Less fight in Taliban, says commander
NATO soldiers at the at the Kandahar Techers’ College. [Combat Camera]
EDMONTON: The commander of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan says his troops aren’t likely to face another summer of pitched battle against hundreds of Taliban.
Brig.-Gen. Tim Grant suggested yesterday that NATO troops will have to fight smarter — using both intelligence and development assistance – as insurgents may well turn to tactics such as kidnapping.
COMPARES TO OKA
In a wide-ranging interview with The Canadian Press, Grant also compared the difficulty Afghanistan and Pakistan have policing their Taliban-friendly border areas to the trouble Canada had on the Kanesatake reserve during the Oka crisis in 1990.
“There is a tribal structure there that’s been in place for a long time,” said Grant, who is on leave in Edmonton. “And for the federal government to come in and try and regulate it, Pakistan has the same challenges that we had during the Oka crisis.”
Last spring and summer, Canadian troops fought the biggest battles they’d seen since the Korean War with Taliban fighters massed in the hundreds. That’s not likely to happen again, said Grant.
“The Taliban have learned that they cannot take NATO and (the International Security and Assistance Force) on head-to-head,” he said.
“I think they believed … you hit them hard enough and they would run. They’ve learned you can’t do that.”
Without large military buildups to fight, NATO will focus on Taliban leadership, Grant said.
“We’re trying to focus on the decision-makers and either capture them or kill them.”
That means a greater use of intelligence, both in Kandahar and along the porous border with Pakistan.
Local Afghans, tired of constant fighting, are opening up.
“The local people are becoming part of the security solution,” Grant said. “They’ll come up to patrols that we have on the ground, saying, ‘There’s a weapons cache over there,’ or ‘They’ve placed a roadside bomb over in this location.’
“They want to get back to normal.”
It’s not enough to drive out the Taliban and leave, he said. Soldiers must stick around to maintain security and kick-start development.
Providing $5-a-day jobs for men who might be recruited by the Taliban is also an effective strategy.
“We don’t want to kill the foot soldiers,” Grant said. “Those are guys who have been equated to the Afghan equivalent of European soccer hooligans. They’re unemployed, they don’t have anything to do, they need some money — so they go to where the money is.”
Interesting…
Comment by Konstandinos — August 7th, 2007 @ 7:34 PM