NATO forces say they won the battle of Panjwaii district in September. But it came at the cost of destroyed homes and farms, and the displacement of civilians. This NYT piece looks at trying to build the peace there.
Villagers trickling back to their homes broke into an argument over who was to blame for the heavy destruction, NATO or the Taliban.
“My house was bombarded and my grape store destroyed,” said Hajji Bilal Jan, 48, a farmer from the upper part of Pashmul. “The coalition forces are cruel, without reason. There were no Taliban in our house. Why did they bombard the house?”
Another man, Neamatullah, 45, who like many Afghans uses only one name, stopped to listen and then countered: “Why did you let the Taliban come to your village? You brought them to your village.”
The battle here, the biggest for the American-led forces in the country since March 2002, was a long-awaited success for NATO forces in a year in which the Taliban have revived with surprising strength.
But it also showed that fighting the insurgency was not just about winning the battle, but securing the peace. Pushing out the Taliban is one thing, NATO and Afghan commanders emphasize, and keeping them out another.
NATO officials estimate that the Taliban lost 500 fighters over all and say 136 have been captured, mostly as they tried to escape. Five Canadian soldiers died in the operation. But just afterward, four more were killed in a suicide bombing.
To help enlist the support of local villagers, military commanders and the governor of Kandahar Province have started handing out half a million dollars in humanitarian aid and have promised families more help with repairing the war’s damage.
“If the people cooperate with us, the Taliban can do nothing,” said Capt. Majid Khan, commander of a unit of the Afghan Army that took part in the fighting and is now based in Pashmul.
Most villagers here, who grow grapes and pomegranates in the rich soil along the Arghandab River valley, said they opposed the Taliban but had been powerless to stop the groups of armed men who moved into the area over recent months.
But among them were those who fed and sheltered the Taliban and possibly fought alongside them. ...
Villagers said the Taliban were mostly Afghans, but from neighboring provinces and districts, as well as from Pakistan. The Taliban were well equipped with radios, satellite telephones and weapons, they said. ...
Although NATO and Taliban forces told villagers to leave before the fighting, some civilians were killed and wounded in the conflict. United Nations officials have gathered reports of at least 40 civilians killed. A government commission sent by President Hamid Karzai to investigate the fighting said that 53 civilians had been killed in the fighting and that it had caused an estimated $750,000 in damage.
Kandahar’s main hospital took in 24 wounded people from the Panjwai and Zhare districts from Sept. 3 to 18, as well as two girls wounded in the suicide bombing, which happened on Sept. 18.
Rahmatullah, 33, a farm laborer, lay in bed with two broken legs. He lost two nephews, ages 3 and 1, when their house in Zangabad was bombed. As family members were trying to save the children’s mother from the rubble, a NATO plane struck a second time, wounding more women and children, he said.
Despite their injuries and losses, there was little sympathy for the Taliban among the patients or other villagers interviewed. In Pashmul, a 19-year-old high school student, also named Neamatullah, and his brother Habibullah, 17, climbed the broken wall where the gate to their house was destroyed.
They gestured with shock at the devastation before them. A bomb had gouged out a 25-foot-deep crater in their yard, smashing the well and the main building of the house.
Asked whom he blamed for the damage, Neamatullah said the Taliban. “Before they came, there was no bombing,” he said.