Taliban vulnerable to air strikes

Thomas Ricks, Washington Post:

As fighting in Afghanistan has intensified over the past three months, the U.S. military has conducted 340 airstrikes there, more than twice the 160 carried out in the much higher-profile war in Iraq, according to data from the Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for the Middle East.

The airstrikes appear to have increased in recent days as the United States and its allies have launched counteroffensives against the Taliban in the south and southeast, strafing and bombing a stronghold in Uruzgan province and pounding an area near Khost with 500-pound bombs.

U.S. officials say the activity is a response to an increasingly aggressive Taliban, whose leaders realize that long-term trends are against them as the power of the Afghan central government grows.

"I think the Taliban realize they have a window to act," Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, commander of the 22,000 U.S. troops in the country, said in a recent interview. "The enemy is working against a window that he knows is closing."

...

Commanders say the combat is more intense than in the past three springs, both on the ground and from the air. The offensive has coincided with an effort to wipe out opium poppy crops in the south, resulting in an alliance between wealthy drug traders and anti-government Taliban forces. Anti-government fighters are moving in where the government has left a vacuum, especially where there is money to be made from drug trafficking and extortion.

"The Taliban are opportunists," said John Stuart Blackton, a retired U.S. diplomat who consults on Afghan issues with the National Intelligence Council, which produces government intelligence forecasts. "They have no deep ideology and no deep theory that informs what they are doing. . . . In other words, they are better understood as being like a crime family in New Jersey."

The airstrikes between early March and late May concentrated on two areas -- the provinces of the south-central mountains that are the Taliban's major redoubt and eastern Afghanistan near the border with Pakistan, where al-Qaeda and its allies operate. But U.S. warplanes have also hit targets near the capital of Kabul, near the main U.S. base at Bagram, and near other major cities such as Jalalabad and Ghazni.

...

The airstrikes reflect the nature of the enemy more than anything else. In Iraq the enemy knows that it cannot mass troops without being destroyed. He therefore disburses his forces and camouflages himself among the civilians. That makes for few inviting targets with the obvious exception of Zarqawi.

In Afghanistan the Taliban have tended to mass in groups large and small in terrain away from populated areas as they try to avoid detection. Patrols by NATO and Afghan forces have flushed them out in some cases, or the Taliban has made bold and foolish attacks on defended postions that has revealed their presence to our aircraft.

As a metric of the war, which Ricks appears to be trying to establish, all it indicates is that the Taliban have given us more opportunities to kill them with air strikes.