Assignment Kandahar: After bin Laden

By Brian Hutchinson
Assignment Kandahar: May 2

“It’s a great day, Bin Laden being dead and all,” said an American civilian Monday morning; she was standing in line at a coffee joint on the famous boardwalk at Kandahar Air Field. “Hell ya,” agreed the American soldier standing next to her. “This might take some of the wind out of their sails.” He was speaking, broadly, of the insurgency.

There’s a crumbling compound close to KAF called Tarnak Farms. It’s where Osama bin Laden briefly lived and taught. When in power  in the late 1990s, the Taliban welcomed al Qaeda to Kandahar, and for awhile members of both groups worked and trained at Tarnak Farms. I last visited it on September 11, 2010. A ghostly place, it seemed to me then.

Al Qaeda packed up and left Kandahar long ago. But it continues to operate in Afghanistan. Last month, just weeks after U.S. forces left the bitterly-contested Pech Valley in the country’s north-east, al Qaeda rushed back into the region and resumed training operations, according to some reports.

Bin Laden’s death Sunday at the hands of U.S. Special Forces reverberates across southern Afghanistan, but I suspect it changes little.

I called my fixer–a local Afghan journalist–in Kandahar city.  He’d already been on the phone, talking to Afghan politicians and scholars.

“What are they saying?” I asked.

“Well, some say his death is a blow to al Qaeda and other extremist groups. Some say he should have been killed years ago, it’s a shame that it took the U.S. ten years to find him. Some say the fact he was in Pakistan looks good for Afghanistan because it proves that our government does not willingly harbour terrorists, that Pakistan gave Bin Laden shelter, not us.

“And some say his death gives the U.S. an excuse to declare victory and withdraw more troops from Afghanistan,” added my fixer. This view  is rather fanciful, I think.

Bin Laden is gone, but the Taliban could probably care less. The insurgents and their sponsors–here, in Iran, in Pakistan and elsewhere–are committed to disrupting progress in Afghanistan by committing terrorist acts. On Sunday, the day Bin Laden was taken out in Pakistan, insurgents killed at least 11 Afghans in terrorist acts. Among the dead: four civilians, killed by a 12-year-old boy who detonated an explosives package strapped to his chest.

Source: National Post