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March 8, 2011
Petraeus Sees Military Progress in Afghanistan
By CARLOTTA GALL
KABUL, Afghanistan — Besides well-reported advances in southern provinces, American and NATO forces have also been able to halt or reverse Taliban gains around the capital, Kabul, and even in the north and west of the country, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, said Tuesday.
The general made his case for an improving overall picture in Afghanistan in an interview, offering a preview of what is likely to be his argument next week when he testifies before Congress for the first time since he took over command of coalition forces in Afghanistan eight months ago.
It will also be his first testimony since the influx of additional American and Afghan troops began to change the balance of the fighting in southern Afghanistan in late 2010.
Under General Petraeus, the tempo of operations has been stepped up enormously. American Special Operations forces and coalition commandos have mounted more than 1,600 missions in the 90 days before March 4 — an average of 18 a night — and the troops have captured and killed close to 3,000 insurgents, according to information provided by the general.
“The momentum of the Taliban has been halted in much of the country and reversed in some important areas,” he said.
“The Taliban have never been under the pressure that they were put under over the course of the last 8 to 10 months,” he added.
Other aspects of the war remain difficult, and progress is patchy and slow, General Petraeus conceded. There has been only modest momentum on efforts to persuade Taliban fighters to give up the fight and join a reintegration program, and a plan to train and install thousands of local police officers in rural communities to mobilize resistance to the Taliban has proved to be a painstaking business constrained by concerns that it will create militias loyal to warlords.
But security in and around Kabul has significantly improved, he said, thanks in part to specialized commando units of the Afghan Army, the police and the intelligence service, which operate in the greater Kabul area.
In 2009, Kabul was encircled by Taliban forces and there was talk of the capital’s falling to the insurgents, but now much of the greater Kabul area has been secured, he said.
President Hamid Karzai is to announce on the Afghan New Year, March 21, the beginning of the transition to Afghan control of some districts around the country, part of the plan to pass responsibility for security to the Afghan government by 2014.
The Taliban are expected to try to retake lost territory in coming months, and in particular to single out those districts in transition, the general said. But he said coalition forces would mount their own spring offensive to pre-empt Taliban efforts to retake lost territory.
“You cannot eliminate all the sensationalist attacks,” he said. “That is one of the objectives for our spring offensive — to solidify those gains and push them back further.”
Over the past four months, coalition forces have seen a fourfold increase in the number of weapons and explosives caches found and cleared, in large measure because the Taliban were forced out of territory they had held for up to five years, he said.
“The Taliban had to leave hastily, and the fighters and leaders were killed, captured or run off, and if they were run off they could not cart off all the I.E.D. and weapons and explosives that they had established over five years in some cases,” the general said, referring to improvised explosive devices.
Troops were finding more than 120 explosives and weapons caches a month recently compared with 40 a month a year ago, according to information from the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan provided by the general.
Destroying the infrastructure the Taliban had built up over the years, including field hospitals, weapons stores, bomb-making factories, safe houses and even detention facilities, would make it harder for them to regain the territory, he said. “Not having those will make their job more difficult this spring,” he said.
Many of the Taliban leaders and fighters had escaped to sanctuaries in Pakistan, he said, and coalition forces would focus in coming months on a strategy called “defense and depth,” blocking their return through strategic border regions that the insurgents traditionally used, namely in southern Helmand, eastern Kandahar and eastern Nangarhar Provinces, where Afghanistan borders Pakistan, and preventing them from regaining control of their old havens in Afghanistan.
As Afghanistan braces for an increase in fighting that traditionally occurs in the spring, however, tensions over civilian casualties have flared again, after an episode in eastern Afghanistan last week when American helicopter gunners killed nine boys collecting firewood.
A time lag between the sighting of a group of insurgents by ground forces and the relay of the information to a helicopter attack team led to the deaths, the general said, citing a preliminary inquiry. The attack team believed that the group of boys was the group of insurgents, he said.
“They thought they saw the same group but did not, and there was a gap in time before the final positive identification from the ground force until the handoff to the weapons team,” he said. “Beyond a human tragedy, it was a terrible and tragic mistake.”
That episode on March 1 came soon after a more controversial attack in the same region that the Afghan government said killed 65 civilians on Feb. 17. Mr. Karzai rejected General Petraeus’s earlier explanation that the victims were Taliban fighters, and he refused to accept his apology on Sunday for the deaths of the nine boys.
President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have also apologized to Mr. Karzai and the Afghan people for the deaths.
“This kind of event does clearly undermine the trust between the Afghan government and ISAF, and more important, between the Afghan people and ISAF,” General Petraeus conceded. The full investigation was nearly complete, he said, and a review had been ordered of the tactical directive given to troops. He declined comment on the Feb. 17 episode.
Despite the flare-up, relations with President Karzai were good, the general insisted. The two meet several times a week, including for one-on-one meetings. “We have open and forthright conversations with one another,” he said.
Over all, he noted, civilian casualties caused by Afghan and coalition forces had declined in 2010 by about 20 percent from the previous year, which he said was “impressive” given the deployment of 100,000 more Afghan and coalition troops and the increase in operations in 2010.
A United Nations report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan to be released Wednesday would show the majority — 75 percent — of civilian casualties in 2010 were caused by Taliban and insurgent attacks, he said.
