Tribal Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud has said this year’s spring offensive in Afghanistan will be even “bloodier” than last year. “The mujahideen (holy warriors) will give a tougher fight this year than last year,” he told Daily Times at a secret location in South Waziristan, after taking this correspondent on a tour of Kot Kalay, where an airstrike on an alleged militant training camp killed eight people on Tuesday.I hate to be the one to notice the inconvenient, but the Paks have been forever and a day maintaining the fiction that the Talibs are an Afghan phenomenon and an Afghan problem. Their nifty treaty in Wazoo constrains the local turbans from crossing the border to kill people in a sovreign neighboring country. Yet Baitullah remains blissfully unaware of any constraints on his violent impulses and purports to speak for all the Taliban.
More than 4,000 people were killed in last yearÂ’s Taliban-linked insurgency in Afghanistan. Around 1,000 were civilians, more than 100 coalition soldiers and the rest were said to be insurgents.
That's 2900 dead turbans to 100 dead good guys, which is a 29:1 kill ratio. They'd really be well advised to go into a different line of work. They obviously don't have any aptitude for warfare, despite their fearsome grimaces and their habit of waving guns.
“This year’s spring offensive will be fought harder than before as we want to build on last year’s successes,” said Baitullah, who struck a peace deal with the government in February 2005.
Such as they were. They seem to have been mainly in the press, rather than on the battlefield.
Baitullah vowed to avenge Tuesday’s airstrike. “They launch airstrikes on us and we respond with suicide attack,” he said amidst dozens of armed militants who were guarding him. More than 40 army recruits were killed in a suicide attack at Darrgai on November 8, following an airstrike on a madrassa in Bajaur on October 30 in which 83 people were killed.