Wednesday, July 05, 2006

How about getting a "Mission Accomplished" here?

From:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/troops-face-resurgent-taliban-on-home-turf/2006/07/05/1151779013606.html

Cynthia Banham
Defence ReporterJuly 6, 2006

AUSTRALIAN troops are about to be deployed to an area of Afghanistan where government is virtually non-existent - a province so lawless that local police are too afraid to work there.
The province of Oruzgan is due to see 240 Australian soldiers arrive this month as part of a Dutch-led Provincial Reconstruction Team.

A grim assessment of Oruzgan was provided to the Herald by a top German official, closely connected with Germany's deployment to Afghanistan. It has 2700 troops in the north of the country, where the situation is "a lot easier", the official said.
In a briefing in Berlin, the official said security in Afghanistan had worsened in the past six weeks, and for the first time in two years the Taliban were operating in large units of up to 100 fighters.

He said the Taliban had also started to acquire "a greater competence", and their ability to stage attacks had increased.

He added that the Taliban, who were ousted from government and forced underground by coalition forces in late 2001, were enjoying increased support from ordinary Afghans.
The reason Oruzgan and other provinces in the south are more dangerous is that the Taliban are receiving training in Pakistan, across the border, and then coming back into the country.
The Australian soldiers would be "in the thick of it", the official warned. "You have to move around [there] at all times expecting an attack," he said.

The description of the situation is far more complete than any provided by Australian officials - a fact that has drawn criticism from some of the parents of Australian troops in Afghanistan.
One father of a soldier, in a letter to the magazine Defender, expressed concern the lack of information about the deployment to Afghanistan was affecting troop morale. He compared the reliance on foreign sources for news of the conflict to Vietnam.

"The Government and the [Australian Defence Force] run the risk of losing public support for defence force operations if there is no news at all being made available," the soldier's father wrote.

The German official said there was now a core group of about 1500 Taliban - an increase from 1000 a year ago - who were carrying out guerilla attacks.

Al-Qaeda was not believed to be involved in the bulk of the attacks, he added, and the Taliban members were Afghans, not foreigners.

The official said Taliban forces were managing to attract new local support because of the weakness of the Afghan Government, and because of nepotism and bad governance, which was creating disillusion among the population.

For this reason a resolution to Afghanistan's problems could not be achieved by military means alone, the official said. Local expectations about the pace of change in the country needed to be managed, he said, and poor governance had to be stamped out.

The deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan was illustrated by the anti-American riots in May. The riots, in the capital, Kabul, were sparked by a fatal traffic accident involving US troops in which locals were killed. Such riots would not have been thought possible a year ago, the official said.

Wrap...

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