About the recent headlines, and bigger themes

I thought I'd say a bit about the recent "activity" down near Kandahar, that you may have been reading about in the last week or so. I'm taking specifically about the jailbreak that happened last Friday outside of the Kandahar, and the fighting that went on yesterday and today a little northwest of that city. About a thousand prisoners escaped from a prison after a couple of trucks blew up outside the jail's walls, creating huge exit holes; it's estimated about 400 of these were Taliban members. Yesterday and today, NATO and Afghan forces attacked and pushed back a moderate-sized group of Taliban members (some of whom had been in prison until just recently...) in a strategic area to the north of Kandahar called Arghandab. As it stands now, its seems that the Taliban group that was there before has been dispersed, and the military action seems to have largely ended for now.

I'll say first of all that Kandahar is 300 miles from Kabul; I'm nowhere near the action, and I don't plan to be going down there anytime soon. Southern Afghanistan is really like a different country compared to the northern half. Many areas of the south and south-east are considered the historical heartlands of the Taliban, mixed within larger Pashtun village areas; this makes it hard for Taliban centers to be located and rooted out. Most of the headlines we see on the homefront about violence in Afghanistan come from the southern region, where NATO and Afghan Army forces are trying to "hold" areas where Taliban attacks pop up like Bop-a-Moles from time to time.

Meanwhile, so many population centers in the northern half of the country--Herat, Kabul, Mazar-e Sharif--are progressing with real reconstruction efforts over the past six years. Afghans in these areas haven't had this much (relative) stability since the 1970s, and many new development projects have been apparent as I've travelled around Kabul in the past three weeks. This is the kind of progress that is unflashy, gradual, and doesn't grab attention like news of sporadic bombings. Not that it's not important to report about bombings and unfortunate things like that, but, y'know what I mean.

I do have to say that the jailbreak was really unfortunate, though. The way the Taliban seems to operate, they go for big symbolic attacks to undermine support not only among locals, but also among people in NATO-supporting countries like ours. To make people in Europe, Canada and the US say, "Oh man, we're really losing ground over there, we should probably just get out." No doubt there are persistent insurgency problems in the south, given it's wide rural landscapes (the Taliban thrive in more conservative, rural, undeveloped areas). And the jailbreak last week was shrewdly planned, and it feels like a big step back when you let 400 of these guys back into the surrounding villages. But it seems like the military operation against the Taliban today and yesterday went as well as it could have, even though it's just one step in a long-term process. What's also encouraging is that the Afghan National Army--who had a big hand in today's battles--is widely praised as a ready-to-go, tenacious fighting force (the National Police are generally a different matter, though). Afghanistan just needs a lot more of these ANA guys than the 70,000-80,000 they have at this point, and they seem to be building up their numbers steadily.

Besides that, there's all these interesting geo-strategic angles going on too, many of them having to do with the continued influence of a certain neighboring country to the right of here (...). And the biggest theme of all is that of the "Great Game," as it's been called: that Afghanistan is smack-dab in the middle of Asia, and for thousands of years it's been this critical keystone for anybody trying to gain or maintain influence in Asia. The most unfortunate thing, of course, is that it's always been the Afghan people who've had to bear the brunt of this geo-strategic "game" being played by competing powers across the centuries. It just makes the collective pride and resilience I've seen around here that much more fascinating; that people here continue to rebuild and go on with their lives through all the waves of upheaval. I mean, what else can they--or anyone in this kind of situation--really do otherwise?