Taliban failed to mount spring offensive, NATO says

Dust billows as a Chinook helicopter takes off in Sangin valley in the southern Afghan province of Helmand, June 10, 2007.

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan (Reuters) - The Taliban failed to mount their long-threatened spring offensive in Afghanistan, and indications are the guerrillas may have trouble recruiting fighters after the harvest, a NATO commander said.

"The only spring offensive that has taken place this year is the one that NATO has conducted," British Brigadier John Lorimer, the one-star general who commands NATO's forces in Afghanistan's Helmand province, told Reuters.

The hot months are usually the peak fighting season in Afghanistan. The Taliban threatened -- and NATO's own generals predicted -- a likely upsurge in guerrilla attacks early this year as the snow melted.

But Lorimer, speaking in an interview overnight at his headquarters in the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, said NATO operations over the winter appeared to have disrupted guerrilla supply chains, making it more difficult for them to mount the sort of large-scale attacks that were common last year.

Lorimer commanded a series of combined U.S.-British NATO operations over the past two months, which the alliance says drove Taliban forces out of one of their main strongholds, the Sangin Valley carved by the Helmand River.

The NATO force, which took control of southern Afghanistan last year and aims to impose the rule of President Hamid Karzai's government in Taliban areas, has portrayed the Sangin offensives as a major victory.

For the first time, British troops in the area were able to call on a newly assigned task force of American airborne reinforcements, allowing them to conduct operations much larger in scale than last year.

Lorimer said the next step is to bring government authority and aid to the area, which is heartland for both the Taliban and the opium trade.

"What we've got to make sure when we do a kinetic operation in an area is that we've got to follow it up," he said. "Kinetic operation" is a military expression for combat.

OPIUM HARVEST OVER

But guerrillas still control an adjacent valley, Musa Qala, where British troops pulled out last October under a ceasefire that later collapsed. The Taliban have described that as a key victory of their own.

Lorimer acknowledged that Musa Qala had "totemic value" because of the British withdrawal, but said it was not as strategically important as the areas where his forces have made gains since March.

"Musa Qala is just another town in Afghanistan where the Taliban have control. It's not unique."

If last year's patterns are repeated, the next big test for NATO will be whether the Taliban are able to recruit large numbers of farmers to take up arms after the harvest of the ubiquitous opium poppy crop. The labor-intensive harvest has finished in most areas over the past few weeks.

Last year large groups of Taliban struck NATO positions after the harvest and continued attacking throughout the hot summer.

Lorimer said it was too early to say conclusively whether the farmers the Taliban recruited in the past would instead stay home this year, but "the signs are encouraging".

NATO refers to farmers who may take up arms with the guerrillas as "tier 2 Taliban" to distinguish them from committed, full-time "tier 1" fighters.

"One of our aims, especially over the past two months, is to separate the tier 1 Taliban from the tier 2," he said.

(To read Reuters reporter Peter Graff's blog from southern Afghanistan, go to: here

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