The Taliban hoped to take advantge of NATO take over of operations in Afghanistan

Eric Schmitt, NY Times:

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According to American military officials, the Taliban began preparing to ramp up the violence once it became clear that NATO planned to bring in 6,000 troops to replace Americans. Hard fighting, the Taliban presumably calculated, would test the allies' commitment to stand and fight, and the will of Western voters to support a fight.

"It was to be expected that the Taliban would exploit the fact that we are changing from one operation to the other," said Rear Adm. Michiel B. Hijmans, defense attaché at the Dutch Embassy here. His country has about 1,300 troops in Oruzgan province.

At the same time, British and Afghan Army forces for the first time pushed into parts of northern Helmand province, the center of the illicit poppy-growing region, drawing fire from drug traffickers and increasing the number of Taliban fighters whom the traffickers hired for security.

Military commanders say the emboldened Taliban fighters have now shattered a sense of relative calm and political stability in the south, terrorizing residents who already were skeptical that the government could offer security and services in the hinterlands. Militants have set off 32 suicide bombs, 6 more than in all of 2005, Pentagon officials say. The number of roadside bombs is up 30 percent over a year ago, with insurgents getting designs off the Internet.

And in the past two weeks, Taliban fighters have appeared in battle in groups of up to 300 men, more than triple the size of the largest groups seen before. The militants draw not only from hardened fighters spirited in from sanctuaries in Pakistan, but from impoverished farmers who are paid $4 for every rocket they launch at allied troops.

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The pitched battles in southern Afghanistan have left more than 250 people dead, and by last week their impact was competing with Iran and Iraq for the attention of policy makers in Washington.

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That last paragraph is an example of biased war reporting. Probably over 90 percent of those casualties were Taliban. By massing their forces they become vulnerable to the superior fire power of the NATO led forces. In other words, the Taliban or playing into our strength and are paying a heavy price for doing so. By presenting the casualties figures the way the Times does, they try to make enemy casualties a product of an alleged failure of US policy. This inversion of reason in warfare is part of the liberal plague when it comes to winning. For liberals when you are winning, you are losing because the enemy is dying in great numbers. TheRealtyCheck.Org blog has other examples of this type of reporting.