ISAF and Afghan special operations forces captured another Afghan Taliban commander who used the Pakistani border city of Chaman in Baluchistan province as a base of operations. From the ISAF press release:
Afghan and coalition forces detained a Taliban attack leader, along with several suspected insurgents during an operation in Kandahar City, Kandahar province yesterday.
The detained militant was a Kandahar City-based Taliban leader who had recently been in Nad ‘Ali district, Helmand province; Spin Bolak district, Kandahar province; Chaman, Pakistan. He also was coordinating attacks in Kabul City against Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan officials and coalition forces.
The Taliban use Chaman as a command and control center for operations in the south, particularly in Kandahar. Mullah Zakir, the former Gitmo detainee and now the chief of the Taliban’s military operations, often operates from Chaman, according to US intelligence. You can read more about the importance of Chaman to the Taliban’s operations in the south here. And more about US commanders’ frustration with the Taliban havens in Baluchistan here. Keep in mind that Chaman is far, far away from Pakistan’s tribal areas.
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6 Comments
This is the reason there is no military solution. P-stan does nothing, we can’t [but do] go there. I would do this every chance i get if it was about HVT’s.
I thought we were engaging the enemy on the battlefield of our choosing? If that were true we would be engaging them in Pak and Iran. We’re just going keep rotating our troops in and out of there fighting a endless supply of walking targets (insurgents) until our civilian “leadership” decides it’s politically convenient to get out. Time for a change in strategy and leadership.
Steve said : “Time for a change in strategy and leadership.”
I have grudgingly come to this conclusion myself. In the last 2 or 3 days I have read articles stating that we have fought the Taliban to an immovable stalemate and that Patreaus will step down this year or next year. That leads me to believe the current administration will soon turn over security to the Afghans and begin the previously stated draw-down of troops on schedule. That doesn’t bode well but we’re not getting anywhere as it stands.
Problem here is that NATO/ISAF presence within Afghanistan is destabilising Pakistan.
If Pakistan becomes fractured, then that is going to be a bigger problem than what Afghanistan has presented!
Getting out of Afghanistan is (probably) the lesser of two evils. (and if the mad mullahs do eventually grow too relaxed within their surroundings in any Afghan future, then a BGM-109E could soon shatter their despotic dreams PDQ!)
Resource constrained campaigns are LONG campaigns.
Get used to it.
The way forward is to man up the Afghan Army.
Since their educational system was destroyed between 1979 and 2010 most cannot read or write a word.
We also need more translators. They’ll have to be Afghans — Pashtuns, especially. We need translators with a perfect ear. Poor English we can deal with.
Perhaps a digital translator could be conjured up. Those languages have smaller word sets.
BTW, some of the best stuff has only recently reached the battlespace.
The opfor is terribly demoralized. It gets virtually no press. They’re getting shot at from the sky even at night in a land with virtually no cover outside the cornfields.
As you might pick up from Pakistani complaints — the drones are so effective the opfor is screaming.
Iraq is basically wrapped up so our limitations WRT elite forces have melted away. The opfor has noticed.
Lastly, the Afghans are going to start taking operational control of their land step by step with announcements coming next month by Karzai.
When that happened in Iraq the end was neigh.
I was glad to read Bungo’s post, because I believe more and more that people both in and out of Government are beginning to come to the conclusion that, though he is a decent and well-intentioned President, President Obama is not a War-Time President.
He seems to lack confidence on military matters and treads too gingerly in areas where he needs to be bold and forceful. Just compare the forcefulness of his domestic leadership in pushing through the health care law with the short leash he keeps on Rules of Engagement, Hot Pursuit, Hillary Clinton (she is chomping at the bit to let Pakistan have it).
If anyone saw Donald Trump’s recent interview on Cable New Network, one would see the difference between bold and tepid international leadership. Trump would not throw all caution to the wind, but he made it perfectly clear that he would get a lot tougher with friend and foe alike when it came to putting America’s National Interest first.