U.S.-led coalition finds 'success' elusive in Kandahar

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U.S.-led coalition finds 'success' elusive in Kandahar
By Dion Nissenbaum and Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Friday, July 30, 2010

ARGHANDAB, Afghanistan — As the U.S.-led coalition launches its most critical military operation of the nine-year war in Afghanistan, doubts are growing about whether the United States and its allies can contain the surging Taliban-led insurgency and prevent the country from reverting to an al Qaida sanctuary or erupting in civil war.

The operation aims to secure Kandahar, the financial, trade and political hub of southern Afghanistan and the seat of Taliban rule of Afghanistan until the 2001 U.S. invasion. Kandahar is the cultural and spiritual center of the Pashtuns, the ethnic group from which the Taliban are drawn almost exclusively.

U.S. and Afghan troops already have made the first moves to flush the Taliban from their strongholds in the lush Arghandab Valley and other districts around the second-largest Afghan city, but a host of problems plague the long-delayed initiative and the larger U.S.-led war effort.

It isn't clear when Army Gen. David Petraeus, the newly named commander of all allied forces, will extend the operation into the city of Kandahar, nor what form it will take, but U.S. commanders insist that it won't involve street-to-street fighting.

U.S. casualties are averaging two deaths per day, the highest since the beginning of the war, and U.S. troops suffered their highest monthly death toll of the war in July, with 63 Americans killed.