This means war

This means war

Canadian troops are digging in for a long bloody battle with the Taliban this summer. Someone should tell our defence minister

Just a few days before he and Prime Minister Stephen Harper made their surprise March trip to visit Canadian troops in Afghanistan, Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor tried to calm growing anxiety about the combat role Canada appeared to be taking on in Kandahar. Asked by Maclean's about what looked like an increasingly dangerous mission in the volatile southern Afghan province, the general-turned-politician seemed exasperated by the impression that Canadian and other coalition forces were taking the fight to the Taliban. "Our role in Afghanistan is not to conduct combat operations," O'Connor said. There might be some "rooting out of insurgents," he allowed, "but we're not primarily there for combat operations."

Three months and a bloody Taliban springtime resurgence later, and the defence minister's reassuring tone rings hollow. Not only have Canadian soldiers engaged repeatedly in full-scale battles in Kandahar, they are expecting much more of the same as they join a massive coalition summer-long push into Taliban sanctuaries in four southern Afghan provinces. It's called Operation Mountain Thrust, and between 500 and 1,000 Canadian combat soldiers will be among the estimated 11,000 troops taking part, including U.S., British, Australian and Romanian contingents, and about 3,500 members of the Afghan army. U.S. military officers say the operation -- the coalition's most ambitious military campaign since ousting the Taliban government in 2001 -- has been in the works for 18 months.

Reconciling that long planning period with what O'Connor said about the nature of the Kandahar mission in March is not easy. And his soft-pedalled description differs sharply from what Canadian officers say has been going on in the field, and looks likely to intensify. "The coalition here has been going on the offensive," said Lieut. Larry MacIntyre from the Canadian base in Kandahar last week. "We're throwing the Taliban off balance, and Mountain Thrust is a continuation of that." He said the plan for the scorching summer is to advance into villages that have not yet known a significant coalition presence. "It's going to be into some pretty challenging terrain and into areas where we know the Taliban are operating," MacIntyre added. "We're going to extend the authority of the government of Afghanistan."

If the recent pattern holds, the Taliban will put up stiff resistance. In a series of clashes through the spring, the insurgents who represent what's left of the ousted regime, which once made Afghanistan a safe haven for al-Qaeda terrorists, have shown a surprising willingness to engage in drawn-out gun battles. And although coalition troops, including Canadians, have been wounded and killed in these clashes, the conventional fighting is perhaps not entirely unwelcome.

http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/canada/article.jsp?content=20060626_129652_129652

Bloodshed in Afghanistan as U.S. Launches Largest Military Offensive Since 2001

In Afghanistan, US forces have launched their largest military offensive since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001. More than ten thousand coalition troops are spreading out across southern Afghanistan to fight the Taliban in a campaign called Operation Mountain Thrust.
Over the past month more than five hundred people have died in Afghanistan in some of the heaviest fighting of the war. The head of the United Nations assistance mission in Kandahar recently told The New York Times, "The situation is really, in the last four years, the most unstable and insecure I have seen."

In the latest bloodshed, two Taliban ambushes of civilian convoys left thirty people dead on Tuesday, including twenty five members of the same family. Afghan and coalition soldiers killed eleven militants in separate clashes.

But much of that news may go unreported within the country. The BBC has obtained evidence that Afghanistan's intelligence services are putting new restrictions on what Afghan journalists can report. The restrictions include directives not to represent the Afghan armed forces as weak or criticize the US-led coalition. The government maintains the restrictions are needed to prevent the media from what it calls glorifying terrorism.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/20/141259