The unfortunate Afghan province located adjacent to Mohmand, Kurram, and Khyber Agencies. The capital is Jalalabad. The province was the fief of Younus Khalis after the Soviets departed and one of his sons is the current provincial Taliban commander. Nangarhar is Haqqani country..
It was certainly the most dramatic and widespread assault in the Afghan capital since an attack in September on the US embassy and NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A collection of multinational and multilingual and multicultural armed forces, all of differing capabilities, working toward a common goal by pulling in different directions...
headquarters. It took the Afghan national security forces and their NATO mentors some 18 hours to clear out the last of the 36 hard boyz involved in the attack in Kabul.
An Afghan front man explained that so much time was taken only because the Afghan cops were anxious to avoid civilian casualties. They did acknowledge that while 35 of the 36 hard boyz in Kabul were killed, eight members of the Afghan cops and four non-combatants were killed while another 40 security personnel and 25 civilians were maimed.
The attacks at the Jalalabad airfield used by the Americans and on Afghan installations in Paktia and Pashtun-infested Logar were, it seems, largely casualty-free though three of the four hard boyz attacking the airfield were killed.
Taliban front man Zabiullah Mujahid, in a detailed briefing, told a Rooters' correspondent that the 30 specially trained mujahideen had spent months working with mock-ups of the targets to rehearse the attacks. He claimed that heavy machineguns, rocket grenades and ammunition had been put in place before the assault with inside help from the Afghan cops.
This attack has been termed as the start of the 'Taliban spring offensive' and one can assume that this was the Taliban version of creating 'shock and awe' -- very different from the military dominance that was proclaimed by this term when used in describing the American attack in Iraq -- to let the Afghans know that the Taliban could attack at will the most sensitive installations in the best-guarded parts of the capital.
According to Mujahid, "The attacks were very successful for us and were a remarkable achievement, dealing a psychological and political blow to foreigners and the government."
On the other hand, NATO saw things very differently. In his statement, Gen John R. Allen, the top US commander in Afghanistan, maintained that the Afghan cops "were on scene immediately, well-led and well-coordinated. They integrated their efforts, helped protect their fellow citizens and largely kept the hard boyz contained".
President Karzai, while being critical of both NATO and Afghan intelligence failures that permitted the hard boyz to infiltrate into sensitive areas, maintained that "Death Eaters must know that by launching such attacks they cannot prevent the determination of the peoples of this homeland of ours from the path of rebuilding and progress, as well as our goal for reaching peace and tranquillity in our country".
Separately, a spokesperson at NATO headquarters in Brussels, while conceding "we still face security challenges" and that "this was not the first such attack, and I don't expect it will be the last", went on to say "such attacks don't change the transition strategy. They don't change the goal and they don't change the timeline." Not much publicity has been given to the fact that NATO helicopters were used in the final assault on the bully boy positions which would seem to suggest that the Afghan forces may have acted "largely" on their own but needed critical help from NATO forces to clinch the issue.
In other words, the NATO perspective is that this was a "largely ineffective" attack and not the "remarkable achievement" that the Taliban would like to think it was. Rather, it established that the Afghan cops have proved their ability to take on responsibility of handling whatever the Taliban can throw at them. The truth, of course, lies somewhere in between these contradictory assertions.
Certainly the Taliban have reinforced the belief that they have sympathisers among the most well-placed of the security forces and can enlist their support to place weaponry in sensitive sites and to allow infiltrators to reach and use these caches. But it is also established -- if this is the start of the 'spring offensive' -- that the Taliban cannot yet mount frontal assaults and cannot retake territory lost to the foreign and Afghan cops.
From Pakistain's perspective the most important element is the assertion that the one bully boy captured has said that he was a member of the Haqqani network. The American ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, told CNN that "frankly, I don't think the Taliban [are] good enough" to pull off such an attack. In another interview, he said that the attacks may be the work of the Haqqani network since, in his view, "The Taliban are very good at issuing statements, less good at fighting".As surely as night follows day we will see in the next few days a spate of leaked reports confirming that the attack was the handiwork of the Haqqanis and dismissing contemptuously the Taliban front man's statement that the Haqqanis, even while being with the Taliban, were not involved in this attack. Pressure will then mount on Pakistain to take action in North Wazoo. How will we react at this time when relations are at a particularly delicate juncture?
Another point to ponder. Was there any connection between the assault in Kabul and the similarly well-planned attack on the same day on Bannu prison, which resulted in the escape of several high-security prisoners? There, too, the assault was rehearsed over a period of time. The attackers had inside information about the location of the cells occupied by the high-security prisoners. There was no resistance to the assault by the prison guards. Not one attacker and not one defender was even injured.
Does this suggest that the same people planned both attacks? Worse, does this not prove that, because of venality or incompetence, our security is now worse than that prevailing in war-torn Afghanistan?