FORWARD OPERATING BASE LIGHTNING: Insurgents have stepped up operations in border provinces close to Pakistan, one of Afghanistan’s top generals said yesterday, with militant numbers up on last summer as government forces work to improve security in the volatile east.
Major-General Mohammad Sharif Yaftali, who commands Afghan forces in seven crucial southeast provinces, said insurgent numbers were up around 15 percent on last year’s summer fighting months, with an estimated 5,000 insurgents now in his area.
Many were Pakistanis and Chechens, Yaftali said, reinforcing recent assessments by Afghan army chief of staff General Sher Mohammad Karimi that the insurgency’s backers in Pakistan had shut Islamic schools to send more fighters across the border.
“They closed them on purpose, to push them to Afghanistan to disrupt security,” said Yaftali in a frank assessment likely to raise hackles in Pakistan. “There are 3,500 madrassas in Pakistan and if every one send five people, well, you can imagine,” he said.
Pakistan, which supported the 1996-2001 Taliban government in Afghanistan, is seen as crucial to US and Afghan efforts to promote peace in Afghanistan, a task that is gaining urgency as Nato-led combat troops continue to leave the country.
Karimi, in comments rejected by Islamabad, said in a recent interview that the influential Pakistan military could end the 12-year-old Afghan war if it chose to “in weeks”, despite facing a Taliban insurgency of its own.
Yaftali said recent security operations in the east by four Afghan brigades had greatly improved security with only minimal assistance from Nato coalition allies. Major roads were cleared and more than 650 insurgents killed over three months.
While local people in Paktia province say the Taliban-allied Haqqani network still influences at least five of 14 districts, Yaftali said around 150,000 girls attending school in his command were proof the insurgency was on the back foot and its leaders were now throwing everything possible into the fight.
Paktia is one of three provinces fiercely contested by the militant Haqqanis, blamed for several prominent attacks in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan.
Reuters
