Taliban are on the run.....The Surge has worked.

The progress made in taking the fight to the Taliban has been made largely in the South and the areas in Helmand Province....courtesy of the USMC.

We called Helmand Province " Marineistan " when I was there last year as the USMC had complete control over the battle there....there will be a fight in Afghanistan and the toughest region will be in the Northeast near the mountainous territory around Kabul. The terrain offers too much cover and the northern areas near Korengal and Pech are too rugged for any modern army to maintain complete control.

I salute the progress made by the troops and all who are working there to provide freedom for the Afghan people.....we have shown the naysayers that it can be done and the fight is worth finishing.


Beating Back the Taliban
The Afghan surge has been a success.
BY SETH G. JONES MARCH 14, 2011
Foriegnpolicy.com

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Despite all the political hand-wringing in Washington over the war in Afghanistan, it's the Taliban who are now on the defensive on the military battlefield. Indeed, there is a growing recognition among senior Taliban leaders that they are losing momentum in parts of southern Afghanistan, their longtime stronghold. This is more than the normal winter lull of senior Taliban fighters migrating to Pakistan: The Taliban have definitively lost territorial control in parts of Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan, and other southern provinces.

According to a growing body of Afghan, NATO, and even Taliban reports, Taliban leaders held a secret meeting last month near Quetta, Pakistan, to discuss concerns that they had lost territory in parts of Helmand province and other areas in southern Afghanistan. According to one Taliban commander with direct knowledge of the meeting, they concluded that local forces allied to the Afghan government "are in control of a growing number of areas in the province and will likely continue to expand since local families and the government have encouraged their sons to participate."

Assessing progress in a counterinsurgency is more art than science. Body counts tend not to be helpful in measuring insurgent progress. Nor do levels of violence. Neither captures the combatants' primary goal: control over the population.

The Taliban have been remarkably transparent about their objectives and tactics. As the group announced in 2010 when it kicked off Operation al-Fath, or "conquest," it aims to conduct a range of targeted assassinations in urban and rural areas to seize control of Afghanistan. "May Allah help the mujahideen establish an Islamic government, keep the trenches of war hot against the aggressive infidels, and carry out their jihad," the Taliban announced. But after years of gains, the Taliban's progress has stalled -- and even reversed -- in southern Afghanistan this year.

A recent NATO assessment indicated that Taliban control of territory had decreased since last year, with many of the Taliban's losses coming in the south, their most important sanctuary. Since late 2010, Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Sirajuddin Haqqani, a senior official in the Haqqani network, have acknowledged mounting losses, though they have vowed to retaliate.

There appear to be several reasons for the Taliban's diminished ability to wage war.

One is the decision among Afghan and NATO leaders to establish a "bottom-up" component of the campaign plan that allows Afghan communities to stand up for themselves. The Afghan Local Police program, which was established in August by President Hamid Karzai, has undermined Taliban control in Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan, and other provinces by helping villagers protect their communities and better connecting them to district and provincial government.

The Afghan government and NATO forces have been fairly meticulous in choosing locations where locals have already resisted the Taliban, vetting candidates with biometrics and available intelligence, and training and mentoring local villagers. In some cases, the Afghan government has provided basic weapons and equipment to local communities for self-protection. The government and NATO forces have also helped ensure Afghan Local Police are small, defensive entities under the supervision of local shuras and control of the Interior Ministry.

The Taliban have taken notice. "We must crush these efforts," another Taliban commander, who has been with the organization since 2002, told me in Kandahar province in February. "And we must do it now." Taliban and other insurgent commanders are listening. Insurgent attacks against the Afghan government and NATO forces have nearly doubled from levels at the beginning of 2010, though so have civilian casualties caused by the Taliban.

A second reason for the decline in Taliban control appears to be the surge in conventional military forces, especially in eastern and southern Afghanistan. There are currently nearly 70,000 NATO forces in the south, up from 20,000 in April 2009. In Helmand province, for example, U.S. Marine Corps and Afghan National Army forces have conducted a range of dismounted patrols, targeting insurgent sanctuaries and working closely with tribal and other community leaders. One of the most notable successes has been the recent agreement with the Alikozai tribe in Sangin district, an insurgent stronghold, to halt insurgent attacks on coalition forces and expel Taliban fighters.

These factors have placed the Taliban in a difficult position. When asked who they would rather have ruling Afghanistan today, 86 percent of Afghans said the Karzai government and only 9 percent the Taliban, according to a December poll by ABC News, BBC, ARD, and the Washington Post. When asked who posed the biggest danger in the country, 64 percent of respondents said the Taliban, up from 41 percent in 2005.

It's not difficult to see why the Taliban are unpopular. In the 1990s, the Taliban closed cinemas and banned music, along with almost every other conceivable kind of entertainment. Most Afghans don't subscribe to their religious zealotry. Indeed, most Muslims elsewhere in the world would also disavow the severity of the Taliban's puritanism.

But despite the Taliban's struggles this winter, they will surely continue to fight. The Taliban retain a robust sanctuary in Pakistan, especially in Baluchistan province, where its senior leaders and their families reside. The Taliban have also demonstrated an uncanny ability to regenerate, by taking advantage of local grievances against the Afghan central government. For the Taliban, the spring fighting season can't come soon enough.

As in previous Taliban attacks, some of the assailants wore Afghan army uniforms, a tactic meant to at least momentarily confuse the defenders....

Taliban keep up the pressure on troops especially around Jalalabad. That area was relatively quiet but has been seeing more attacks over the last few months....Guess the idjits we were bombing into the Stone Age (wait a minute, were they already there?) decided that heading a little bit further out of the hills was preferable to getting dispatched by an incoming JBU....or watching as a hit from a Predator wipes out the cave they were huddled in.

Keep up the pressure boys...take out the Taliban Cockroaches. The pressure is obviously on the Taliban....happy hunting NATO !!

latimes.com

Insurgent attacks ripple across Afghanistan
A suicide bomber kills 10 in the north while scattered violence hits other regions in advance of a NATO summit to plot the alliance's future in the country.
By Laura King, Los Angeles Times
November 13, 2010

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan

Violence hopscotched across Afghanistan on Saturday, as a suicide bomber killed 10 people in a northern province and coalition troops repelled an assault by a squad of gunmen and suicide bombers on a base in the country's east region.

In Afghanistan's south, North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces reported the deaths of three service members in an insurgent attack. It did not provide details or release the nationalities of those killed, but most of the troops serving in the south are Americans.

The heightened tempo of attacks comes days before NATO nations gather for a summit to consider the course of the alliance's Afghan mission.

The insurgents appear eager to demonstrate that setbacks in the south, where the U.S. military has claimed major progress in breaking the Taliban grip on districts surrounding Kandahar city, will not hinder them from regrouping elsewhere.

U.S. Marines have also been suffering significant casualties in recent weeks as they stage an aggressive push in Helmand province, which neighbors Kandahar.

This has been the deadliest year of the nine-year war for Western soldiers and Afghan civilians alike. The NATO force also says it has wiped out many mid-level insurgent commanders and foot soldiers in pinpoint raids over the past several months targeting both the Taliban and a virulent offshoot known as the Haqqani network.

The early-morning attack Saturday on an observation post on the edge of the main NATO air base in the eastern city of Jalalabad left six insurgents dead, Western military officials said. The failed attempt to storm the installation set off a firefight that lasted two hours, with the NATO force calling in air support to fight off the attackers.

No fatalities were reported among coalition forces.

The attack fit a pattern of multipronged assaults by insurgents seeking to exploit any potential lapse in security at Western installations. Last month, insurgents lost dozens of fighters when they tried to overrun a U.S. outpost in Paktia province.

As in previous attacks, at least some of the assailants wore Afghan army uniforms, a tactic meant to at least momentarily confuse the defenders.

The Taliban painted the assault in Jalalabad as a success, claiming to have killed dozens of coalition troops. Such exaggerated claims are routine, but the insurgents do reap propaganda value merely by demonstrating the ability carry out such assaults.

Their calculations appear to take the likelihood of heavy insurgent casualties into account, because even briefly penetrating a well-defended Western installation would represent a major coup.

In Afghanistan's increasingly restive north, a bomb planted on a motorbike blew up in a busy market area in the district of Imam Sahib, a longtime trouble spot in Kunduz province. Three children were among the dead, the Interior Ministry said. Also killed was a senior police official who may have been the target of the blast.

Up until about a year ago, the north was relatively calm, but the Taliban and other groups have made major inroads in a swath of provinces, threatening a major NATO supply route and taxing Western resources amid the military push in the south.

laura.king@latimes.com

Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times

Taliban win £1600 bounty for each NATO soldier killed

This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder why WE are getting accused of how we conduct the war, treatment of combatants when the Taliban can brazenly offer a bounty on our soldiers.....

May our warriors find these bas-trds and punch their ticket for the meeting with Allah...

================================

From The Sunday Times
May 23, 2010
Taliban win £1,600 bounty for each NATO soldier killed
Miles Amoore

TALIBAN rebels are earning a bounty of up to 200,000 Pakistani rupees (£1,660) for each Nato soldier they kill, according to insurgent commanders.

The money is said to come from protection rackets, taxes imposed on opium farmers, donors in the Gulf states who channel money through Dubai and from the senior Taliban leadership in Pakistan.

So far this year 213 Nato soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan, including 41 British troops, bringing the potential rewards for the Taliban to £350,000.

Taliban commanders said the bounty had more than doubled since the beginning of last year.
The insurgents, who employ “hit and run” tactics against foot patrols and convoys, use paid informants, media reports and the local population to confirm the deaths of Nato soldiers.

“We can’t lie to our commanders: they can check to see if there was a fight in that area. We get money if we capture equipment too. A gun can fetch $1,000 [£690],” said a commander from Khost province who controls about 60 fighters.

The money usually reaches commanders via the traditional hawala transfer system found in many Muslim countries. They then share it among their men and sometimes celebrate with a feast.
“It’s a lot of money for us. We don’t care if we kill foreigners: their blood allows us to feed our families and the more we kill, the more we weaken them. Of course we are going to celebrate this,” said a commander from Ghazni province.

The increase in rewards for Taliban fighters comes as the Afghan government prepares to present its strategy for ending the insurgency. This aims to lure less senior insurgents away from the fighting by offering them jobs in farming and engineering, vocational training in carpet weaving and carpentry, education and assimilation into the Afghan security forces, including the secret police.