Where the fight is only half the battle

Where the fight is only half the battle
By Carlotta Gall
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: October 2, 2006


PASHMUL, Afghanistan NATO forces scored one of their biggest victories here in September, flushing out an area that had been swarming with Taliban insurgents in ferocious fighting. But almost immediately, a new and more difficult battle began - for support of the local people.

Villagers trickling back to their homes broke into an argument over who was to blame for the destruction, NATO or the Taliban.

"My house was bombarded and my grape store destroyed," said Haji Bilal Jan, 48, a farmer from the upper part of Pashmul. "The coalition forces are cruel, without reason. There were no Taliban in our house. Why did they bombard the house?"

Another man, 45, who used the sole name Neamatullah, stopped to listen and countered: "Why did you let the Taliban come to your village? You brought them to your village."

The battle here was a long-awaited success for forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in a year in which the Taliban have revived with surprising strength. But in Afghanistan, much as in Iraq, fighting insurgents is not just about winning the battle, but also about securing the peace.

NATO officials estimated that the Taliban lost 500 fighters over all and said they had captured 136 others, mostly as they tried to escape. Five Canadian soldiers died in the operation. But just afterward, four more were killed in a suicide bombing, which, again as in Iraq, has become an increasingly deadly tactic in Afghanistan.

To help enlist the support of local villagers, military commanders and the governor of Kandahar Province have started to distribute half a million dollars in humanitarian aid and have promised families more help with repairing the war's damage.

"If the people cooperate with us, the Taliban can do nothing," said Captain Majid Khan, commander of a unit of the Afghan National Army that took part in the fighting and is now based in Pashmul.

Most villagers here, who grow grapes and pomegranates in the rich soil of the Arghandab River valley, said they opposed the Taliban but had been powerless to stop the groups of armed men who moved into the area in recent months.

But some villagers fed and sheltered the Taliban and possibly fought alongside them.

The leader of the Taliban in this area, Abdul Khaleeq, was himself from Pashmul, and he had fighters from surrounding villages, as well as outsiders, the villagers said.

"Most of the people are with the government. Just a few people get special benefits from the Taliban," Neamatullah said.

"It was very good, the bombing," he added. "I am happy because the Taliban must be finished off."

The Taliban first moved into the two densely populated farming districts, Panjwai and Zhare, west of Kandahar, in May, just as NATO forces led by Brigadier General David Fraser of Canada were preparing to take over from American forces in the southern region.

"The whole place was full of Taliban," said Faizullah, 26, a farmer who was later wounded in the bombing of his village, Zehdanan, in upper Pashmul. "They did not stay more than two nights in one place," he added. "They were telling people to leave."

In July and August the Taliban began building up their forces there in a bid to set up an area of control and threaten the city of Kandahar, Fraser said in an interview in his headquarters at the Kandahar air base.

"They put a lot of resources into this area, a lot of intellectual capital and psychological commitment," Fraser said. "This was a fight unlike the fight I've had with the Taliban for the last eight months."

Villagers said the Taliban were mostly Afghans but from neighboring provinces and districts. Some members are from Pakistan. The Taliban were well equipped with radios, satellite telephones and weapons, they said.

NATO and Afghan forces began an operation Sept. 2 after warning civilians to leave the area and dropping leaflets promising the Taliban safe passage out if they gave up their weapons.

There were several pockets where the Taliban concentrated their fighters on either side of the river - at Sperwan, Pashmul and Siah Jui - and NATO deployed forces from the south, north and east in a pincer movement.

More NATO forces guarded the western and southern flanks to cut supply and escape routes.

The commander of U.S forces in southern Afghanistan, Colonel R. Stephen Williams, 46, joined the battle four days later. He gathered Canadian, American and Afghan forces for an attack on Pashmul on Sept. 12.

After wearing the Taliban down for six days with rock music blaring across the river valley, and artillery and airstrikes, they found a weak spot in the Taliban's defenses.

Playing his favorite music, AC/DC's "Back in Black," to hide the sound of the armored vehicles, Williams took the Taliban by surprise, crossing the river and driving through the cornfields from the northeast.

The fighting was intense over a day and a half. The Taliban were dug in at vineyards with deep irrigation channels and high, mud-wall barns for drying grapes. The village school, a cluster of white painted classrooms, built with American aid money in the past four years, was destroyed by repeated air and artillery strikes.

"The Taliban used this as a weapons cache and their command-and-control place," Williams said.

The Taliban pulled out under the attack in groups, leaving small numbers of men to delay the NATO advance. Williams calculated from battlefield reports that his force alone killed 150 to 200 insurgents in 10 days of fighting, and only had 4 men wounded on their side.

Although both NATO and Taliban forces had told villagers to leave before the fighting, some civilians were also killed or wounded. United Nations officials have gathered reports of 40 civilians killed. A government commission says that 53 civilians were killed in the fighting and that it caused an estimated $750,000 in damage.

Despite their injuries and losses, there was little sympathy for the Taliban, neither among the wounded nor other villagers.

In Pashmul, a 19-year-old high school student, also named Neamatullah, and his brother Habibullah, 17, climbed the broken wall where the gate to their house was destroyed.

They gestured with shock at the devastation before them. A bomb had gouged out a crater in their yard, eight meters, or 25 feet, deep, smashing the well and the main building of the house.

Asked whom he blamed for the damage, Neamatullah said the Taliban.

"Before they came there was no bombing," he said.

Suicide bomber wounds 6

A suicide bomber blew himself up next to a NATO convoy in Kabul on Monday, wounding three soldiers and three civilians, The Associated Press reported from Kabul, citing a NATO military spokesman and an Afghan police official.

Three NATO-led troops suffered "minor injuries" and were evacuated to a nearby military hospital, said Major Luke Knittig, a spokesman for the NATO-led forces. He would not disclose the nationalities of the wounded soldiers. The severity of the wounds to the civilians was not immediately known.\