Taliban plan to fight through winter to throttle Kabul

Taliban plan to fight through winter to throttle Kabul

Militia fighters are operating just an hour's drive from the capital's suburbs, confident of undermining Western support for the war

Jason Burke
Sunday October 29, 2006
The Observer

The Taliban are planning a major winter offensive combining their diverse factions in a push on the Afghan capital, Kabul, intelligence analysts and sources among the militia have revealed.

The thrust will involve a concerted attempt to take control of surrounding provinces, a bid to cut the key commercial highway linking the capital with the eastern city of Jalalabad, and operations designed to tie down British and other Nato troops in the south.

Last week Nato, with a force of 40,000 in the country including around 5,000 from Britain, said it had killed 48 more Taliban in areas thought to have been 'cleared'. 'They have major attacks planned all the way through to the spring and are quite happy for their enemy to know it,' a Pakistan-based source close to the militia told The Observer. 'There will be no winter pause.' The Taliban's fugitive leader, Mullah Omar, yesterday rejected overtures for peace talks from President Hamid Karzai and said it intended to try him in an Islamic court for the 'massacre' of Afghan civilians.

Since their resurgence earlier this year the Taliban have made steady progress towards Kabul from their heartland in the south-east around Kandahar, establishing a presence in Ghazni province an hour's drive from the suburbs. They do not expect to capture the capital but aim to continue destabilising the increasingly fragile Karzai government and influence Western public opinion to force a withdrawal of troops. 'The aim is clear,' said the source. 'Force the international representatives of the crusader Zionist alliance out, and finish with their puppet government.'

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1934251,00.html

forcing their fundie beliefs on everyone else.

and put a religious wacko in charge. It was Karzai that allowed sharia law to be reimposed, and women to be subjugated again. It was Karzai who made deals with the drug running warlords and allowed his country to sink into anarchy.

Just as Americans embraced PATRIOT Act to feel safe, many Afghans are embracing the Taliban to have law and order.

We lost Iraq, and we are on the verge of losing Afghanistan. We might as well get used to the idea of defeat!

"...and said it intended to try him in an Islamic court for the 'massacre' of Afghan civilians."
The murdered thousands on their road to power, then tortured, abused, starved and murdered thousands more after that.

His comments are both pathetically sad and rather unnerving.

quietly (very quietly) in the background and encouraging them in their fanatical, fundamentalist way of thinking and eagerly providing the means for them to indoctrinate the local population with their religious fanatacism.

that Benazir Bhutto warned Bush I that he had created.

and it sure was convenient how the same tool used to defeat the commies conveniently became the new enemy just in time to save war industry profits from the demise of the red menace.

the backlash will be in our future for their misuse of Christian fundamentalists. Scary thought.

....the only way to do that is to do what their benefactors believe we would never do.....it is time to turn on Pakistan.......and support the secular Nationalists (Baloch, Sindhi, Pashtun) in their long held convictions for freedom, secularism and democracy. Any other route....the Taliban and Islamist Islamabad will rout us.....

To turn the heat up with force alone will do nothing.....the problems to Pakistan and Afghanistan's instability rest squarely on the Durand Line.

NATO slaughtering of Afghan civilians, and the photos of NATO soldiers playing with human skulls, will feed the anti-Western sentiments in Afghanistan and guarantee NATO's defeat.

I'll put your "Taliban are toast" next to Cheney's "last throes" as examples of Western miscalculations.

Or toast made from Russian black bread? English muffin? They have had plenty experience being toast. Good toast is hard to put down, though.