Digging Out
Foot of snow, which managed to entirely immobilize the eastern half of snow-savvy Massachusetts for about 8 hours yesterday. While I’m digging, you can read about Afghanistan and other matters:
ABC Blotter, from Musa Qala. Taliban had a bad day:
As the only journalist to join NATO forces entering the town, I found it a ghost town abandoned by both the Taliban and its residents at the end of an eight-day coalition operation. The offensive was one of NATO’s biggest in the country since Operation Anaconda in 2002.
Embedded with a team of British troops and a detachment/”A–team” of U.S. special forces, I watched the Taliban being pounded these last few days with overwhelming force — vapor trails circled in the clear blue sky over the Helmand desert as B1 and B52 bombers backed by A10 tank busters, F16s, Apache helicopters and Specter gunships were used to kill hundreds of Taliban fighters.
The operation was launched last Tuesday with an attack across the Helmand River by British Royal Marine commandos, a thrust from the west by light armor of the U.K. Household Cavalry Regiment; all this, however, was a feint for the main airborne landing from the north of a battalion of soldiers of Task Force Fury from the 82nd Airborne.
Faced with a full brigade of NATO forces, a brigade of Afghan government fighters and the defection of a key Taliban commander, the Taliban chose not to flee at first but to fight a desperate battle.
I joined one feint attack of Afghan soldiers last Friday that came under fierce Taliban fire in a village on the outskirts of Musa Qala — AK47s and heavy machine gun fire opened up on us as we advanced across open ground. The British and Afghans counterattacked backed by U.S. special forces who opened up with 50-caliber fire and by calling three F16 strikes and a B1 bomber strike.
On Sunday, as the 82nd Airborne advanced to take positions north, east and south of the town, I watched the sky being lit with large explosions from heavy ordnance dropped from the air to support the U.S. advance.
U.S. forces believe the Taliban were backed by a large strength of foreign fighters, including those linked to al Qaeda. Soldiers who I accompanied found one dead fighter whose notebook revealed he was from Pakistan.
While hundreds of Taliban are believed to have been killed, two British soldiers and one American soldier lost their lives. All the deaths, however, resulted from vehicles striking mines left not, it is believed, by the Taliban but by Soviet forces in the 1980s.
Press reports will tell you that as many as 6,000 people have been killed in renewed Taliban violence this year, as the resilient militant group is resurgent, etc. Occasionally, the reports will tell you that about 5,000 of those dead are not even civilians accidentally killed when the Taliban use them as cover but … actually Taliban. The offensive followed some key local defections as locals reconsidered their involvement with the “militant” movement:
Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Musa Qala residents had requested government forces eject the Taliban. “A man who lost 19 members of his family in a bombardment in Helmand province came to me and said ‘the people of Musa Qala are expecting you to save them’,” Karzai said in a speech.
“The man from Helmand pleaded with me to set them free from the Taliban and also other fighters from Pakistan and other countries who brutalize and oppress the people.”
Karzai said the Taliban suspended a 15-year-old boy from a ceiling and lit a gas stove underneath him, burning him alive.
“Does anyone believe a human being can be so savage as to burn alive a 15-year-old boy?” he asked.
Then there’s the grandmother who got beheaded. You may have missed this amid the noise about American war crimes.
Never mind the atrocities. Here’s a little more on life in Musa Qala under the Taliban. Onerous monthly tax-collections, heroin labs. A heavy infestation in northern Helmand that will require military and political diligence. One local’s advice:
A local tribal leader said the government should appoint powerful but honest government leaders and police for Musa Qala.
“If they build roads and clinics and provide jobs, then it will be easy to win the sympathies of the people,” Jalal Khan said by telephone from the nearby Gereshk district.
Gates to our Euro allies, a little more help please. Euros unimpressed. Britain’s on board, though frankly Britain is starting to look more like a fair-weather ally and is setting up a test case for what happens when you abandon Iraq prematurely. Will Yanks have to sweep up after that bangup Brit success in the south? Hey Gates, how about leaning on those freedom and democracy-loving Euros to step up in Iraq? Their Saddam/Iran-enabling helped make that mess, after all.
In other business, an angry, mystified war-hating Pelosi lashes out, says GOP “likes” Iraq war and will wear it. Fails to have noticed that increasingly, so do Americans and members of her own party. It will be interesting to see who wears the genocide if the Dems ever manage to organize a premature pullout. I’m guessing war-liking GOP gets festooned with that, per usual.
OK, I have to go shovel now.
Topics: Afghanistan, Boston, GWOT, pols
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:57 am on Friday, December 14, 2007
9 Responses to “Digging Out”
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December 14th, 2007 at 10:52 am
Taliban goes down big in Afghanistan
Awesome - and of course underreported - news from Afghanistan:
Afghanistan’s government flag was raised Wednesday on what had been one of the biggest strongholds of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and a leading world center of heroin pro…
December 14th, 2007 at 11:03 am
All I want for Christmas is to see the end of Nancy Pelosi’s political career. I hope I live to see the day.
Jules, I hope you’re using a carbon-spewing planet-killing snowblower, and not a wimpy, liberal shovel.
December 14th, 2007 at 11:41 am
Well Nancy is correct.
If you like the fact that millions are now free from a brutal thug dictator, that said dictator is no longer a threat to us or his neighbors, that we have over 120,000 of the best troops in the world placed strategtically where it really agitates and frightens some other terror enthusiasts, that it really has been a deadly magnet for terrorists wordwide to be killed by said best troops in the world, that by doing so we have scared some other viscious thugs into abandoning their lust for global relavence and mass murder, and that the whole noble enterprise royally pisses off a certain elitist and nakedly power hungry entitlement addicted domestic constituency, then I would say that is worth liking.
And I like the fact that her and her pathetic unprincipled redistributionist loser party full of failed weather guessers will wear their opposition to that like a millstone for years to come among decent people. Because had we had their support, said war might already be won.
December 14th, 2007 at 11:41 am
Sorry, rant over. Back to regularly scheduled ranting.
December 14th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
I’m with VoC - The US sat around for too damn long and took altogether too much crap from a wide variety of mendacious ass-hats, Euopean, Russian, Iranian, Chinese, whatever… Enough.
I’m glad we finally got slapped rudely awake once more. Japan found out about the unwisdom of annoying the “sleeping giant” last century, and now it’s the middle east’s turn to get educated.
December 14th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Well, I did pay a guy who was moving through the neighborhood last night in a significantly carbon-positive Ford 250 to get the big stuff. Nothing wimpy about my shovel, though. It’s a steel plow blade, must weigh 8 pounds or so, and works a lot better since the namby pamby 3-foot handle with a plastic D end on it broke and I replaced it with a five-foot-long rake handle. Frikkin thing nearly gave me a heart attack but it gets the ice up. That reminds me. I need to get the old guy to weld that right brace back on. You don’t see good shovels like this one around much anymore.
Anyway, ugh like war. others make trouble. others bad. kill others. no more trouble.
war good. ugh like.
December 14th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Frikkin thing nearly gave me a heart attack but it gets the ice up
Took the handle right off my shovel, ya did Crittenden.
Gotta’ watch crap like that “gets the ice up” or not.
I hope Mrs. C, (as lovely and as educated as she is no doubt) used about all the four letter words she MAY know, on ya’. (justly so, I would say)
December 15th, 2007 at 6:38 am
It’s nice in Miami, where I have gone into temporary blogging exile at http://ladyjanellewellyn.blogspot.com/
December 15th, 2007 at 8:44 am
Some rain today in south FL…bummer. Jules - I suggest you do like Theo did and flee. The only way to escape this global warming will be in the tropics.