World News

Taliban Are Getting Weaker, U.S. Says, as NATO Mounts Offensive June 19 (Bloomberg) -- The Taliban are becoming weaker after losing leaders and territory in the past year, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan said, as NATO and local forces mounted an offensive against insurgents in the country's south. ``The Taliban can raise a lot of dust at any given moment,'' Ambassador William Wood told reporters in Washington yesterday, adding the rebels fail to hold captured areas. ``They've lost the loyalty of the people, they've lost leaders, they've lost fighters.'' Coalition troops are trying to clear rebels from the Arghandab valley after hundreds of militants broke out of prison in Kandahar last week and massed in outlying villages. At least 35 Taliban fighters were killed yesterday as alliance helicopter gun ships and artillery targeted their positions, Agence France- Presse reported. Taliban rebels, seeking to overthrow President Hamid Karzai's government, stepped up their insurgency in southern and eastern provinces and increasingly targeted the capital, Kabul, with suicide bombings in recent months. The Islamist movement was driven from power by a U.S.-led coalition in late 2001 after refusing to hand over al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden following the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. While acknowledging the jail break and fighting posed difficulties, Wood said the international community wouldn't allow the district to fall to the insurgents. ``Our unified assessment in Kabul is that the Taliban is weaker in 2008 than it was at the beginning of the fighting season in 2007,'' Wood said. Islamist Fighters The Islamist fighters last year lost districts, including Musa Qala in the southern province of Helmand, and the U.S. has intelligence of ``some dissatisfaction among the rank and file of the Taliban with their focus on terrorism against innocent civilians,'' he said, according to a State Department transcript. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization leads a force of more than 53,000 soldiers battling the Taliban. The alliance this week sent reinforcements to Kandahar city and Arghandab to help hunt for rebels who escaped from Sarposa Prison and support an offensive by the Afghan National Army. Forces yesterday patrolled the western banks of the Arghandab River, NATO said in a statement. ``This is a show of force undertaken by the Afghan army to show they are in control,'' General Carlos Branco, a spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force, said in a telephone interview from Kabul yesterday. He didn't have reports of casualties. NATO and the U.S. say al-Qaeda is helping finance and direct the insurgency from camps in Pakistan's tribal region, where gunmen train, rearm and plan attacks. Cooperation Strained Cooperation in tackling the militants has been strained in recent days. Karzai threatened to send troops across the border to raid rebel camps, and Pakistan denounced a U.S. strike along the frontier, saying it destroyed a military post and killed 11 of its soldiers. The Pentagon said it was targeting militants and that no structure was hit. Pakistan's military is threatening to postpone or cancel a U.S. program to train a paramilitary force in counterinsurgency because of the strike, the New York Times reported, citing two government officials in Islamabad it didn't identify. A stone hut and nine bunkers at a Frontier Corps post at Gora Parai, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) northwest of the town of Ghalanai, were destroyed in the June 10 incident, the newspaper reported, citing the officials. The coordinates of the post were known to NATO and American forces, and the strike was too accurate and too intense to have been an accident, it cited an official as saying.