The Afghan Front
The death of Mullah Dadullah is good news on the Afghan front. Given the decentralized nature of the insurgency, it won’t be that big a blow to them.
Mullah Dadullah "will most certainly be replaced in time but the insurgency has received a serious blow" the Nato-led security assistance force (Isaf) said.
The time being basically a day. Most mature insurgent groups have back-ups-in-waiting for all their senior commanders who have been groomed to take over when the inevitable happens.
Still, given the fact that the insurgency in Afghanistan is more centrally controlled than the multiple groups in Iraq, it is likely to have at least some effect, unlike the far more heavily touted death of Zarqawi in Iraq.
Of course, other things are having a big effect on the insurgency in Afghanistan, just not in our favour.
There is growing alarm over a wave of US bombing raids in which 110 civilians have died in the past two weeks. Twenty-one people were killed last week after US special forces called in airstrikes on the town of Sangin in Helmand province. “Sometimes you wonder whose side the Americans are on,” said a British official.
. . .
“One mishandled bombing raid wipes out the benefits of months of development work,” said Matt Waldman, head of Afghanistan policy for Oxfam.
And from the New York Times
American officials say that they have been forced to use air power more intensively as they have spread their reach throughout Afghanistan, raiding Taliban strongholds that had gone untouched for six years. One senior NATO official said that “without air, we’d need hundreds of thousands of troops” in the country. They also contend that the key to reducing casualties is training more Afghan Army soldiers and police officers.
The anger is visible here in this farming village in the largely peaceful western province of Herat, where American airstrikes left 57 villagers dead, nearly half of them women and children, on April 27 and 29. Even the accounts of villagers bore little resemblance to those of NATO and American officials — and suggested just how badly things could go astray in an unfamiliar land where cultural misunderstandings quickly turn violent.
The United States military says it came under heavy fire from insurgents as it searched for a local tribal commander and weapons caches and called in airstrikes, killing 136 Taliban fighters.
But the villagers denied that any Taliban were in the area. Instead, they said, they rose up and fought the Americans themselves, after the soldiers raided several houses, arrested two men and shot dead two old men on a village road.
After burying the dead, the tribe’s elders met with their chief, Hajji Arbab Daulat Khan, and resolved to fight American forces if they returned. “If they come again, we will stand against them, and we will raise the whole area against them,” he warned. Or in the words of one foreign official in Afghanistan, the Americans went after one guerrilla commander and created a hundred more.
On Tuesday, barely 24 hours after American officials apologized publicly to President Karzai for a previous incident in which 19 civilians were shot by marines in eastern Afghanistan, reports surfaced of at least 21 civilians killed in an airstrike in Helmand Province, though residents reached by phone said the toll could be as high as 80.
Under the circumstances, the killing of Dadullah just doesn’t seem all that significant in the long-term.
