Posted on 06/24/2006 6:43:24 PM PDT by Murtyo
The country has become increasingly unstable, writes Declan Walsh in Kandahar
Maulavi Ghulam Muhammad, a stern-faced man with a combed white beard, is one of Afghanistan’s most senior clerics.
As head of the Kandahar shura, or council, he leads the Islamic faithful in Kandahar, a city that was once the headquarters of Taliban rule. Now he fears for his life.
Twelve of the shura’s 175 clerics have been assassinated in the past 12 months for their pro-government views. Many were murdered in drive-by shootings reminiscent of mafia-style assassinations. Muhammad could be next in line.
He pulls out a Taliban fatwa, or religious order, bearing the names of four top clerics including himself.
‘‘They are puppets and servants to the infidel, friends of the devil,” it reads. ‘‘They must be killed.”
That even Islamic leaders - not a famously radical force - have become caught in the crosshairs of southern Afghanistan’s escalating conflict is a measure of how destablised the country has become.
About 600 people have died in the past six weeks, many under American and British aerial bombing raids on Taliban hide-outs in the southern provinces. Suicide attacks and roadside bombings, once a rarity, are now commonplace in cities such as Kandahar.
Ten days ago, US led forces launched Operation Mountain Thrust, the largest anti-Taliban offensive since the fundamentalist militia was swept from power in 2001.
More than 10,000 troops are combing four southern provinces to flush the insurgents from their refuges in remote valleys and dusty desert towns.
The US wants to cripple the mounting insurgency before it hands control of the southern sector to the Nato-led ISAF force on July 31. But the bloody operations, which have caused dozens of civilians casualties, are increasingly unpopular among frightened villagers. The strain is showing on President Karzai, the western-backed leader who lives in a heavily fortified palace in central Kabul.
A traffic accident involving US troops in mid-May sparked city-wide riots that rocked his fragile authority. Last week, he launched a sharp attack on the casualty-heavy tactics employed by his western allies.
‘‘It is not acceptable for us that in all this fighting, Afghans are dying. Even if they are Taliban, they are sons of this land,” he said.
But the trouble also stems frustration with Karzai’s own government. Afghans, particularly in the south, have seen little improvement to their miserable living conditions since the US-led war began in 2001.
‘‘The government’s popularity is very low,” said Talatbek Masadykov, head of the UN office in Kandahar.
‘‘It has failed to provide security and been slow to sack corrupt officials. That creates a lot of animosity.” Xenophobia is also rising in a country with a long history of initially welcoming outsiders before violently expelling them.
Three bomb craters mark the highway to Maiwand, an unlovely hamlet of opium traders, Taliban spies and disgruntled tribesmen on the sun-baked plains of western Kandahar.
In 1880 an Afghan tribal force scored a famous victory against a colonial force here, killing about 1,000 British and Indian soldiers at the height of the Second Anglo-Afghan war. One officer, recalling the frantic retreat along a ‘‘blood-stained’’ road to Kandahar, 40 miles east, described Maiwand as ‘‘simply a rat trap’’. Today the town has not lost its sense of menace.
A charred, up-ended police jeep lies like a fallen sentinel at the town gates, scene of a June 16 roadside bombing in which four officers died. Hashish and opium are openly sold in the bazaar, a place of slouching shops and greasy mechanic pits.
Turbaned locals glare suspiciously at foreign visitors. Officials say many are Taliban sympathisers from nearby Helmand province where 3,300 British soldiers are deploying as part of the ISAF mission. Fundamentalist sentiment runs strong. Bullet holes pepper the front gate of the police station, scene of a recent firefight.
The Taliban, strengthened by their cut from the thriving heroin smuggling trade, are well-organised, said Umar Jan, the chain-smoking police chief.
‘‘They use mobile phones to coordinate ambushes on our patrols. It’s a big problem,” he said.
One quarter of the town’s 60 policemen have been killed in the past month, Jan said. Yet Canadian soldiers based in Kandahar had done little to help, he complained.
‘‘They show up maybe once a week, promising vehicles and ammunition but bringing nothing. Now we take their promises like a joke,” he said. Kandahar’s youthful governor, Asadullah Khalid, blames infiltration from neighbouring Pakistan for the Taliban resurgence. At the chaotic frontier in Spin Boldak, a two-hour drive south of the city, it is easy to appreciate the problem.
Several thousand people cross every hour, many of them Afghans with homes and businesses on both sides of the border. Bribes change hands, contraband is smuggled, and insurgents based in Pakistan can easily slip through.
‘‘It is impossible for us to check everyone,” said Khusnay Kaka, a senior Afghan border official.
But more fundamental problems lie inside Afghanistan, where the Karzai government continues to lose traction fast and western troops are bracing for a long, hot and dangerous summer.
Yea but didn't the libs and MSM say Iraq was on the brink of all out civil war, blah blah? ... "Well there you go again..."
There is a lot of fighting Southeast of Kandahar, as coalition forces tighten the noose. The coalition forces are not fighting small squads of Taliban, they are forcing smaller units to join together and coalition troops are having shoot outs against as many as 50 to 100 Talibani at a time. The Taliban are now fighting defensively, not offensively, a fact that the MSM drive by slime ball media do not report.
This article is nothing but a litany of whatever negative events they MSM slimes can find. It has become a daily catechism of the media which is hollow empty, and will be at its most shrill as the last Taliban in Afghanistan is killed or forced to retreat across the border into Pakistan.
Right, that's why the headlines usually read "70 Taliban were killed..."
The media love to use the word destablised. They like things nice and stable. You know same leadership for 40+ years, like in Cuba.
The MSM in the US say nothing about it, which is why I chucked my TV 6 years ago. No TV. Its all crap! I get my news from Freepers like you!
Right. The headlines scream "600 killed in worst violence in 3 yrs!" Read carefully and you find out that 590 are bad guys. No wonder the msm is upset, their guys are getting stomped.
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