with Union flags on them aren't going to save Afghanistan,' said one department official in Kabul. Yet development is clearly essential. Poverty is a powerful - if often indirect - recruiter for terrorism and both the Taliban and the drugs dealers often pay good money. 'We offer security and prosperity. The Taliban offer just security,' Butler said. But no one is sure how that prosperity can or should be delivered.
A final problem is historical. Watching Sergeant Wright's patrol in Lashkar Gah was Ghulam Rasul, who has lost count of how old he is. He had also, he said, lost count of the number of armies he had seen pass through his town. Local people know that the British are not going to be in Lashkar Gah - or anywhere else - forever. At the very least that means they will, in classic Afghan fashion, hedge their bets.
In the bazaar the next morning, a fierce argument was under way between those who wanted the British to stay as long as possible and those who wanted them to leave immediately. What united everyone was contempt for their own government, led by recently re-elected President Hamid Karzai. 'He speaks well but never delivers,' said Saeed Ahmed, 28. 'We don't like the Taliban, but at least they are more or less honest.'
Though the newly appointed governor of Helmand province, the urbane English-speaking Mohammed Daud, blithely denies any administrative corruption, the Lashkar Gah police chief admits a grave problem. 'I've just arrested three of my own officers,' Jaimulla Kheel said. With the drugs traffickers making millions, and police officers paid $50 a month, the problems are evident. In a corner of the office sits the policeman in charge of the opium eradication. In the bazaar The Observer heard a detailed account of how officials had received a £20,000 bribe from 50 families in one village to leave their opium fields - their only livelihood - alone. 'I have received no complaints,' the officer said.
The only safe way to travel through south-eastern Afghanistan now is early in the morning - before 'the enemy' is awake. The previously ruinous road from Lashkar Gah to the local city of Kandahar has recently been resurfaced - thanks to US money - so the 150 miles can be covered in around three hours. It is a hair-raising trip none the less. Occasionally groups of disconsolate policemen armed with old Kalashnikovs squat in roadside posts but there is an overwhelming if diffuse sense of threat. There is no sign of Afghan or coalition troops.
The road cuts north, across the burnt plains, the dawn light glinting off the gravel and sand desert. Two American security men were killed on this stretch earlier this month and attacks are common. The road is lined by a series of destitute villages - cleared minefields around some, uncleared minefields around others. Dirty children and emaciated dogs play in the dust. Near the town of Maiwand, a burnt-out truck, hit recently by the Taliban, lies in a pile of ash. The road here is known for improvised roadside bombs - of increasing sophistication, perhaps influenced by those in Iraq. The Taliban are strong here, powerful enough to seize temporary control of the road recently.
A few miles away lies a village where around 40 people were killed in a US airstrike. The Americans say they were Taliban. The locals and human rights groups say they were villagers forced into sheltering the militants. Whatever the truth, the district is now in militant hands and the local police, 60-strong, have had a third if their number killed or wounded in recent weeks. Potholes in the tarmac mark the site of bomb blasts.
Inside Kandahar the wreckage of a car is still scattered in a marketplace - a suicide bomber who attacked a Canadian convoy a day earlier, killing one and injuring six more. There are similar attacks every two or three days.
And then, finally, you arrive in Kandahar itself, more economically active than for years, with new factories and businesses and a functioning mobile phone system, but a city with the smell of fear in its collective nostrils.
There has been development - the central hospital is now supplied with adequate drugs and those who are brought in with all the myriad diseases that afflict the poor in the rural areas are treated relatively well. But the tension is palpable. Local people said they were caught: the Taliban demanded food and shelter, the government threatened them with severe sanctions if they co-operated with militants. 'I wish the Taliban and the West would leave us alone,' said one shopkeeper. 'And I wish the government could govern. I wish for lots of things.'
If the threat in Helmand is from drug smugglers with a smattering of local religious militants, the proportions are inverted in Kandahar and up the eastern flank of Afghanistan. The police chief in the city describes how many of the 'old Taliban' are still operating out of Pakistan - an oft-heard charge in Afghanistan, but one that is almost certainly true. Of the 30 suicide bombers seen in Afghanistan this past year, many have been Pakistani, a few more central Asian and Arab militants, the 'al-Qaeda' fighters who are based in the mountains that line the porous frontier.
The road from Kandahar to Kabul is 300 miles long. Again, you drive it at dawn. Under the Taliban it took a day and a half to travel, a hideously uncomfortable jolting ride over dry river beds, lumps of eroded tarmac and twisted concrete. Now, resurfaced with American aid, it takes a mere five hours. Now it is uncomfortable for different reasons.
The road crosses the highly insecure environs of Kandahar - and the province of Zabul where the militants are possibly strongest of all - before it follows a broad valley of breath-taking natural beauty north. The stunning landscape belies the threat. The mountains on either horizon are full of militants, angry tribesmen, bandits and coalition soldiers hunting them. Then there are the torched rural schools - the Taliban have forced closure of scores as part of their strategy of targeting the government's presence. Even at Ghazni, an hour or so south of Kabul, the Taliban are growing in strength. It is only when the road snakes up onto the plateau where the capital lies that the route becomes secure.
Finally, you reach the city itself, high in the mountains, closed off by a wall of hills from the south, where the embassies, government, aid agencies plan and discuss and hold strategy meetings. The will is there and, if all states follow through on recent pledges, so are the resources. But, as the people of Lashkar Gah know all too well, it is distinctly possible that the sudden focus of attention on Afghanistan by the West this summer will prove to be too little, too late.
ARGHANDAB, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan and Canadian forces moved into a series of villages outside of southern Afghanistan's largest city on Wednesday to root out any Taliban who have infiltrated the area, officials said.
Troops exchanged fire with militants during "a few minor contacts" but there were no immediate reports of casualties, NATO spokesman Mark Laity said. Helicopters patrolled the skies and smoke rose from fields after exchanges of fire.
"As of this morning we've expanded operations into Arghandab," Laity said. "Canadian troops are in support" of the Afghan National Army.
Afghanistan's Ministry of Defense on Tuesday said between 300 and 400 militant fighters were operating in Arghandab — a lush region of pomegranate and grape fields that lies 10 miles northwest of Kandahar city, the Taliban's spiritual home.
Canadian military officials who patrolled through Arghandab over the last day reported "no obvious signs" of insurgent activity. But that didn't mean there were no Taliban there, a news release said. Pentagon officials said reports of hundreds of Taliban in Arghandab were being overstated.
But Afghan officials and witnesses said that Taliban fighters destroyed bridges and planted mines after overrunning the Arghandab villages on Monday. Local police said hundreds of farm families have fled, fearing upcoming military operations.
The Taliban have long sought to control Arghandab and the good fighting positions its pomegranate and grape groves offer. With control cemented, militants could cross the countryside's flat plains for probing attacks into Kandahar, in possible preparation for an assault on their former spiritual home.
Haji Agha Lalai, a provincial council member and the head of the province's reconciliation commission — which brings former insurgents who lay down their weapons back into the folds of society — said the militants were destroying bridges and planting mines as defensive measures in hopes they can repel attacks from Afghan and NATO forces.
"From a strategic military point of view, Arghandab is a very good place for the Taliban," Lalai said. "Arghandab is close to Kandahar city, allowing the Taliban to launch ambushes and attacks more easily than any other place in the province. Secondly, it's covered with trees and gardens. They can easily hide from air strikes."
The Taliban assault on the outskirts of Kandahar was the latest display of strength by the militants despite a record number of U.S. and NATO troops in the country. The push into Arghandab came three days after a coordinated Taliban attack on Kandahar's prison that freed 400 insurgent fighters.
The hardline Taliban regime ousted from power in a 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan regarded Kandahar as its main stronghold, and its insurgent supporters are most active in the volatile south of the country.
Associated Press writers Jason Straziuso and Amir Shah contributed to this report from Kabul.
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