*The Taliban's more brutal treatment of civilians and Nato's response have raised the temperature – and the fear factor – as the fighting season approaches
Source: DTN News / Guardian.co.uk, John Boone in Kandahar (NSI News Source Info) KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - May 9, 2010: The coming of spring always brings an influx of Taliban fighters to the district of Zhari, where the young leaves on the grapevines and fruit orchards provide cover so thick tha
t Nato's hi-tech thermal imaging cameras struggle to see the insurgents hiding within.But this year things are different. The Taliban are back once again, but the locals who live in the area on the western doorstep of the city of Kandahar say they have arrived in far higher numbers than in previous years.
"Two months ago there were only around 30 in the area, but it has increased dramatically in the last two weeks," said Faiz Mohammad, a shopkeeper from the town of Sanzari in Zhari district.
"We now see hundreds of them, young teenage boys, led by older commanders. They are clean shaven and look like everyone else, except they carry good weapons and communications equipment."
It is a similar story in the nearby villages of Pashmol and Ashgho, locals say. According to one farmer, the fighters operate within just a few hundred metres of Nato bases. "They just come up and check we haven't met government officials and demand we give them food and money," said Bari Dad.
The young fighters, fresh from over the border in Pakistan, appear to be mustering in exactly the places where Nato expects to do some of its heaviest fighting this summer.
As they did before the major February operation in Marjah in Helmand, the insurgents are preparing for the onslaught by laying roadside bombs and mines in the areas where they expect to fight. But, unlike in the past, they now rarely tell the locals where they are buried, Dad said.
In what has been called the "cornerstone of the surge effort", June and July will see about 23,000 US, Canadian and Afghan troops attempt to clear Kandahar's rural hinterlands, focusing particularly on areas such as Zhari and the neighbouring district of Panjwai.
The hope is that by controlling these areas they will take the pressure off the beleaguered city of Kandahar and its estimated 500,000 citizens.
Nato talks of creating "rings of security" around the provincial capital. But inside the city a Taliban campaign of violence has succeeded in creating an atmosphere of panic and terror.
Sources throughout the vital southern province report similar stories of a higher than usual influx of fighters, including insurgents, passing through the district of Shah Wali Kot to the north and the area of Dand to the south. The Indian consulate in Kandahar also said it had received reports from locals from Maruf, a district on the border with Pakistan, that Taliban activity has "increased many-fold" compared with last year.
Pranav, a diplomat at the heavily fortified Indian consulate, said that insurgents appeared also to be moving in from neighbouring provinces, including Helmand, in preparation for a major Kandahar offensive.
Both sides are gearing up for a bloody summer. The head of the health department has set up an additional 100 beds for the city's main hospital, which previously held 330. Those beds are already full of the war wounded, including many suspected Taliban fighters.
Caught between the two sides, civilians are hoping to avoid the crossfire.
Mohammad Karim, a farmer from Ashgo, said: "The Taliban publicly executed a man in our village by hanging him from a tree and then shooting him. He was accused of passing information to the foreigners. Both sides are creating problems for us and we try to remain neutral."
Haji Abdul Haq, a tribal elder from Arghandab district, said people in his area were only interested in avoiding the fight. "The people only want peace and security; they don't care if it's provided by Isaf [the international security assistance force led by Nato] or the Taliban," he said.
A recent public opinion survey in Kandahar conducted for the US army found that despite their efforts to remain above the fray, most of the 1,994 people questioned sympathised with the insurgents' reasons for taking up arms against the government. Some 94% of respondents did not want foreign forces to start a new operation.
The US has already stepped up its secret war against the Taliban: special forces teams have been killing and capturing mid-level commanders and apparently squeezing the insurgents' supply chains.
But in recent weeks the Taliban have responded with an aggressive assassination campaign, bringing an unprecedented level of fear to the city.
Rumours are circulating that Taliban leaders in Pakistan have issued a "kill list" of officials who have been targeted – most of whom do not have any security to speak of.
Last month the city's deputy mayor was shot dead as he prayed in a mosque. A week earlier, a young Afghan woman employed by Development Alternatives, a company that works on US government construction projects, was gunned down as she travelled to work.
These developments have created a clear sense of fear, particularly among anyone connected with the government, Nato or any foreign organisation.
At a time when the US military is trying to bolster the provincial government's capacity to get things done, key staff members are trying to quit. One aide in the governor's office, who cannot be named, has handed in his resignation although it has not yet been accepted.
Some who leave government employment find that it is already too late: former interpreters for Nato soldiers have been targeted and killed, in one case more than a year after leaving the job.
One Afghan man, who cannot be named, said he quit his well-paid job at the International Committee of the Red Cross after receiving phone calls from acquaintances in Quetta, the frontier town in southern Pakistan where many Taliban live with their families, politely asking him not to work with the foreigners any more. When he argued that the Red Cross was a humanitarian organisation that famously strives to be neutral, he was told the Taliban believe that they share information with the Americans and cannot be trusted.
And the United Nations, which also describes itself as neutral, now considers its staff to be in such danger that on 27 April all foreign workers were hurriedly evacuated to Kabul and local staff told to remain at home after rumours that the UN compound was going to be attacked.
With the departure of the UN, there are very few foreigners still living in the city. When I checked into a heavily fortified guesthouse, the first thing the manager showed off was not the bedroom but a basement safe room and an escape route over the roof.
He was right to be cautious: just round the corner is the remains of a compound that housed a number of foreign companies working on US-funded projects. The building was largely destroyed on 15 April by a suicide bomber who drove a car packed with explosives into the front gate.
"They are trying to show who is the boss in Kandahar city, and it appears to be working," said Ganesh, the Indian diplomat.
The collapse in security and the increase in US military patrols have frightened locals who used to regard the city as a sanctuary from more dangerous outlying districts.
And foreign officials worry that operations in the surrounding districts will displace fighters into the city itself; urban warfare on the streets of Kandahar would be a disaster for the Nato strategy of trying to create security in areas where the population is most dense. Last week, Mark Sedwill, Nato's senior civilian representative, admitted that street to street fighting was a possibility.
"We are just in absolute despair," said one man from Arghandab district who had come into the city to shop. "People used to move their families into the city when there was fighting in the districts, but now that's not safe either. We really don't know where to go."
Despite the dire state of security in the city and its surrounding areas, there is widespread opposition among locals to a major military offensive, which, like the February operation in Marjah, has been well publicised in advance.
Nato hoped that this would encourage fighters to simply withdraw. But it has, in fact, given the Taliban time to thoroughly prepare the battleground with bombs and mines as well as terrifying the local population.
When Hamid Karzai visited the city at the beginning of April to talk to elders, most of them called on him to cancel the plan.
Last week Nato began trying to play down the military aspect of this summer's surge, saying it would prefer to call it a "process that is encompassing military and non-military instruments" rather than an "operation", or "offensive".
Others say that nothing will change until a solution is found for Kandahar's underlying problems of official corruption and tribes who feel excluded from power, which they say is controlled by a small oligarchy of businessmen-politicians.
Several Kandaharis I interviewed saw the Taliban insurgency in terms of rivalry between members of the largely excluded Gilzai tribe, which has always been heavily represented within the Taliban, and the traditional elite Durrani tribe to which Hamid Karzai belongs.
The claim is backed up by figures from the US military, showing that Durranis hold two-thirds of positions within the provincial government and 26 out of 34 district and police chiefs.
"Things will never get better unless the Ghilzai are more fairly represented," said Faiz Mohammad the shopkeeper from Zhari. "You cannot just ignore the needs of a major tribe like that."
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