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"Nowhere to hide?" echoed a tribal elder from Panjwayi named Haji Abdullah, whose family has farmed there for five generations. "I am sorry, but in fact there are many, many places to hide. Everywhere in the district, they move as they like."
Adding to Kandaharis' sense of pressure piled upon pressure, many people displaced from the outer districts by fighting are crowding into the city, some living in miserable conditions.
Farid, the Arghandab pomegranate farmer, does not know how he will reestablish himself when he returns home, as he intends to do. "It is harvest season, and the crop is rotting in the orchards," he said.
The Western military says one of its primary success stories in Kandahar has come in the form of near-nightly raids targeting midlevel Taliban commanders. Increasingly, these operations are taking place not only out in the districts, but in the city's precincts — formerly a rarity.
On Monday, NATO's International Security Assistance Force said one such strike in the western part of the city had snared two senior Taliban leaders who had organized a string of attacks — the latest of 21 such captures in the last 30 days.
"Taliban leaders operating in Kandahar are feeling the heat," the statement quoted U.S. Army Col. Rafael Torres as saying. "Our joint security forces are intent on securing the city."
But in a densely populated urban environment, local people are feeling the heat as well. During the course of one such operation last week, the Western military reported that a man who had menaced coalition forces with an assault rifle had been shot and killed.
He turned out to be an off-duty police officer who lived next door, said Col. Fazal Ahmad Shirzad, the police security chief.
"I would say that in these raids, the intelligence is correct about 60% of the time," he said. "And wrong about 40% of the time."
Shirzad said as long as the Kandahar operation continues, NATO forces — and even Afghan police and soldiers — will continue to be bedeviled by the difficulty of distinguishing friend from foe.
"Who is a Talib?" he asked. "A man who takes up a gun and fights us. But we are all Afghans, speaking the same language, in the same turbans and getup. We can't arrest everybody."
laura.king@latimes.com
Adding to Kandaharis' sense of pressure piled upon pressure, many people displaced from the outer districts by fighting are crowding into the city, some living in miserable conditions.
Farid, the Arghandab pomegranate farmer, does not know how he will reestablish himself when he returns home, as he intends to do. "It is harvest season, and the crop is rotting in the orchards," he said.
The Western military says one of its primary success stories in Kandahar has come in the form of near-nightly raids targeting midlevel Taliban commanders. Increasingly, these operations are taking place not only out in the districts, but in the city's precincts — formerly a rarity.
On Monday, NATO's International Security Assistance Force said one such strike in the western part of the city had snared two senior Taliban leaders who had organized a string of attacks — the latest of 21 such captures in the last 30 days.
"Taliban leaders operating in Kandahar are feeling the heat," the statement quoted U.S. Army Col. Rafael Torres as saying. "Our joint security forces are intent on securing the city."
But in a densely populated urban environment, local people are feeling the heat as well. During the course of one such operation last week, the Western military reported that a man who had menaced coalition forces with an assault rifle had been shot and killed.
He turned out to be an off-duty police officer who lived next door, said Col. Fazal Ahmad Shirzad, the police security chief.
"I would say that in these raids, the intelligence is correct about 60% of the time," he said. "And wrong about 40% of the time."
Shirzad said as long as the Kandahar operation continues, NATO forces — and even Afghan police and soldiers — will continue to be bedeviled by the difficulty of distinguishing friend from foe.
"Who is a Talib?" he asked. "A man who takes up a gun and fights us. But we are all Afghans, speaking the same language, in the same turbans and getup. We can't arrest everybody."
laura.king@latimes.com
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