Afstan and the Internet: Canadians, Aussies and the Taliban/NATO winning?

1) The wired and the wonderful:

KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN — Rob MacGregor is a soldier who knows what to do with the business end of a rifle. He is also a digital soldier who knows his way around with a computer mouse.

Master Corporal MacGregor has just returned from what passes for the front in the war in Afghanistan. The India Company of his 2nd Battalion Royal Canadian Regiment had been in the thick of the hunt for Taliban as part of Operation Hoover.

The soldiers hiked for kilometres in the dead of night and had been involved in several gun battles throughout the long day. Near the end of the operation, MCpl. MacGregor had fallen from a roof and broken his ankle.

And less than 48 hours later, there he was in the cool of a trailer on the Kandahar Air Field checking out pictures of his sister's new baby on Facebook. It was a welcome bit of home...

Most of the 2,500 troops in southern Afghanistan have easy access to e-mail and MSN instant messaging, the exception being those at the newest forward bases. There are 50 computers with high-speed satellite connections, five of them with video cams, at the new Canada House compound on the base. There are 50 phones hooked to a satellite and each member of the military is given a phone card that allows 35 minutes of long-distance telephone calls weekly. There are 24 computers designed for the latest in video games. There's even a rudimentary wireless system for the vast number of troops who bring their own laptops.

They can book a video conference hookup. They can watch new-release DVDs in a 60-seat theatre or on their laptops. They can catch the news or latest hockey game on one of three 60-inch plasma televisions or listen to a simulcast of a Fredericton radio station.

And if all else fails to amuse they can play their own video games - soldiers were lying on their bunks with their hand-held video games at the Ma'sum Ghar forward base moments after Op Hoover ended - or slap on the earphones from their iPods...

And it's not just at Kandahar. I was listening to the Lowell Green Show on CFRA, Ottawa, this morning when he got a call from a Master Corporal, via satellite phone, at a forward operating base outside the wire. He just wanted to say "Hi" to his wife, family and friends in Ottawa. Holy mackerel.

2) The wired and the wicked:

Australia's special forces task group is now fully deployed inside Afghanistan and intent on making life uncomfortable for Taliban insurgents, defence head Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston says.

But Air Chief Marshal Houston declined to give a Senate estimates committee hearing many details of their planned activities.

He said the insurgents had proved adept at use of the internet.

"We have announced the deployment of the special operations task group but I won't be saying too much about the way they conduct their operations because as we have seen, the Taliban have a great capacity for gaining information," he said.

"If we say something over here in Australia, they exploit the electronic media, particularly the internet to find out what we are saying [emphasis added].

"For reasons of operational security I don't want to say any more than our special operations people will be doing operations that will make the Taliban extremely uncomfortable."

Australia currently has some 500 troops engaged in reconstruction work in Oruzgan province of south-central Afghanistan.

With the special forces deployment, plus the deployment of a RAAF air traffic control unit and two extra army Chinook helicopters next year, Australian force numbers in Afghanistan will exceed 1,000 by early 2008 [emphasis added]...

The Taliban are certainly aware also of what is happening in Canada and, as Babbling pointed out, are using their easy reading of the Canadian mood to test our steadfastness.

3) Meanwhile, the Dutch General who formerly had our troops under his overall command in Regional Command South believes NATO is winning:

A top NATO alliance general said yesterday that Afghanistan's Taliban militia has lost its ability to control large swaths of territory, even if the hard-line Islamic movement remains strong in "small pockets" of the country.

Dutch Maj. Gen. Ton van Loon, who this month ended his tour as commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan's volatile south, said Taliban fighters had been driven out of the regions where they had sought to gain a foothold, including Kandahar city and parts of Helmand province.

"They will still be a force but they don't have the initiative we have," van Loon said in an interview with Washington Post reporters and editors.

Last year, the Taliban used suicide bombings, kidnappings and coordinated attacks to destabilize large parts of the country, including much of the south, leading many Afghans to fear that the country was slipping back under Taliban control.

After a lull in the fighting over the winter, Afghan and NATO officials had been preparing for a major Taliban offensive this spring. So far, the onslaught has failed to materialize, though the country has experienced daily clashes that have taken a heavy toll on civilians.

The U.N. human rights chief reported Monday that as many as 380 civilians had died in Afghanistan in the first four months of the year. While the Taliban has been blamed in many of those cases, U.S. and NATO firepower has also caused civilian deaths, provoking public anger and embarrassing the government of President Hamid Karzai...