80 insurgents killed in raid in Eastern Afghanistan

NY Times:

The number of insurgents reported killed in a NATO attack on a large encampment in a remote area of Paktika Province rose to 80 on Saturday, said Afghan officials, adding that they were concerned that there could be more undetected militant camps within the country’s borders.

The camp, which was raided Thursday by NATO troops backed up by Afghan forces, accommodated considerably more people than most compounds where Taliban and other insurgents take shelter along the border with Pakistan. The discovery raised questions about how entrenched the insurgency had become in southeastern Afghanistan. NATO has conducted many raids along the border, but rarely if ever come across compounds big enough for dozens of insurgents, officials said.

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The insurgents killed in the NATO attack were affiliated with the Haqqani group, a particularly effective and brutal militant faction based around a family originally from neighboring Paktia Province, according to a NATO statement on the attack. For several years the Haqqanis have been headquartered in Miran Shah in north Waziristan, one of Pakistan’s tribal areas, which explains why many of the fighters appear to have been drawn from there rather than from the Afghan side of the border.

“These fighters were moved into the country by Haqqani insurgents who planned to use them for attacks throughout Afghanistan,” the NATO statement said. The Haqqani group has been associated with an attack last month on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul as well as one on the Kabul Bank in Jalalabad in February in which gunmen mowed down civilians who were collecting their salaries.

American and Afghan forces were still clearing the area of the NATO attack on Saturday morning and received occasional fire from insurgents throughout the day, said Muhibullah Samim, the governor of Paktika Province.

In photos released by the military, the insurgents appeared to have fashioned rough shelters built into rocks and under tree roots that they had fortified and then covered with white pieces of cloth to provide some protection from the elements. According to local officials, the camp was relatively newly built. It had been there for about 20 days, said Hajji Abdul Qadir, a member of Parliament from Paktika Province.

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It was a fatal mistake for the Haqqanis to mass this size of a force in Afghanistan. They may have been planning something big, or just got careless. They are probably having a problem because some of their more traditional strongholds have been lost to the US surge and government forces. The article indicates the government is concerned there maybe other such encampments, but they are unlikely to be so lucky. The current correlation of forces makes it a mistake for the insurgents to gather so many people where our superior firepower can take them out at once.