WaPo: war against the Taliban "crime family" in Afghanistan intensifies [View All]

U.S. Airstrikes Rise In Afghanistan as Fighting Intensifies

In Response to More Aggressive Taliban, Attacks Are Double Those in Iraq War

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 18, 2006; Page A01

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.

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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."

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Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who recently returned from a visit to Afghanistan, said that the Taliban have gone from operating in company-size units of about 100 men last year to battalion-size units of about 400 men this year. Some recent airstrikes have targeted those troop formations, contributing to the sharp rise in the total, especially when compared with the number of airstrikes in Iraq.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/17/AR2006061700784.html?nav=rss_world/mideast/iraq