Afstan: Not good news

Taliban repeating their old ways:

The Taliban are setting up courts and other local-government institutions across southern Afghanistan, challenging U.S. efforts to pacify the country and bolster the authority of the central government in Kabul.

Senior American military officials said the Taliban run roughly two dozen law courts in southern Afghanistan, one of the armed Islamist group's main strongholds. Drawing on a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law, the courts work to resolve conflicts over property, grazing rights and inheritances, the officials said.

The Taliban have also appointed unofficial governors and mayors to exercise day-to-day control over remote areas, amounting to a parallel government independent of Kabul, according to the U.S. officials.

"I do see the attempts in many areas by the Taliban to exert intimidation and exert control," Gen. David McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said in remarks Tuesday at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank. "They do try to have shadow governors or court systems."

The Taliban have regained control in these pockets despite seven years of American attacks and the presence of more than 50,000 U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops. There are thousands of U.S. and British troops in southern Afghanistan, but American commanders say they don't have enough forces to prevent the Taliban from controlling territory there.

Afghanistan's ambassador to the U.S., Said Tayeb Jawad, said in an interview that the Taliban is expanding its reach into Afghans' daily lives.

"It is a disgrace that seven years after the beginning of the military operations in Afghanistan we are seeing a U-turn back to how the situation was before Sept. 11," he said.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Monday [Nov. 17] that Taliban activity at the local-government level appears to be rising [emphasis added].

The first indications that the Taliban were taking on government functions appeared more than a year ago and picked up this summer, said Henry Crumpton, a former senior CIA and State Department counterterrorism official. He said the functions include running courts and collecting taxes.

Two senior U.S. military officials in Afghanistan said the Taliban created their courts by abolishing the tribal judicial systems that have long settled disputes in poor, conservative regions.

The Taliban used a similar approach in the 1990s, when they rose to power by using force to bring a measure of order to unstable regions of the country...

Update: Military success but some telling realities about ISAF and Afghan security forces' strength:

LAKOKHEL, Afghanistan - South of this tiny Afghan village west of Kandahar city, the throaty twin-engine roar of Sea King and Chinook helicopters echoed through the air as they disgorged the first wave of what would turn out to be an entire battalion of British Royal Marines.

Not far away, bathed in the light of a brilliant Afghan moon, Canadian soldiers and armoured vehicles from the Royal Canadian Regiment began to move, buttressed to the west by a phalanx of U.S. troops.

Another operation was underway in Afghanistan's perilous Zhari district.

Hours earlier, Afghan National Army soldiers moved stealthily from compound to compound on a rare night mission, alongside their Canadian mentors.

"It's riskier in the dark, but should pay off," one of the Canadians said as he checked his gear and night vision goggles.

"We don't want them to think we are getting in a rut," he chuckled...

The mission was considered a "disruption operation [emphasis added]," where the troops, under the command of Task Force Kandahar, move into a location with a show of force in an effort to disrupt the local command and control of the Taliban and uncover any caches of weapons or explosives.

It's also the sort of operation that usually yields valuable intelligence, said Brig.-Gen. Denis Thompson, the commander of Task Force Kandahar...

The Zhari district, littered with hundreds of mud-walled compounds, grape orchards and uneven terrain, has been an ongoing battleground for several years. The Taliban presence is strong, hiding places are plentiful and every coalition outing is fraught with danger.

Several of these tiny walled enclaves, deemed "compounds of interest," were targeted during the operation. British forces found what was described as "an extremely large" cache of explosives and weapons.

"By constantly conducting operations here, in the end-game we want to hold this ground and make sure it is garrisoned by police, but at this point in time those forces don't exist [emphasis added]," Thompson said.

"We need to keep the initiative and not make it easy for them to use this as a base for operations because we're too damn close to Kandahar city to permit that."

While there are areas in the volatile Zhari and Panjwaii districts that are secure and largely under Afghan government control, this isn't one of them. Previous efforts to flush out the Taliban presence have resulted in enemy fighters staying put or simply coming back later.

"We can come and go as we please in here, providing we have sufficient force, but we don't control it - and I would argue that they don't control it either," Thompson said.

"This is the piece of Kandahar province that is justifiably described as contested, and
we have to continue to contest it in order to protect the pieces that we hold [emphasis added]."

A shortage of Afghan Uniformed Police in the area has been a setback to the plan to bring security to the region. Without enough sufficiently trained officers, it's impossible to clear out the region and establish a significant police presence [emphasis added]...

"Search and destroy" since "clear and hold" cannot be done.