Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Special forces turn Kabul into an oasis of calm

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published December 20, 2006

TAGAB VALLEY, Afghanistan - While the southern city of Kandahar reels from a series of suicide attacks, Kabul is enjoying a respite because of a little-publicized operation that officials say disrupted Taliban suicide training cells and scattered hundreds of fighters.

After 115 suicide attacks this year nationwide, including a rash of bombings this fall that killed almost 40 people in Kabul, the Afghan capital hasn't suffered a suicide attack in two months.

Military officials had feared a bloody winter campaign in Kabul, saying 300 to 500 Taliban fighters had massed 60 miles north of the city in this isolated valley from which the earlier wave of attacks was launched.

But the operation in the Tagab Valley early last month wiped out three training compounds and drove out the Taliban fighters, U.S. Army Special Forces Lt. Col. Lynn Ashley told the Associated Press this week.

U.S. and NATO commanders say the joint U.S.-Afghan operation is a model for taming the Taliban as it rebounds from its ouster by the U.S.-led invasion five years ago.

The militants had been able to gather so close to the capital because of the region's rough terrain, Ashley said. Minor operations had been conducted against them, but never a full-scale push.

Abdul Satar Murad, governor of Kapisa province, said about 20 fighters - some of whom had come from Pakistan - were killed in the weeklong operation and the rest left the region.

After five suicide attacks in Kabul during the first eight months of the year, fighters had stepped up their offensive, with eight suicide bombings in September and October, said Maj. Dominic Whyte, a spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force.

The Taliban has launched seven suicide attacks within 11 days this month in the Kandahar region, its former power base, and Ashley said the assumption was Kabul was its next target.

But denying them Tagab Valley as a safe haven "will definitely lessen their ability to mass when they come out in the spring like they normally do," he said at the U.S. base at Bagram.

About 250 U.S. special and conventional forces along with more than 800 Afghan troops and police launched the offensive. Murad, the governor, was closely involved in its planning and execution, heightening its success and cutting down on civilian casualties, Ashley said. Also, medics treated hundreds of Afghans and handed out food supplies.

The U.S. has since built a small military base on a high plateau and is spending $3-million to improve its winding dirt access road. Ashley said other projects, such as a new cell phone tower, have also moved ahead.

[Last modified December 20, 2006, 01:25:39]