The Taliban failed to mount their long-threatened spring offensive in Afghanistan, and indications are the guerrillas may have trouble recruiting fighters after the harvest, a NATO commander said. “The only spring offensive that has taken place this year is the one that NATO has conducted,” British Brigadier John Lorimer, the one-star general who commands NATO’s forces in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, told Reuters. The hot months are usually the peak fighting season in Afghanistan. The Taliban threatened - and NATO’s own generals predicted - a likely upsurge in guerrilla attacks early this year as the snow melted.
But Lorimer, speaking in an interview overnight at his headquarters in the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, said NATO operations over the winter appeared to have disrupted guerrilla supply chains, making it more difficult for them to mount the sort of large-scale attacks that were common last year. Lorimer commanded a series of combined US-British NATO operations over the past two months, which the alliance says drove Taliban forces out of one of their main strongholds, the Sangin Valley carved by the Helmand River. The NATO force, which took control of southern Afghanistan last year and aims to impose the rule of President Hamid KarzaiÂ’s government in Taliban areas, has portrayed the Sangin offensives as a major victory.