AfPak: US in RC South/US and Paks/Paks vs. Talibs

Regional Command South:

U.S. Sets Fight in the Poppies to Stop Taliban

Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
American troops after a battle with the Taliban. More Photos >

ZANGABAD, Afghanistan — American commanders are planning to cut off the Taliban’s main source of money, the country’s multimillion-dollar opium crop, by pouring thousands of troops into the three provinces that bankroll much of the group’s operations.

The plan to send 20,000 Marines and soldiers into Helmand, Kandahar and Zabul Provinces this summer promises weeks and perhaps months of heavy fighting, since American officers expect the Taliban to vigorously defend what makes up the economic engine for the insurgency. The additional troops, the centerpiece of President Obama’s effort to reverse the course of the seven-year war, will roughly double the number already in southern Afghanistan. The troops already fighting there are universally seen as overwhelmed. In many cases, the Americans will be pushing into areas where few or no troops have been before.

Through extortion and taxation, the Taliban are believed to reap as much as $300 million a year from Afghanistan’s opium trade, which now makes up 90 percent of the world’s total. That is enough, the Americans say, to sustain all of the Taliban’s military operations in southern Afghanistan for an entire year.

“Opium is their financial engine,” said Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, the deputy commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan. “That is why we think he will fight for these areas.”

The Americans say that their main goal this summer will be to provide security for the Afghan population, and thereby isolate the insurgents.

But because the opium is tilled in heavily populated areas, and because the Taliban are spread among the people, the Americans say they will have to break the group’s hold on poppy cultivation to be successful.

No one here thinks that is going to be easy.

Only 10 minutes inside the tiny village of Zangabad, 20 miles southwest of Kandahar [emphasis added], a platoon of American soldiers stepped into a poppy field in full bloom on Monday. Taliban fighters opened fire from three sides.

“From the north!” one of the soldiers yelled, spinning and firing.

“West!” another screamed, turning and firing, too.

An hour passed and a thousand bullets whipped through the air. Ammunition was running low. The Taliban were circling.

Then the gunships arrived, swooping in, their bullet casings showering the ground beneath them, their rockets streaking and destroying. Behind a barrage of artillery, the soldiers shot their way out of Zangabad and moved into the cover of the vineyards.

“When are you going to drop the bomb?” Capt. Chris Brawley said into his radio over the clatter of machine-gun fire. “I’m in a grape field.”

The bomb came, and after a time the shooting stopped.

The firefight offered a preview of the Americans’ summer in southern Afghanistan. By all accounts, it is going to be bloody.

Like the guerrillas they are, Taliban fighters often fade away when confronted by a conventional army. But in Afghanistan, as they did in Zangabad, the Taliban will probably stand and fight...

Many of the new American soldiers will fan out along southern Afghanistan’s largely unguarded 550-mile-long border with Pakistan [emphasis added]. Among them will be soldiers deployed in the Stryker, a relatively quick, nimble armored vehicle that can roam across the vast areas that span the frontier.

All of the new troops are supposed to be in place by Aug. 20 [more on deployment schedule here], in order to provide security for Afghanistan’s presidential election.

The presence of poppy and opium here has injected a huge measure of uncertainly into the war. Under NATO rules of engagement, American or other forces are prohibited from attacking targets or people related only to narcotics production. Those people are not considered combatants.

But American and other forces are allowed to attack drug smugglers or facilities that are assisting the Taliban. In an interview, General Nicholson said that opium production and the Taliban are so often intertwined that the rules do not usually inhibit American operations.

“We often come across a compound that has opium and I.E.D. materials side by side, and opium and explosive materials and weapons,” General Nicholson said, referring to improvised explosive devices. “It’s very common — more common than not.”

But the prospect of heavy fighting in populated areas could further alienate the Afghan population [see Update at previous link above]. In the firefight in Zangabad, the Americans covered their exit with a barrage of 20 155 millimeter high-explosive artillery shells — necessary to shield them from the Taliban, but also enough to inflict serious damage on people and property. A local Afghan interviewed by telephone after the firefight said that four homes had been damaged by the artillery strikes...

...the trickiest thing will be winning over the Afghans themselves. The Taliban are entrenched in the villages and river valleys of southern Afghanistan. The locals, caught between the foes, seem, at best, to be waiting to see who prevails [emphasis added]...

US and Paks

1) Taliban Advance in Pakistan Prompts Shift by U.S.

The Pakistani government's inability to stem Taliban advances has forced the Obama administration to recalibrate its Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy a month after unveiling it.

What was planned as a step-by-step process of greater military and economic engagement with Pakistan -- as immediate attention focused on Afghanistan -- has been rapidly overtaken by the worsening situation on the ground. Nearly nonstop discussions over the past two days included a White House meeting Monday between Obama and senior national security officials and a full National Security Council session on Pakistan yesterday.

Pakistani soldiers prepare to fire at suspected hideouts of Taliban insurgents in Lower Dir district during an ongoing operation launched Sunday. (By Mohammad Sajjad -- Associated Press)

A tripartite summit Obama will host here next week with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai will center heavily on the Pakistan problem rather than the balance originally intended, officials said.

New consideration is being given to a long-dormant proposal to allow U.S. counterinsurgency training for Pakistani troops somewhere outside the country, circumventing Pakistan's refusal to allow American "boots on the ground" there. "The issue now is how do you do that, where do you do it, and what money do we have to do it with?" said a senior administration official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity yesterday [see below].

On Capitol Hill, anxious lawmakers proposed breaking $400 million out of the administration's pending $83 billion supplemental spending request in order to fund immediate counterinsurgency and economic assistance to Pakistan. "We could pass it really quickly, in just a matter of days," said Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), who just returned from Pakistan. Waiting for debate and approval of the entire supplemental, Kyl said, "could be too little, too late."

"Certainly, we are discussing with the administration what is needed, and I think that all of us are very concerned about what's happening in Pakistan," House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters...

Beyond this week's combat, officials said they were still looking for Pakistan to begin moving large quantities of its half-million-strong military away from the eastern border with India, its historic adversary, and toward Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries in the west.

2) U.S. training of Pakistan army to grow
Fearing Islamabad is ill equipped to battle militants, Washington aims to bolster the nation's anti-insurgency efforts.

The Pakistani government has agreed to allow the U.S. a greater role in training its military, part of an accord that will also send counterinsurgency equipment to help Islamabad step up its offensive against militants.

Washington has been watching with growing alarm as Taliban forces have made military gains in Pakistan and U.S. officials have stepped up pressure on Islamabad to do more.

Although the Pakistani military launched an air attack against the Taliban on Tuesday, senior U.S. Defense officials remain deeply worried about Islamabad's ability to beat back the militant advance.

Long shaped by the threat of war with India, the Pakistani military is armed mostly with heavy weaponry and lacks some of the equipment useful in fighting an insurgency. And after months of fighting, the forces that have been hunting militants are exhausted.

"You have a Pakistani military that is battle weary," a senior U.S. Defense official said. "Their equipment is aged and not effective for the fight they are in."

The official, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the U.S.-Pakistani relationship.

On his trip last week to Pakistan, Adm. Michael G. Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, continued to press the government to take the militant force more seriously. Pakistani military chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani outlined for Mullen a series of steps he was planning, including the offensive in the Buner area.

Mullen emerged from his meetings with Kayani and other Pakistani officials deeply worried, telling aides that the situation had grown far worse than even two weeks before, when he had visited with special U.S. envoy Richard C. Holbrooke. "I have never seen him come back more concerned, deeply bothered by what he saw," a military officer said [more on the situation here].

The Pakistani operation included using heavy artillery, helicopters and fighter jets to strike Taliban positions in the mountains beyond Islamabad. But U.S. officials fear that those tactics will be ineffective or could backfire by inflicting civilian casualties. The U.S. military would like to see Pakistan's military move in light infantry or commando units [emphasis added--and see first story above].

Over the long term, the U.S. military believes training the Pakistanis for that kind of combat is critical for countering the Taliban threat.

But so far Pakistan has only allowed in about 70 U.S. special operations trainers, an effort the American military has long been anxious to expand [some Brits helping with training too].

The new agreement would have the U.S. military train Pakistani officers outside Pakistan [emphasis added]. The Pentagon has offered to train the Pakistanis in the U.S., but a senior Obama administration official said the location of the additional training had not been finalized.

"The issue now is, how do you do it? Where do you do it?" the senior administration official said. "We are responding to the Pakistani military's request."

Until now the U.S. has focused on creating commando forces that can conduct raids and counterinsurgency operations effectively...

The Pentagon intends to pay for an array of new equipment for the Pakistani military, including helicopters, night-vision goggles and better small arms, if Congress approves the administration's request for $400 million for the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund...

Paks fighting back

Pakistan wrests control of town from Taliban
But militants have taken over a police station and dozens of officers are hostage. The military actions are an effort to push the Taliban back into its base in the Swat Valley.

Pakistani commandos dropped from helicopters today into an area behind Taliban lines some 80 miles from Islamabad, the capital, and regained control of a key town, the army said. But authorities faced a fresh challenge after militants seized a police station, holding dozens of officers hostage.

Helicopters dropped troops before 8 a.m. near Daggar, the main town in the Buner district, the army said. The area has seen fighting between the military and Taliban forces for several days [more here].

The army said it has killed at least 50 militants in Buner during the last two days of fighting but estimates that 500 fighters remain. The offensive may last another week, the military added, given that troops are running into stiff resistance in mountainous areas.

"We assure the nation that armed forces have the capability to ward off any kind of threat," military spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas told reporters at a briefing in the city of Rawalpindi.

In other developments today, officials here say a suspected U.S. missile strike killed five people in Pakistani territory along the Afghan border. The unmanned U.S. missile strikes, or drones, are extremely unpopular in Pakistan, drawing criticism that the nation's sovereignty is being violated.

Abbas said the army had destroyed two ammunition depots that hold arms for the militants but still had not managed to reach several towns in Buner that remain Taliban strongholds, including Pir Baba and Ambela.

Eighteenpolice and paramilitary personnel seized by the Taliban in the Pir Baba police station Tuesday were freed today, but about 50 hostages still remain in the hands of militants...

So far, the fragile and controversial Swat peace deal appears to be holding, officials said, although discussions have broken down.

The Taliban also issued an order to journalists this week to "shun propaganda." Analysts said the statement has a tone of desperation as the militants have watched their once-favorable domestic support fall sharply since they expanded beyond Swat.

"The mood in Pakistan has changed among the middle class and the talk show hosts [emphasis added--more here] , where before it was generally supportive of the Taliban," said Hilaly, the analyst. This veiled threat pressing for favorable coverage "doesn't come from strength," he added, "it comes from weakness."

Map:

Update: From the Economist, nice maps:

Pakistan and the Taliban
A real offensive, or a phoney war?
As the Pakistani army launches a new assault on the Taliban, America hopes it is now more serious about defeating the militants
...