US to focus on Kandahar

Sort of make or break for the COIN campaign:

Surge Targets Taliban Bastion

Commanders in Afghanistan say they will devote the majority of the fresh troops expected from the White House to securing the country's troubled south and will especially target this volatile city, the Taliban's main power base.

President Barack Obama will announce his revamped war strategy in an address early next week, likely Tuesday. He is widely expected to adopt a plan that sends between 20,000 and 40,000 more troops to bolster a flagging military campaign and the 68,000 U.S. troops now fighting it.

But even before Mr. Obama takes his case to the public, military commanders on the battlefield are ready to implement a plan that makes a defensive ring around Kandahar a linchpin of the fight to come. No matter how many troops the president decides to authorize, the Kandahar campaign will be an early, large-scale test of U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal's plan of refocusing allied military, political and economic efforts on population centers and away from sparsely peopled rural areas.

The new commander of coalition forces in southern Afghanistan, British Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, and his staff detailed how they will put the McChrystal approach into action, in interviews with The Wall Street Journal: They plan to mass thousands of troops now scattered around the south and pack them into a tight cordon around the outskirts of Kandahar city [see this post for current positioning of US and Canadian troops].

At the same time, the coalition plans to pour economic, police and political assistance into the urban core to try to persuade residents that the Afghan government serves them better than the Taliban alternative. "We have to regain the initiative, and we have to get some momentum going," said Gen. Carter.

As Gen. McChrystal's team scrambles to reverse Taliban gains in Kandahar, they will also dispatch thousands of American soldiers to secure the major highways that pass through the city to Pakistan and southern Afghanistan.

As soon as this weekend, officers expect to order the fast-moving armored Stryker Brigade to devote itself full time to securing roads plagued by hidden bombs and illegal checkpoints run by insurgents, bandits and corrupt police...

Thousands of the new troops also would likely be deployed to expand the Kandahar approach to the most densely populated districts of the Helmand River Valley in neighboring Helmand province [those would likely be Marines, see this post for more on US units that may be coming]. Together, the two areas contain about two million of the estimated three million residents of southern Afghanistan.

The new southern strategy is an explicit recognition that a move this past summer to position a few thousand Canadian and U.S. troops outside Kandahar failed to stop insurgents from infiltrating the city.

For years the coalition paid little attention to the city, despite a huge allied presence at the airfield outside town. That neglect allowed the Taliban, whose Islamist movement was born in Kandahar, to again make inroads [see "Bullshit Bob" here]...

...allied and Afghan officials say Kandahar is too crucial to lose. "The history of Afghanistan always was, always is and always will be determined from Kandahar," provincial Gov. Tooryalai Wesa [an Afghan-Canadian] said in an interview...

For security reasons, allied officers don't want to publicize how many soldiers will be involved in the Kandahar operation. They say their plan will boost the troops encircling Kandahar by 50%, while reducing the area they cover by 90%, making the cordon harder for insurgents to penetrate.

Gen. Carter is wary of inserting large numbers of foreign troops into the center of Kandahar, an ethnically Pashtun city in a Pashtun insurgency. There is a small Canadian security and economic-aid team inside the city [the Provincial Reconstruction Team] and a 150-man U.S. military-police company [so in fact not an MP battalion under our command, more here]. Gen. Carter plans to boost that with another small MP unit to bolster the Afghan National Police [what about those extra US troops reported to be coming under Canadian command?]...

The coalition also plans to flood Kandahar and its environs with economic aid, including a $50 million Canadian irrigation system [that actually would be the Dahla dam project, more here, which US troops are already helping protect], a U.S. farm-and-jobs project and a new electrical-distribution network expected to cost some $20 million...

As for the world needing more Canada, read this AP story on the situation in Kandahar City.

Update: The governor of Kandahar escaped an assassination attempt Nov. 27.