NO SIGN OF TALIBAN RETREAT IN “INSURGISTAN”
By ALAN CULLISON And MARIA ABI-HABIB
KABUL—A bold attack on NATO’s largest military base in southern Afghanistan this weekend signals that the Taliban are determined to keep up the pace of high-profile strikes against coalition troops, despite high casualties among the attackers and faint hope of capturing any of the targets.
The attack late Saturday on the coalition’s Kandahar Air Field wounded about a dozen North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops and contractors, and forced a lock-down of the base for several hours.
The attack comes just a few days after a similar strike on Bagram Air Field, the main coalition base in eastern Afghanistan. Some of the insurgents in the Bagram attack were disguised as U.S. forces, and killed one contractor and injured several U.S. service members before retreating.
NATO officials say the Taliban’s attacking force suffered heavy losses in both engagements, as gunships from both air bases quickly responded along with ground troops, and strafed the surviving attackers as they fled the field.
Sixteen were killed and five attackers were captured in the Bagram assault. NATO hasn’t yet announced how many Taliban were killed in the attack on the Kandahar assault, but say they never came close to piercing the base perimeter.
Still, the attacks are an important psychological boost for the Taliban cause, since the fighters are demonstrating their ability to strike virtually anywhere after nine years of occupation by coalition troops and a vaunted troop surge that is meant to force Taliban leaders to the negotiating table. Stray rocket and mortar attacks on the Kandahar base have been common in recent years, but before Saturday, insurgents hadn’t mounted any coordinated assaults there.
The Taliban, which claimed responsibility for the attack, said it launched more than a dozen rockets, one of which landed near a popular coffee shop where off-duty personnel often line up for take-out coffee and pastries.
Sounds of gunfire and explosions rattled through the base for several hours, and personnel throughout the base, where about 20,000 people work, were confined to reinforced bunkers.
The Taliban declared this month that it was launching an offensive, dubbed al Fateh, or victory, aiming to besiege and take over coalition bases. But the Taliban have declared they would take aim at stray coalition personnel and Afghan government officials when available.
On Sunday, a top police chief in a district of Ghazni province was shot and killed in a gunfight, and last Tuesday, a suicide bomber rammed a van packed with explosives into a lightly armed convoy of coalition vehicles, killing 18 people, including five Americans and a Canadian.
NATO officials insist their war with the Taliban is on track, and a surge in troops this year will retake key areas that were under Taliban control, especially in traditionally hostile regions in the south.
The Afghan government is also counting on a string of political initiatives to help persuade some fighters to lay down their weapons. One of them, a so-called peace jirga, or assembly, was to start May 29, but has been postponed for a few days due to “technical factors,” an Afghan official said Sunday.
Comments are closed.
