Britain: Offensive in Afghanistan a success

BRITAIN announced the end of a five-week offensive against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan yesterday, saying it had succeeded in driving militants out of population centres ahead of national elections next month.

Operation ‘Panther’s Claw’, which involved around 3,000 British troops backed by US, Danish and other NATO units, was the largest offensive by British forces since they took responsibility in mid-2006 for Helmand, a volatile desert-and-mountain province in the south.

The offensive is part of a series of operations that Western forces have launched ahead of Afghanistan’s presidential and provincial elections on August 20, designed to build security and allow as many people as possible to vote.

However, 21 British deaths in six weeks of fighting have fuelled doubts at home about the overall war in Afghanistan and whether troops are receiving the support they need from the government.

“What we have achieved here is significant and I am absolutely certain that the operation has been a success,” Brigadier Tim Radford, commander of British forces in Helmand, told reporters in London via video. “We have inflicted heavy losses on the insurgents, both physically and psychologically, and we have seen a number of them give up and flee the area as a result.”

He said around 500 Taliban had confronted British troops during the offensive, which focused on an area north of the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, where the Taliban had infiltrated a string of towns along the Helmand river. He would not give details of how many had been captured or killed, but said some Taliban had probably managed to escape or melt back into the local population.

British prime minister Gordon Brown, under fire from opposition politicians and some commanders who say frontline troops lack the equipment they need, praised the operation.

“What we have done is push back the Taliban, and... start to break that chain of terror that links the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the streets of Britain,” he said. The campaign began on June 19. Since then, 21 British troops have been killed, the most concentrated toll the nation has suffered in seven years in Afghanistan. Britain’s overall death toll, now at 189, exceeds that in Iraq, where 179 died.

As a result of Panther’s Claw, Radford said up to 80,000 more Afghans – of a total Helmand population of about 1.3 million and 30 million nationwide – would now be free to vote.

British foreign secretary David Miliband, addressing NATO ambassadors in Brussels, said Afghanistan would require a long-term political solution and efforts were under way to draw softer elements of the Taliban into the political process. The aim would be to pull conservative Pashtun nationalists – from where the Taliban draws its support – away from the insurgency, “separating those who want Islamic rule locally from those committed to violent jihad globally”.

Meanwhile, the Afghan government yesterday said it had struck a cease-fire with Taliban insurgents in a remote province in the northwest.