U.S. officials dampen expectations for Kandahar offensive

[unhappycamper]

A police officer in Kandahar scrutinizes traffic at a checkpoint on Monday. Afghan and American strategists are crafting plans to target the Taliban birthplace with a coordinated military/civil operation this summer.


U.S. officials dampen expectations for Kandahar offensive
By Julian E. Barnes and Paul Richter, Tribune Washington Bureau
Stars and Stripes online edition, Friday, May 14, 2010

WASHINGTON — American-led military operations in and around the Afghan city of Kandahar in the next months will look markedly less militaristic than this year's offensive in Marjah, top U.S. officials said Thursday.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, said that Kandahar would not require an overt military push into the heart of the city, and said there would be no "D-Day" kicking off military operations.

"Kandahar is not in fact controlled by the Taliban. So it's not a case of having to recapture an area under enemy control, as Marjah was," McChrystal said at a news conference at the Pentagon.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, appearing alongside Afghan President Hamid Karzai before a Washington think tank audience later on Thursday, said the effort in Kandahar would not be "a massive military action," with "tanks rolling into the city."

"That is not the kind of operation that our military leaders believe is warranted," Clinton said. "They want to have a successful counterinsurgency operation that doesn't destroy Kandahar in order to save Kandahar."



unhappycamper comment: Well Stanley, how are things in Marjah now that the United States has pulled out? The poppies have been harvested and I hear the boys are taking pot shots at us again. What's up with that?