Major operation kills 150 Taliban

Fox News:

As many as 150 insurgent fighters have been killed since Sunday in a major offensive involving about 700 U.S. and Afghan troops along eastern Afghanistan's border with Pakistan, a senior military official confirmed to Fox News early Tuesday.

The U.S.-led operation was one of the largest yet in the region, officials told The Washington Post, who described the assault as "one of the most intense battles of the past year."

In a statement Sunday, NATO's International Security Assistance Force said more than 600 ISAF and Afghan troops were pursuing Al Qaeda and Taliban militants in Kunar and that "a number of insurgents" were killed.

Two American troops were also killed in the battle, according to ISAF.

The offensive was designed to flush out growing numbers of Taliban militants bidding to open up a second front in Kunar, as U.S.-led forces root out insurgents in southern Afghanistan, the Post reported.

"The Taliban know we are bringing our surge of forces, and they realize they can't just let that happen, so they are pursuing their own surge," Maj. Gen. John Campbell, the senior commander in eastern Afghanistan, told the newspaper.

The U.S.-led force in Kunar gave no prior warning of the offensive, unlike the onslaught in Marjah in southern Afghanistan earlier this year.

"We needed the element of surprise in that terrain," Colonel Andrew P. Poppas was quoted as saying.

...

I think they must have achieved surprise. I suspect that this change in tactics was made possible by McChrystal's departure. Usually the Taliban will flea a force that size, if they have an opportunity. Kunar has been the site of several attacks on small US outpost where the Taliban have achieved numerical superiority. The opposite happened here, and the Taliban appear to have lost about three quarters of their force as KIAs.

Bill Roggio has background info on the area of operation.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t...
Read more

Is the F-35 obsolete?

Headline USA: Pentagon Fires Back after Musk Calls Its Most Expensive Project ‘Obsolete’ 'Yeah, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I'm not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35....'   ... ... Drones appear to be replacing jets for many operations.  The Russia-Ukraine war is an example of that.  Drones are often hard to detect and can be used for intelligence operations as well as for attacking enemy targets.  It would not surprise me to see drones engaging other drones in combat.  They also cost much less than manned fighters.  
Read more