The Spring Initiative

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The following news item indicates that the offensive is already underway.

World - AP Asia

U.S. Launches New Afghanistan Offensive
1 hour, 22 minutes ago

By STEPHEN GRAHAM, Associated Press Writer

KABUL, Afghanistan - The U.S. military on Saturday announced a sweeping new operation across troubled southern and eastern Afghanistan (news - web sites), with the aim of destroying al-Qaida and the Taliban and ultimately reeling in Osama bin Laden (news - web sites).

The offensive comes as Americans step up their hunt for the al-Qaida leader and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, who are believed to be hiding out in the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan.


``We believe this will help bring the heads of the terrorist organizations to justice, by continuing placing pressure on them,`` said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, a U.S. military spokesman.


The operation, however, was ``about more than one person,`` he said. Hilferty said American forces were confident they will eventually catch the al-Qaida leadership as well as Taliban chief Mullah Mohammed Omar, but not necessarily during the new operation.


Hilferty also said U.S. forces are involved in what he described as a ``small scale air assault`` in southern Afghanistan, but would not give details about the location or the target.


A senior Afghan army commander in southern Kandahar province, Haji Granai, told The Associated Press that U.S. aircraft attacked a pickup truck carrying 12 suspected Taliban in Kandahar province on Thursday, killing them all. Granai said the American planes swooped down on the truck near Sami Ghar in Maruf district, some 160 miles east of Kandahar city. Suspected Taliban militants killed seven Afghan soldiers in a raid on a border post in Maruf on Mar. 3.


The U.S. military had no immediate comment.


The overall operation, dubbed ``Mountain Storm,`` officially began Sunday and was open-ended, Hilferty said. He said the entire 13,500-strong U.S.-led coalition was involved.


While bin Laden`s whereabouts have been the subject of intense speculation, there has been no known hard evidence of his location — or even that he is alive — since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.


Hilferty said the operation was in effect a continuation of tactics already being used, such as intensive patrolling, village searches and impromptu checkpoints.


He declined to give specifics, but an Associated Press reporter at the military`s main southern base at Kandahar noted what base personnel said was heavier than usual air traffic, with C-130 cargo planes and Chinook helicopters landing through the night.


The base also served a lobster and steak dinner on the eve of the new operation. The army traditionally serves special meals to kick off large offensives.


Lt. Gen. David Barno, the top American commander in Afghanistan, has said his soldiers are engaged in a ``hammer-and-anvil`` strategy along with Pakistani forces on the other side of the border.


Some 70,000 Pakistani troops have moved into semiautonomous tribal regions to take away maneuver room for al-Qaida and Taliban fugitives believed to have taken refuge there.


A Feb. 24 operation in Wana, the main town in Pakistan`s South Waziristan region, netted 24 suspects, but none were believed to be important al-Qaida operatives.


Pakistan, a key ally in the U.S. war on terrorism, has arrested more than 500 al-Qaida suspects. But Afghans also say they have not done enough to seal the border, and complain that Taliban commanders have been organizing operations from large Pakistani border towns like Quetta and Peshawar.


On Saturday, tribal elders in South Waziristan imposed a 24-hour deadline on a tribe accused of sheltering terrorists to hand over the fugitives or expect an armed force of 600 men to search the area forcibly.





A Pakistani military spokesman, Gen. Shaukat Sultan, would not comment on the new U.S. operation or say whether Pakistani troops were involved in fresh deployments on their side of the border.

Hilferty played down suggestions by defense officials in Washington that the military was embarking on a ``spring offensive.``

``If it continues past March 21, I assume it will be a spring operation,`` Hilferty said. ``But spring offensive is what they media have been calling for, not us.``

The military offensive also is supposed to safeguard landmark Afghan elections slated for June, when U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai is expected to secure a new term.

More than 140 people have died in violence already this year, underlining security fears ahead of the vote.

Much of the south and east of the country remains off-limits to international aid groups, and local officials complain their forces are unable to deal with the Taliban threat without more help from the Americans and the central government.

Hilferty said the previous two-month U.S. operation, called Blizzard and including 143 raids and searches, had resulted in the death of 22 ``enemy combatants.`` No U.S. soldiers were killed in combat during the period, he said, though a number died in accidents.

`And now that Al Qaida is equated with the Taliban, this association procures sympathy for Al Qaida. The syllogism being: Taliban were good people, but the US considers them evil; the US is calling Al Qaida as evil as the Taliban, so Al Qaida must also be good. `

Above is a quote from the article. For us the non-mulsims cannot inderstand the hair splitting that is going on. Taliban got rid of opium growing, there was no crime in afghanistan, so taliban was good. But taliban also supported al-quida, they supported the indian plane hijackers, however those killed through taliban support were kafirs, hence taliban is sti;ll good.
Cementaur, I suspect that you are an educatde pakistani. Why use these sbterfuges, why cant you say jihad is killing of kafirs and that produces shaheeds and that is per the book.

The fact is pretty simple, the war on terror is simply a war against jihad. Either muslims like you have to take on the mullahs and say that ``jihad is not killing of kafirs``, or face daisy cutters.
There is little doubt that spainish bombing willbe pinned on al quida and the future of pakistan is not looking good at all.

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#8: Sadna,

That was a sweet start :)

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Only Ballukhan, #5, makes sense. Sadna, please do not use Mir`s wonderful gazal for the shitty purposes of Osama, Taliban and al Quaida.

Jaaney na jaaney gul hi na jaaney, baagh tho saara jaaney hai

From The Telegraph, India.

``...Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, published by Penguin, also offers the first clue to why Ashraf Jehangir Qazi was posted as Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington after Delhi asked Islamabad to pull him out as high commissioner in Delhi.

Coll says that among the documents recovered from Pakistan’s embassy in Kabul after the Americans overthrew the Taliban was a secret cable sent by Qazi from Delhi to Islamabad in advance of a meeting called by Musharraf of all Pakistani ambassadors abroad.

Arguing strongly in favour of ditching the Taliban, Qazi wrote in that cable about Pakistan’s support for Mullah Omar, the one-eyed Taliban supremo: “We find practical reasons to continue with policies that we know are never going to deliver and the eventual costs of which we also know will be overwhelming... Thus we are condemned to ride a tiger.”

Pakistan, he argued, had “no choice” but to “resolve the OBL (Osama bin Laden) problem before addressing any other issue”. The cable would have been written at a time when Qazi was feeling the heat in Delhi after the Taliban cooperated with hijackers of an Indian Airlines plane taken to Kandahar and released in exchange for terrorists jailed in India for holy war in support of Kashmir’s freedom.

Qazi, it would have been clear to the Americans from the cable and other such evidence, was among those in the Pakistani foreign office who had questioned the support of the Army General Headquarters in Rawalpindi for the religious zealots in Afghanistan, a factor that would have endeared him to the Washington establishment.

The book reveals that contrary to the popular belief that Musharraf was reining in the Taliban, it was the other way round. Mullah Omar wrote a threatening letter to Musharraf on January 16, 2001, urging him to “enforce Islamic law... step by step”. He warned Musharraf of instability in Pakistan if this was not done.

“This is our advice and message based on Islamic ideology,” Omar wrote to the general. “Otherwise you had better know how to deal with it.”

The letter and Qazi’s cable were reported in Survival, the journal of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, in 2002 but Coll’s book puts such facts into the context of Pakistan’s web of ties with the Taliban and the evolution of Washington’s alliance with Musharraf during the Bush presidency. ..``

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The United States wants to pacify the resistence in Afghanistan and make sure the government it created in November 2001, after the collapse of Talian, matures into a viable American ally in the region. The post-Taliban Afghanistan`s political rubric has been created in a manner that skews the balance of power away from the pushtun majority and gives it to the non-pushtun minority. The majority of the Pushtuns in Afghanistan live near the border with Pakistan and the Pakistani Pushtuns have a traditional affinity for the Afghan pushtuns based on family and tribal connections. The Afghan Pushtuns have, given the odds against them in Afghanistan, retreated into Pakistan`s FATA and from here, they are conducting their operations of resistence to the government in Kubal.

Therefore, if the Afghan goverment is to survive, then the threat to it has to be ended and that threat comes not from Al-Qaeda as much as it comes from Pakistan`s tribal belt, which is offering sanctury to the Afghan Pushtuns and prolonging the political crisis of stablity in Afghanistan. Consequently, the United States realizes that the Battle for Afghanistan has to be fought and won inside of Pakistan`s tribal belt, which is the center of the gravity as far as the Afghan political situation is concerned.

The advantages for Pakistan in this situation is that if the United States is successful, Pakistan would like the United States to leverage its influence with Kabul and make the Afghans agree to the sanctity of the Durand Line as the dejure international border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The second importance to Pakistan, from the perspective of its internal politics, is that once the Durand Line`s legitimacy is agreed upon, it will lessen the impluse of Pushtun nationalism within Pakistan itself and end the periodic demand for Puktunistan. Consequently, the military forays by the Pakistani army are designed to incorporate FATA into Pakistan and use this excuse as a means to end the nearly 100 year old British system of tribal political administration by FATA is ruled and which Pakistan gained in 1947 as a colonial legacy.

There is a distinct possibility of a revolt in Pakistan against the military action in FATA and the political consequences could be bitter for Pakistan in the long, but in the immediate sense given Pakistan`s committments to the United States` ``war on terror``, Pakistan can no longer afford to delay the prospect of allowing FATA freedom to determine American perceptions of Pakistan vis-a-vis its support of Afghan Pushtuns.

Ciao

I agree with the author. USA through hobnobbing with the northern alliance and indiscrimiately killing pashtuns as Taliban has aggravated Pakistan`s security environment.

US, that was the biggest critic of Afghan heroin passing through Pakistan ignored that Taliban eradicated it. Now right under the nose of the coalition forces, Afghanistan is the biggest producer of heroin in the world.

They also on inaccurate intelligence, eliminated the only secular country (Iraq) in the Arab world.

The tales of Pashtuns suffering from daisy cluster bombs are gory and frightful. There was just no reagrd for human life, sex or age. Pashtun Afghans have paid dearly for what OBL did.

Believe it or not, there is a rise of Pashtun ethno-religious nationalism that may not auger well for Pakistan. War on terror is becoming a war of hate.

Those who fail to see the link between Al Qaeda and Taliban fail to see the enemy at their own gates.

arjun dude since ur a HINDU u wont get y we worry about people(muslims) dying in palestine or iraq or anywhere else..see ur like a hindu and there aint no other hindu country n e where what a crap religeon lol.. we muslims r all brother and lemme tell u 80% f the ``janta`` believes taht OBL is a US agent and he was pretty smartly used to make way for americans in afghanistan. What are the americans going through in afghanistan??? you would never get to watch that on Zee News :) they are dying like dogs...then comes iraq...americans have taken over and crap...ur zee news wont tell u the number of americans that die everyday thanx to iraqi balls. now if uncle sams sends his ppl here............there would be more of them dying...till then tum apnay mandar may jao aur tun tun karo aur hamari fikar karna chor do.....if only the world was running on analysis done by people like u....65 ki war yaad hay the bridge over ravi kitnay bombs phainkay wahan aik bhi nahi phata indian pilots ki phat gaye :D

And, I thought there was something serene on Spring Cleaning.

Kash!