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...estimated 400 Taliban fighters, and many of them appear to have gone right to work. Within three days, hundreds of insurgents swarmed through the key district of Arghandab - and escaped prisoners were among them, says district chief Ghulam Farouq. As the Taliban gained a footing in the villages, NATO and Afghan army troops launched a counter operation aimed at stopping the insurgents before they could mass for a major assault of their...
Mark Laity, spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), NATO's military arm in Afghanistan, concurs. "In the wake of the jailbreak we obviously have a different and more difficult security situation in Kandahar," he says. While ISAF officials are skeptical about reports of high numbers of Taliban forces fighting together, on June 18 Afghan National Army (ANA) and ISAF troops launched an offensive, assisted by helicopter gunships, to drive the Taliban from the villages. Later that day, the Afghan Ministry of Defense said that dozens of Taliban fighters - including foreign militants - had died in the confrontation...
...massing of Taliban fighters in Arghandab is a departure from the militant tactics that have evolved over the past two years. In 2006 NATO forces soundly defeated a Taliban force in nearby Panjwayi, and declared the movement all but dead. Since then there has been an increase in suicide bombings and the use of Improvised Explosive Devices. That approach was interpreted as one of weakness and desperation, but now it is starting to look like a recuperation strategy. The jailbreak and ensuing raid indicates the growing strength of the Taliban, whose fundamentalist Islamic regime was pushed from power when...
...NATO leaders have asked for more troops to counter the rising threat of the Afghan insurgency, but to little effect. The war in Iraq has taken the lion's share of American resources, and other Western nations are reluctant to invest more troops. "Afghanistan is half again bigger than Iraq, and it has a population estimated to be 3 to 5 million more than Iraq," says General Dan McNeil, a former ISAF commander. McNeil points out that there are only 65,000 international troops in Afghanistan, compared with nearly double that number in Iraq. The effort in Afghanistan, he says...
...episode of Gallic exceptionalism branded into the French national consciousness: in 1966, then-President Charles De Gaulle Charles De Gaulle flounced out of NATO's military command, declaring that Paris would never submit to outside influence on its defense policy...