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Two NATO soldiers were killed Saturday in a Taliban suicide car bomb attack in eastern Afghanistan, while authorities said more than 100 rebels were slain in military operations in the southwest.
Four more International Security Assistance Force soldiers and five civilians were wounded in the blast in Jalalabad, a thriving city 50 kilometers from the Pakistan border, the alliance and Afghan government said.
The 40-nation ISAF would not release the nationalities of its casualties, according to policy. Most foreign troops in eastern Afghanistan are U.S. nationals.
The new deaths bring to 67 the number of international soldiers who have died in Afghanistan this year, most of them in hostile action.
The insurgent Taliban -- an al-Qaida-linked outfit waging a deadly campaign against the pro-democratic government -- claimed responsibility for the blast, similar to scores of others carried out by the group.
Two other ISAF soldiers were wounded in a roadside bombing on Saturday in Paktia province, a troubled region in the country's east bordering Pakistan, ISAF spokesman Carlos Branco said.
The interior ministry said meanwhile that Afghan security forces backed by foreign military allies killed more than 100 rebels to retake the remote district of Bakwa in the southwestern province of Farah.
The rebels had captured the district eight months ago. Authorities retook control on Friday, ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary said.
"During two days of operations more than 100 enemies of peace and stability were killed," he said, adding that security forces were still chasing rebels in the district.
The Taliban have taken control of remote towns and districts but have been easily pushed back by Afghan and foreign security forces.
Farah, which borders Iran, has seen some of the bloodiest violence in a two-year insurgency, which has mainly taken place in the country's south and east.
About 18 other Taliban-linked militants were killed in other operations by Afghan and foreign troops in southern Kandahar province, a police commander said.
"In the past three days we've killed 16 Taliban including two commanders in Zhari and Panjwayi district. They were killed in an operation launched to clear the area of the enemy," said the Kandahar police chief, Sayed Agha Saqeb.
Two other rebels were killed in a gunfight with police elsewhere in Kandahar, he told AFP.
Meanwhile, in southern Zabul province overnight, suspected Taliban militants gunned down a district governor and his body guard, deputy provincial governor Gulab Shah Alikhail said.
In the same region, an Afghan soldier was killed in a firefight with militants, Afghan army spokesman colonel Mohammad Gul said.
The defence ministry said another Afghan soldier was killed Friday when a base came under heavy fire from militants in Helmand province in the south.
The Taliban were ousted in an invasion led by the United States in late 2001 after the Islamic rebels refused to hand over al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden following the September 11 attacks on the United States.
Their insurgency left 8,000 people dead last year, most of them rebels.
© Wire reports
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Jahdog
W made the decision to rely on local forces to get Bin Laden in Tora Bora, over the CIA's explicit objections (They specifically told the president the local forces weren’t capable and shouldn't be relied upon, and we should nail him ourselves).
The local forces were bought off by bin Laden, allowing him and a small group to walk across the Pakistan border, which wasn't blocked. Gen. Musharraff had offered to move forces from Pakistan's eastern border, telling Gen. Tommy Franks in Islamabad that all he needed was a US airlift. Franks never sent it. (from fmr. Nat'l Coordinator for Security & Counterterrorism Richard Clarke's Your Government Failed You)
Afghanistan has not been stabilized to the point where civilian teams can safely rebuild the country, stop the drug trade, etc.
More history at http://bigpicture.typepad.com/writing/wardefense/index.html
The way to defeat alQaeda is to dry up their support. The US has been doing the opposite. The US is doing exactly what alQaeda said we would: invade and occupy an oil-rich country that had done nothing to justify such an action.
Zaphod
Al Quaeda Bin Ladin are just names. It is totally irrelevant what happens with them; there are countless other jihadist organizations and leaders to take their place. And Bin Ladin is already a Jihadist legend, dead or alive.
And the Jihad against the non-muslim world (the "house of war") get stronger with every new madarassa that is build.
Sarge
"Their ( Taliban ) insurgency left 8000 people dead last year, most of them rebels"
The Taliban are miserable failures.
Madverts
"The Taliban are miserable failures."
We might perhaps have defeaten them, had Bush Co not dumped Afghanistan for Iraq. Now they've re-grouped, re-armed and are in a position to be threatening people again.
We know who the real Miserable Failure is in all this.
Zaphod
Sarge:
What makes you think so? From where I sit, the Taliban movement has been spectacularly successful. They are bleeding Western countries, who naively waste ressources to support the Karzai government until the will finely give up, and they safe havens in Northern Waziristan and the Swat valley, where they have introduced their Sharia Caliphate. The radical muslim movement just keeps getting stronger, while the West endlessly poors ressources into a black hole, chasing the ever-elusive fiction of a democratic islamic state.
Where in the world do you see a failure there?
adaydream
If we'd have stayed in Afghanistan like we should have, this problem wouldn't be haunting us.
But no, we're the great United States and we're...
Jahdog
Stunning:
From "We'll get him, dead or alive" to "he's irrelevant," eh? The tragic humor is that OBL is the best thing that ever happened to W, who is the worst thing that ever happened to America and the West.
But your point about "countless other" jihadis to take the place of OBL/AlQ is valid. Of course, by playing into OBL's strategy and invading a Muslim country for oil, W helped OBL gain this countless supply of jihadis.
Do you not yet understand that OBL wanted W and the GOP to remain in charge? By his actions, W has radicalized a billion Muslims, in the Middle East and around the planet. OBL will no doubt appear in a video before the 2008 election in an attempt to keep the war going and bleed the US dry.
The US economy is on the brink of meltdown as the price of oil continues to rise, Iran has already gained greatly, and you want to dig the hole deeper?
'...in the Middle East, Arabs and even Israel reckon with the limits of American power--and begin to cut their own deals..." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/30/AR2008053002517.html
Tell me this guy doesn't know what he's talking about: Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror by Michael Scheuer, a 22-year CIA veteran who ran the Counterterrorist Center's bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999
"...the war in Iraq was like a 'Christmas gift' to bin Laden not just because it distracted the U.S. military from the war against al Qaeda, but more importantly because it has provided global jihadists a failed state from which to operate that is even more conducive to terrorism than Afghanistan. By attacking and occupying the second holiest place in Shi'a Islam, the U.S. has turned Iraq into a lightning rod for jihadists from around the globe to come attack the occupying armies...has provided credibility and substance to bin Laden's assertion that terrorists are waging a defensive jihad against foreign occupier bent on destroying Islam.
Scheuer: in Afghanistan, the Taliban was not defeated; it is simply biding its time for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops and the inevitable collapse of Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul. "Karzai's defeat may not come tomorrow...but come it will..."
Scheuer: AlQ will "inevitably" acquire WMD and try to use them; OBL is probably "comfortable" commanding his organisation from the mountainous tribal lands along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
"Our choice of timing, moreover, shows an abject, even wilful failure to recognise the ideological power, lethality and growth potential of the threat personified by Bin Laden, as well as the impetus that threat has been given by the US-led invasion and occupation of Muslim Iraq."
...the US missed its biggest chance to capture the al-Qaida leader at Tora Bora in the Afghan mountains in December 2001. Instead of sending large numbers of his own troops, General Tommy Franks relied on surrogates who proved to be unreliable. "For my money, the game was over at Tora Bora."
(6-19-04) Yesterday President Bush repeated his assertion that Bin Laden was cornered and that there was "no hole or cave deep enough to hide from American justice".
Scheuer: "What I think we're seeing in al-Qaida is a change of generation. The people who are leading al-Qaida now seem a lot more professional group. They are more bureaucratic, more management competent, certainly more literate. Certainly, this generation is more computer literate, more comfortable with the tools of modernity..."
"I'm very sure they can't have a better administration for them than the one they have now...One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president." Mr Bush is taking the US in exactly the direction Bin Laden wants, towards all-out confrontation with Islam under the banner of spreading democracy. "It's going to take 10,000-15,000 dead Americans before we say to ourselves: 'What is going on'?"
May 29, 2008 "Why Doesn't al-Qaeda Attack the US?" http://www.antiwar.com/scheuer/
Sarge
Zaphod - "From where I sit the Talibam movement has been spectaculary successful"
What planet are you sitting on?
"Where do you see a failure here?"
Lessee... prior to 2001 the Taliban controlled the entire country. Now, driven from power, they're reduced to hit and run attacks.
yabits
The Taliban spectacularly successful or miserable failures? The truth is somewhere in between. As a recent report in The Economist puts it:
For the time being, the danger is less that the government will lose more land to the insurgents, more that the war will settle into a stalemate, one in which the Taliban controls much of the countryside in the Pushtun belt and Mr Karzai's government runs the rest.
A military stalemate plus de facto partition is not quite defeat for the West in Afghanistan. But it is not victory either. This, remember, is a place America invaded so as to deprive al-Qaeda of a safe haven. Yet al-Qaeda has now re-established just such a haven straddling the Pakistan border. In the longer run, moreover, a stalemate will be hard to sustain. The slow but relentless toll of NATO casualties continues to sour opinion in troop-contributing countries. Support for the good war will shrivel unless sceptical voters in the West see that they are gaining something useful for their lives and money.
This cannot be done if it is shown that the Karzai government is corrupt and incompetent. The thugs and drug warlords he's surrounded himself with make it very difficult to provide basic services in the areas that his government does control.